Who Goes There?

I know I’ve read at least one Keith Laumer story before, because he appeared in Dangerous Visions, but I could not tell you what “Test to Destruction” is about at all from memory. Laumer is one of those authors who is surprisingly easy to avoid, or rather to miss, considering how prolific he was in the ’60s. He made his debut in 1959, and spent the next decade or so writing at a feverish pace with a few series under his belt, most notably the episodic Retief series. I almost picked a Retief story for today, but it seems like that series was more associated with If in the ’60s; as such as we have a totally standalone story with “The Body Builders.” Laumer suffered a stroke in 1971, which put him off writing for a few years, and when he did return, he was not the same writer he once was, in both quality and quantity. This dip in quality is understandable, since even a minor stroke requires physical therapy to recover from, and for many authors the same incident would’ve outright meant the end of their careers. Laumer was also one of the pioneering voices of military SF, which makes sense given his military background. “The Body Builders” is a very curious story that I wish I liked more, not least because of how prescient it is.

Placing Coordinates

First published in the August 1966 issue of Galaxy Science Fiction. It’s been reprinted a fair number of times, including The Infinite Arena: Seven Science Fiction Stories About Sports (ed. Terry Carr) and the Laumer collections The Best of Keith Laumer and Keith Laumer: The Lighter Side.

Enhancing Image

Barney Ramm is our narrator as well as our guide to this strange new world, where it has become normal to all but give up one’s physical body in exchange for a more physically attractive robotic surrogate—provided one has the money for certain cosmetics. People’s bodies are kept in “the Files,” hooked up to tubes and physically trained unconsciously just enough so that they won’t be totally emaciated bags of bones. Laumer does not leave us to speculate as to how we got to such a future, because Ramm pretty much tells us outright what the deal is:

Our grandparents found out it was a lot safer and easier to sit in front of the TV screen with feely and smelly attachments than to be out bumping heads with a crowd. It wasn’t long after that that they developed the contact screens to fit your eyeballs, and the plug-in audio, so you began to get the real feel of audience participation. Then, with the big improvements in miniaturization and the new tight-channel transmitters, you could have your own private man-on-the-street pickup. It could roam, seeing the sights, while you racked out on the sofa.

One of the cultural landmarks that separated the ’50s from the ’40s was the rise of commercially viable TV, so that you too could have a TV set in the comfort of your living room. If you were rich then you might’ve even been able to buy two TV sets. Wow. Imagine the possibilities. By the end of the ’50s the TV had become a commonplace household item, at least for those with middle-class incomes or better, and by 1965 (about when Laumer would’ve written this story), TV in color was becoming the new norm. A sharper and more vivid image, closer to real life, or rather the real thing. People living vicariously through their TV sets was apparently on Laumer’s shit list, because he doesn’t even try to hide his fist-shaking sentiments at the medium. On the one hand this could’ve been trite and a little too cranky if done improperly, but to Laumer’s credit it’s how he extrapolates on the proliferation of TV that makes “The Body Builders” worth reading. People tend to walk around in lifelike android bodies that seem to be modeled after movie actors, or at least this is the case with some of them. There’s a John Wayne robot, and Lorena, Ramm’s date at the beginning, is also made to look like Marlene Dietrich.

Now you may be thinking to yourself: this sounds a bit like cyberpunk. And it does, about fifteen years in advance. Ramm being a first-person narrator makes the exposition-dumping more awkward than it should’ve been, in that it does hamper the story somewhat, but Ramm being a “light-heavy champ in the armed singles” (he’s basically a boxer, although it turns out to not be boxing quite as recognize it) with a detective’s intuition and an ear for slang lends the narrative voice a noir feel that would later also become a trope associated with cyberpunk. Of course, classic cyberpunk takes a lot of inspiration from old-school crime fiction a la Raymond Chandler, so this is a case of “The Body Builders” and the subgenre it anticipated both drinking from the same well. Cyberpunk became a codified subgenre by the mid-’80s, but there are quite a few examples of SF that predate it, including but not limited to Fritz Leiber’s “Coming Attraction,” Richard Matheson’s “Steel,” Samuel R. Delany’s Nova, and of course Philip K. Dick’s Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep? Speaking of the Matheson story, I have a hunch that Laumer looked to “Steel” as an influence, or perhaps more likely he was thinking of the Twilight Zone adaptation, which would’ve been more recent when he wrote “The Body Builders.”

This all sounds great, but it’s in service of rather clunky storytelling. There’s really no room for environmental or passive worldbuilding here, since Ramm yaps in Expositionese and tells us upfront about every detail of this world that’s relative to the plot. For the most part Laumer chooses to tell rather than show, which hurts one’s attempts at getting immersed in what should be a memorable and somewhat dystopian future. It doesn’t help that the plot is really basic when you get down to it: Ramm gets ambushed into having an impromptu fight when he’s in the wrong robot body for it, with someone clearly having it out for him. He has, I think two girlfriends? There’s the aforementioned Lorena, who’s shown to be vain and high-class, and then there’s Julie, who believes the “Orggies” are an abomination. Can you guess which one he ends up with ultimately? I’m generally not a fan of how snarky and reliant on slang these characters are; if we’re to be invested in Ramm having his revenge then Laumer should’ve tried to conceive a more likable protagonist first. Despite being nearly thirty magazine pages, the tell-don’t-show method combined with the simplistic plot trajectory result in a story that feels undercooked somehow.

There Be Spoilers Here

If you’ve read “Steel” (and I’ve written about it twice now), then you may remember the ending, which is more or less ambiguous in its tone. Are we are supposed to take this as a victory or a defeat? What is to become of Our Hero™ after he has literally broken a few bones in the name of recapturing the glory days? No such ambiguity in “The Body Builders.” After having deliberately sabotages his robot body, Ramm winds up in his real body, in the Files, nearly dying “for real” in the process. I will say, this is a very good scene, when Ramm “wakes up.” It’s like that scene in The Matrix where Neo wakes up from the virtual world to find himself as a scrawny bald dude, with a big tube shoved down his throat and in what almost resembles a bee hive. It’s a great image, and in the case of “The Body Builders” it’s one of the few moments where Laumer’s craftsmanship really shines through. Of course, despite being a scrawny dude who does not resemble the prize fighter he often lives as, Ramm is still able to win the day by virtue of taking advantage of the fact that Orggies are designed to take on other Orggies—that is to say robots, as opposed to humans. This is Laumer’s way of telling you that you should turn the TV off and go for a jog or something. I know, it’s ironic that I’m instead typing this out, sitting in my comfy office chair in my air-conditioned apartment whose rent I can barely afford. To think when this story was written we didn’t have the internet, or even at-home video games. Laumer had a fine imagination, but he really could not have anticipated what the future would bring.

A Step Farther Out

I like thinking about “The Body Builders,” but I wish it was better as a story. Laumer is perhaps a decent writer who in this case punches above his weight class (sorry for the pun). This same premise and even broad plot structure may have worked better in the hands of someone like Philip K. Dick or Robert Sheckley, but in Laumer’s it lacks the sheer momentum as well as narrative fluidity to be compelling from start to finish. I do somewhat recommend checking it out, though, especially if you wanna read more examples of proto-cyberpunk.

See you next time.