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End as a Hero
THE CONQUERING HERO
Mankind was at war with the hideous Gool...and losing. Then, beyond Ganymead, one man fought the searing brain probe of an alien spy...and won. He mastered the power of its telepathic mind-control, captured the secret of its matter transmitters, and learned how to destroy the Gool Overlords. He called intelligence with news of the victory and headed home.
Straight into a barrage of Terran nuclear warheads.
Past missiles, shells, and assassins, he made it home - alone, badly wounded, and branded a traitor by conventional Terran wisdom that said no one could survive the Gool brain probe. No one, that is, except a brainwashed puppet deliberately allowed to survive to serve the Gools as a spy.
But he must survive Earth's attempts to kill him - because no matter how much his fellow humans want him dead, he knows that he is the only one who can lead them against the Gool and have a chance at victory.
Mankind was at war with the hideous Gool...and losing. Then, beyond Ganymead, one man fought the searing brain probe of an alien spy...and won. He mastered the power of its telepathic mind-control, captured the secret of its matter transmitters, and learned how to destroy the Gool Overlords. He called intelligence with news of the victory and headed home.
Straight into a barrage of Terran nuclear warheads.
Past missiles, shells, and assassins, he made it home - alone, badly wounded, and branded a traitor by conventional Terran wisdom that said no one could survive the Gool brain probe. No one, that is, except a brainwashed puppet deliberately allowed to survive to serve the Gools as a spy.
But he must survive Earth's attempts to kill him - because no matter how much his fellow humans want him dead, he knows that he is the only one who can lead them against the Gool and have a chance at victory.
150 pages, Mass Market Paperback
First published June 1, 1963
About the author
Keith Laumer
502 books229 followersJohn Keith Laumer was an American science fiction author. Prior to becoming a full-time writer, he was an officer in the U.S. Air Force and a U.S. diplomat. His brother March Laumer was also a writer, known for his adult reinterpretations of the Land of Oz (also mentioned in Keith's The Other Side of Time).
Keith Laumer (aka J.K Laumer, J. Keith Laumer) is best known for his Bolo stories and his satirical Retief series. The former chronicles the evolution of juggernaut-sized tanks that eventually become self-aware through the constant improvement resulting from centuries of intermittent warfare against various alien races. The latter deals with the adventures of a cynical spacefaring diplomat who constantly has to overcome the red-tape-infused failures of people with names like Ambassador Grossblunder. The Retief stories were greatly influenced by Laumer's earlier career in the United States Foreign Service. In an interview with Paul Walker of Luna Monthly, Laumer states "I had no shortage of iniquitous memories of the Foreign Service."
Four of his shorter works received Hugo or Nebula Award nominations (one of them, "In the Queue", received nominations for both) and his novel A Plague of Demons was nominated for the Nebula Award for Best Novel in 1966.
During the peak years of 1959–1971, Laumer was a prolific science fiction writer, with his novels tending to follow one of two patterns: fast-paced, straight adventures in time and space, with an emphasis on lone-wolf, latent superman protagonists, self-sacrifice and transcendence or, broad comedies, sometimes of the over-the-top variety.
In 1971, Laumer suffered a stroke while working on the novel The Ultimax Man. As a result, he was unable to write for a few years. As he explained in an interview with Charles Platt published in The Dream Makers (1987), he refused to accept the doctors' diagnosis. He came up with an alternative explanation and developed an alternative (and very painful) treatment program. Although he was unable to write in the early 1970s, he had a number of books which were in the pipeline at the time of the stroke published during that time.
In the mid-1970s, Laumer partially recovered from the stroke and resumed writing. However, the quality of his work suffered and his career declined (Piers Anthony, How Precious Was That While, 2002). In later years Laumer also reused scenarios and characters from his earlier works to create "new" books, which some critics felt was to their detriment:
Alas, Retief to the Rescue doesn't seem so much like a new Retief novel, but a kind of Cuisnart mélange of past books.
-- Somtow Sucharitkul (Washington Post, Mar 27, 1983. p. BW11)
His Bolo creations were popular enough that other authors have written standalone science-fiction novels about them.
Laumer was also a model airplane enthusiast, and published two dozen designs between 1956 and 1962 in the U.S. magazines Air Trails, Model Airplane News and Flying Models, as well as the British magazine Aero Modeler. He published one book on the subject, How to Design and Build Flying Models in 1960. His later designs were mostly gas-powered free flight planes, and had a whimsical charm with names to match, like the "Twin Lizzie" and the "Lulla-Bi". His designs are still being revisited, reinvented and built today.
Keith Laumer (aka J.K Laumer, J. Keith Laumer) is best known for his Bolo stories and his satirical Retief series. The former chronicles the evolution of juggernaut-sized tanks that eventually become self-aware through the constant improvement resulting from centuries of intermittent warfare against various alien races. The latter deals with the adventures of a cynical spacefaring diplomat who constantly has to overcome the red-tape-infused failures of people with names like Ambassador Grossblunder. The Retief stories were greatly influenced by Laumer's earlier career in the United States Foreign Service. In an interview with Paul Walker of Luna Monthly, Laumer states "I had no shortage of iniquitous memories of the Foreign Service."
Four of his shorter works received Hugo or Nebula Award nominations (one of them, "In the Queue", received nominations for both) and his novel A Plague of Demons was nominated for the Nebula Award for Best Novel in 1966.
During the peak years of 1959–1971, Laumer was a prolific science fiction writer, with his novels tending to follow one of two patterns: fast-paced, straight adventures in time and space, with an emphasis on lone-wolf, latent superman protagonists, self-sacrifice and transcendence or, broad comedies, sometimes of the over-the-top variety.
In 1971, Laumer suffered a stroke while working on the novel The Ultimax Man. As a result, he was unable to write for a few years. As he explained in an interview with Charles Platt published in The Dream Makers (1987), he refused to accept the doctors' diagnosis. He came up with an alternative explanation and developed an alternative (and very painful) treatment program. Although he was unable to write in the early 1970s, he had a number of books which were in the pipeline at the time of the stroke published during that time.
In the mid-1970s, Laumer partially recovered from the stroke and resumed writing. However, the quality of his work suffered and his career declined (Piers Anthony, How Precious Was That While, 2002). In later years Laumer also reused scenarios and characters from his earlier works to create "new" books, which some critics felt was to their detriment:
Alas, Retief to the Rescue doesn't seem so much like a new Retief novel, but a kind of Cuisnart mélange of past books.
-- Somtow Sucharitkul (Washington Post, Mar 27, 1983. p. BW11)
His Bolo creations were popular enough that other authors have written standalone science-fiction novels about them.
Laumer was also a model airplane enthusiast, and published two dozen designs between 1956 and 1962 in the U.S. magazines Air Trails, Model Airplane News and Flying Models, as well as the British magazine Aero Modeler. He published one book on the subject, How to Design and Build Flying Models in 1960. His later designs were mostly gas-powered free flight planes, and had a whimsical charm with names to match, like the "Twin Lizzie" and the "Lulla-Bi". His designs are still being revisited, reinvented and built today.
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Displaying 1 - 6 of 6 reviews
March 3, 2023
Oh, dear. I always knew there was some good Laumer, and there was some bad Laumer, but I never knew there was this. End As a Hero reads like a first draft written by a high schooler the day before it was due to be turned in, with no real thought, direction or editing.
The first two thirds of this "story" take place on a spaceship under psychic attack by the evil and disgusting Gool (described as "five hundred pounds of liver at the bottom of a dark hole"), and consists of endlessly repetitive scenes of people pointing blasters at the hero, then realizing they'd been under Gool mind control, and then immediately re-pointing their blasters at the hero, and then re-realizing - it's like an endless GIF of Humphrey Bogart taking Peter Lorre's gun away in "The Maltese Falcon," and then giving it back to him, and then taking it away again…
Plot (or lack thereof) aside, while this story obviously takes place in some distant future, Laumer seems increasingly incapable of making even a minimal attempt to place his characters in any time period later than the 1950's. People still call each other "buddy" or "Fats" or "sucker;" they read mimeographed reports and pack Samsonite luggage and take $1.50 cab rides and say "what's yer beef?" or "everything's jake;" (although that's still better than the Gool, who speak rarely but in all caps as they exclaim things like "THE STRANGELIFE IS ELUSIVE, MASTER! IT WRIGGLES LIKE A GORM-WORM IN THE EATING TROUGH!").
I picked this up for 65¢ at our local used book warehouse, but only when I got home did I remember to check the publication date (1985). Sadly, Laumer had a stroke in the early 70's, and according to Wikipedia "the quality of his work (subsequent) suffered, and his career declined." And also sadly, that decline is all too visible in Hero.
That said, of course I'll continue to read the occasional Laumer (most of which take less than a day) - but I think I'll stick to his pre-1973 work.
The first two thirds of this "story" take place on a spaceship under psychic attack by the evil and disgusting Gool (described as "five hundred pounds of liver at the bottom of a dark hole"), and consists of endlessly repetitive scenes of people pointing blasters at the hero, then realizing they'd been under Gool mind control, and then immediately re-pointing their blasters at the hero, and then re-realizing - it's like an endless GIF of Humphrey Bogart taking Peter Lorre's gun away in "The Maltese Falcon," and then giving it back to him, and then taking it away again…
Plot (or lack thereof) aside, while this story obviously takes place in some distant future, Laumer seems increasingly incapable of making even a minimal attempt to place his characters in any time period later than the 1950's. People still call each other "buddy" or "Fats" or "sucker;" they read mimeographed reports and pack Samsonite luggage and take $1.50 cab rides and say "what's yer beef?" or "everything's jake;" (although that's still better than the Gool, who speak rarely but in all caps as they exclaim things like "THE STRANGELIFE IS ELUSIVE, MASTER! IT WRIGGLES LIKE A GORM-WORM IN THE EATING TROUGH!").
I picked this up for 65¢ at our local used book warehouse, but only when I got home did I remember to check the publication date (1985). Sadly, Laumer had a stroke in the early 70's, and according to Wikipedia "the quality of his work (subsequent) suffered, and his career declined." And also sadly, that decline is all too visible in Hero.
That said, of course I'll continue to read the occasional Laumer (most of which take less than a day) - but I think I'll stick to his pre-1973 work.
October 19, 2018
So-so science fiction story where the hero talks a lot of incomprehensible jargon before trying to save the world from a species of mind-controlling extraterrestrials with a silly name.
It started off well enough. Peter Grantham, the sole survivor of an encounter with the Gool, wakes up aboard his spaceship and reports back to Earth, only to find that they won't let him come back home for fear that the enemy have got to him. Grantham can't even be sure of that himself.
He tests his own mind by going into a trance, 'a dreamworld of vague phantasmagoric figures milling in their limbo of sub-conceptualization,' and so the jargon begins. Reading the minds that are reading his using 'my monitoring basic personality-fraction,' Grantham heads back to an Earth keen to prevent his re-entry.
Lucky our hero is a psychodynamicist, as he informs us himself. Lucky for Earth, perhaps, but not for the reader. The misery of a Gool invasion is as nothing compared to that to be found within the pages of a psychodynamicist textbook:
'I had readied myself for the trip with sessions on the encephaloscope, setting up the cross-networks of conditioned defensive responses, the shunt circuits to the decoy pseudo-personality, leaving my volitional ego free. I talked about subliminal hypnotics and the resilience quotient of the ego-complex.'
For those still interested after that, End as a Hero was first published in Galaxy Science Fiction, June 1963 and latterly on Project Gutenberg.
It started off well enough. Peter Grantham, the sole survivor of an encounter with the Gool, wakes up aboard his spaceship and reports back to Earth, only to find that they won't let him come back home for fear that the enemy have got to him. Grantham can't even be sure of that himself.
He tests his own mind by going into a trance, 'a dreamworld of vague phantasmagoric figures milling in their limbo of sub-conceptualization,' and so the jargon begins. Reading the minds that are reading his using 'my monitoring basic personality-fraction,' Grantham heads back to an Earth keen to prevent his re-entry.
Lucky our hero is a psychodynamicist, as he informs us himself. Lucky for Earth, perhaps, but not for the reader. The misery of a Gool invasion is as nothing compared to that to be found within the pages of a psychodynamicist textbook:
'I had readied myself for the trip with sessions on the encephaloscope, setting up the cross-networks of conditioned defensive responses, the shunt circuits to the decoy pseudo-personality, leaving my volitional ego free. I talked about subliminal hypnotics and the resilience quotient of the ego-complex.'
For those still interested after that, End as a Hero was first published in Galaxy Science Fiction, June 1963 and latterly on Project Gutenberg.
March 31, 2024
End as a Hero comes near the transition from Golden Age to Modern science fiction, and it shows its confusion on several pages.
The craft is there but the story shows the shift from needing tropes to get things across to using tropes laid down in the early years of the genre to state things without explanation. Read the story and you have elements of EE "Doc" Smith's Lensmen series intertwining with some of the best of Philip K. Dick's Imposter.
More towards Dick and away from Smith, there's some interesting philosophical points offered in the last pages, and the protagonist's solution to an impossible problem is a gem.
The craft is there but the story shows the shift from needing tropes to get things across to using tropes laid down in the early years of the genre to state things without explanation. Read the story and you have elements of EE "Doc" Smith's Lensmen series intertwining with some of the best of Philip K. Dick's Imposter.
More towards Dick and away from Smith, there's some interesting philosophical points offered in the last pages, and the protagonist's solution to an impossible problem is a gem.
August 14, 2025
End As A Hero by Keith Laumer is a space opera from one of the great classic science fiction authors. I'm a Laumer fan, and as usual, he writes with humour and authority. While this is less humorous than his usual, it is nevertheless a good story with his signature strong male lead character. This book is probably not the one to read if you've never read anything by him before. My suggestion would be to start with the Bolo tank stories or any of the Retief stories. Still, in all, a good read by a master from the past.
September 15, 2018
where's the rest of the book?
Read
August 22, 2008End As A Hero by Keith Laumer (2000)
Displaying 1 - 6 of 6 reviews