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Star Colony
Book by Laumer, Keith
396 pages, Paperback
First published January 1, 1981
4 people are currently reading
97 people want to read
About the author
Keith Laumer
498 books226 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 - 10 of 10 reviews
November 11, 2022
Star Colony is more serious, indeed more science in the science-fiction, that most of my favorite Keith Laumer reading. Don’t take that as a negative, though. Many of the things I love in Laumer’s more humorous stories (mostly the Retief stories) are present in some way or another in this novel. The title tells you that it is about the formation and history of a colony several light years away. The conceit of Star Colony is that it is a historical work taken from the journals of the early settlers and important citizens through the colony’s history. In a pastiche of academic works, Laumer devotes xviii pages of front matter with academic notes and disclaimers to set the tone. These 18 pages feature some useful background and I liked them, but they would probably be cut by some cost- and style-conscious editor today. There are also some ironic footnotes scattered throughout the novel such as the ones on page 128. So, if you like the author poking fun at pretentious types while pretending to present something in a strait-laced fashion, you’ll be amused by Star Colony.
One characteristic I always enjoy about Laumer is his ability to stick it to bureaucracy in its many forms. In Star Colony, we start with three point-of-view characters: the bureaucratic Captain Brill, the folksy and headstrong (but pragmatic) special Chief Colonial Officer (or CCO, but that’s my description of the job, not Laumer’s) Jake Colmar, and fascinating interaction by one of the most alien aliens described in my recent reading. This one starts with what appears to be a typical mutiny plot and moves to more fascinating speculation than I could have started to imagine before paging through Star Colony. Of course, being a “historical record” as its conceit, we see the split between the bureaucrats and the pragmatic (but not always) colonists throughout the account.
Laumer also characteristically uses some aberrant kind of speech pattern to delineate characters or classes. In this case, the aforementioned Jake Colmar tends to drop into folksy Southern slang, but as one gets deeper in the novel, there is an entire development of language using the defective lateral (pronouncing “r”s instead of “l”s, for example—p. 156). There is a nice play on words where the descendants of the surviving colonists pronounce Paradise as Parasite (p. 164). With that in mind, there is also a pun between the Dew Line that gets distorted into a Don’t Rine (“Line”—p. 255). That the word for mosquito has been distorted to skiddoo was also amusing to me (p. 367). I also rather enjoyed Laumer’s oblique references to The Caine Mutiny (p. 86), E. A. Poe (p. 133), and Impressionist painters like A. Sisley (p. 133). I like it when there is some continuity between the present world and the setting of a science-fiction novel.
Although Laumer is not afraid of a happy ending, Star Colony’s denouement is somewhat subdued compared to a Retief story or a Time Bender novel. And Star Colony has some rather cynical lines, as well. One slam against a particular character reads: “Empathy requires a framework of involvement in which to operate, and this man is not involved.” (p. 63) At a critical juncture, a character asks for simple justice, only to be told: “’You call justice simple? …The most sophisticated concept of which the mind of man deludes itself-and that’s the only place it exists: in men’s minds.’” (p. 356)
Star Colony is an apt demonstration that Laumer can use the long-form of fiction as masterfully as he uses the short form. I was more impressed with this novel than with the Time Bender series and very glad I read it.
One characteristic I always enjoy about Laumer is his ability to stick it to bureaucracy in its many forms. In Star Colony, we start with three point-of-view characters: the bureaucratic Captain Brill, the folksy and headstrong (but pragmatic) special Chief Colonial Officer (or CCO, but that’s my description of the job, not Laumer’s) Jake Colmar, and fascinating interaction by one of the most alien aliens described in my recent reading. This one starts with what appears to be a typical mutiny plot and moves to more fascinating speculation than I could have started to imagine before paging through Star Colony. Of course, being a “historical record” as its conceit, we see the split between the bureaucrats and the pragmatic (but not always) colonists throughout the account.
Laumer also characteristically uses some aberrant kind of speech pattern to delineate characters or classes. In this case, the aforementioned Jake Colmar tends to drop into folksy Southern slang, but as one gets deeper in the novel, there is an entire development of language using the defective lateral (pronouncing “r”s instead of “l”s, for example—p. 156). There is a nice play on words where the descendants of the surviving colonists pronounce Paradise as Parasite (p. 164). With that in mind, there is also a pun between the Dew Line that gets distorted into a Don’t Rine (“Line”—p. 255). That the word for mosquito has been distorted to skiddoo was also amusing to me (p. 367). I also rather enjoyed Laumer’s oblique references to The Caine Mutiny (p. 86), E. A. Poe (p. 133), and Impressionist painters like A. Sisley (p. 133). I like it when there is some continuity between the present world and the setting of a science-fiction novel.
Although Laumer is not afraid of a happy ending, Star Colony’s denouement is somewhat subdued compared to a Retief story or a Time Bender novel. And Star Colony has some rather cynical lines, as well. One slam against a particular character reads: “Empathy requires a framework of involvement in which to operate, and this man is not involved.” (p. 63) At a critical juncture, a character asks for simple justice, only to be told: “’You call justice simple? …The most sophisticated concept of which the mind of man deludes itself-and that’s the only place it exists: in men’s minds.’” (p. 356)
Star Colony is an apt demonstration that Laumer can use the long-form of fiction as masterfully as he uses the short form. I was more impressed with this novel than with the Time Bender series and very glad I read it.
August 24, 2025
I picked this one up at The Haunted Bookstore in Mobile, Alabama on the way back from a family trip in Florida. I bought it solely based on the cover art, the name of the book, its genre, and publication year (1983). I was super excited to start reading it. I even shared a picture of its cover with Scott and Michele as Brenda drove us home to Austin.
Sadly, the book wasn't very good at all. I'd describe it as, "A somewhat-interesting story told very poorly." The writing was, frankly, terrible. I re-read one entire chapter because events were described so poorly that I really had no idea what was going on. Turns out most chapters were written that way. One character's name was spelled one way in one chapter, then spelled a different way in the next. In one paragraph a character jumped off a boat and swam back to shore, only to be on the other shore in the next paragraph.
The main characters in the book knew things they couldn't have possibly known, and acted in ways that seemed reckless or as if they were mind readers. The descriptions of events and locations were so poorly written that I had a very difficult time imagining things as I read.
The book is called "Star Colony" so I was excited to learn about a ship that traveled light years to settle a colony on the other side of space. Unfortunately very little was centered on the colony itself. In fact, the colony ship disappears very early in the book and the characters seem only mildly concerned with that. The exact same thing happens again later in the book, again with hardly any reaction.
The book had more prologue-type chapters than I've ever seen in a book. I was (mistakenly) eager to get started with the story, but I had to way through dozens of pages of "set-up". It was too much.
A huge, huge disappointment. So, why two stars instead of one? At least I finished it.
Sadly, the book wasn't very good at all. I'd describe it as, "A somewhat-interesting story told very poorly." The writing was, frankly, terrible. I re-read one entire chapter because events were described so poorly that I really had no idea what was going on. Turns out most chapters were written that way. One character's name was spelled one way in one chapter, then spelled a different way in the next. In one paragraph a character jumped off a boat and swam back to shore, only to be on the other shore in the next paragraph.
The main characters in the book knew things they couldn't have possibly known, and acted in ways that seemed reckless or as if they were mind readers. The descriptions of events and locations were so poorly written that I had a very difficult time imagining things as I read.
The book is called "Star Colony" so I was excited to learn about a ship that traveled light years to settle a colony on the other side of space. Unfortunately very little was centered on the colony itself. In fact, the colony ship disappears very early in the book and the characters seem only mildly concerned with that. The exact same thing happens again later in the book, again with hardly any reaction.
The book had more prologue-type chapters than I've ever seen in a book. I was (mistakenly) eager to get started with the story, but I had to way through dozens of pages of "set-up". It was too much.
A huge, huge disappointment. So, why two stars instead of one? At least I finished it.
This entire review has been hidden because of spoilers.
March 31, 2022
It was only a huge streak of stubborn that got me through this. It tries to set the stage for a space opera but jumps all over the place. It has a Lee Child character who seems incredibly stupid, then about half way through, throws in a language with no L's just to make finishing the thing feel like bursting a boil. I'd take it back to the used book store, but I'm going to take one for the team and throw it in the recycling bin.
April 3, 2014
I am glad I got this book for free. The writing style is hard to follow. He abandoned an entire plot line. One of the main characters has super strength that goes unexplained. There are just too many loose ends in this book.
January 20, 2015
Normally I quite enjoy Laumer's books but this one is truly bad. He did a spate of increasingly bad stuff, and I found out some years later that he'd suffered a stroke and it affected his writing. Avoid this one.
December 20, 2007
read 04.10.84
read 07.30.87
read 07.30.87
June 20, 2009
Overall a promising plot kinda messed up by slipshod storytelling and mediocre character development.
August 3, 2009
the way that big SF should be written.
March 16, 2010
An entertaining sci-fi tale. Full of interesting characters and aliens.
December 21, 2014
1984 grade C+
short novel
short novel
Displaying 1 - 10 of 10 reviews