1. Renegades of Time by Raymond F. Jones
Now, for the actual first title in the Laser Books…
In case you missed my review of Thomas F. Monteleone‘s Seeds of Change, this is where the Laser Books officially start. Time is of the essence, so let’s jump right in.
Cover
*Dial tone… ringing… ringing…*
Yes, hello? Mr. Elwood? I’m calling about the first Laser Books title you mailed me… Well, thing is, sir, I subscribed to you because I wanted a sci-fi novel, but I think there’s been a mix-up because I’ve gotten a fantasy novel… Oh, but it must be fantasy! There’s a well-endowed woman riding a dragon in front of some gnomish-looking gears, and there’s some kind of drow wannabe staring into my soul…
Whaddya mean, “What’s a drow?” Ain’t you ever heard of Dungeons and Dragons?… You have, but you never heard of the drow?… Oh, they’re gonna be huge two years from now!… Uh huh… uh huh… well okay, I’ll take your word for it that I’m holding a sci-fi, but you’d better be careful: I don’t want you getting sued by Anne McCaffrey…
Ah, her lawyers have already gotten in touch, eh? Well, I wish you all the best in avoiding bankruptcy. Good day, sir!
*Click*
Sorry about that, had to clear something up. Apparently this is not a fantasy novel, despite looking like a World of Warcraft loading screen.
I’m not knocking Freas‘s artwork — I actually like this cover! I’m a sucker for badass babes riding alien beasts into battle, skirts wind-whipped and hair trailing in the breeze. Freas also manages to imply the presence of giant eldritch machines with those house-sized gears and chimes even if he doesn’t explicitly depict them. Though it’s a mystery how he managed to draw such an accurate portrait of the Armenian guy I worked with at the butcher shop.
Naw, I kid. Kenny was never that hairy or that mean, although I could make him turn blue in the face if I didn’t restock the counters properly. That guy is Amular, Director of Bakor. In case his expression didn’t tip you off, he is the Baddie.
Also… did anyone else notice went from No Hair to Too Much Hair in back-to-back titles?
Blurb
The Algorans, masters of time travel had lost control of the time channels. In despair, they stood helplessly as the barbarian hordes of the devastating Bakori were unleashed on the universe. In the little town of Midland, U.S.A., Joe Simmons worked feverishly to assemble the only device that had a chance to stop them. He knew that success depended on a beautiful Algoran woman, Tamarina, yet he didn’t even know if she would re-appear! But he couldn’t stop trying. This whole disaster was his fault.
As a proud descendent of barbarians, I find this blurb offensive. Why does every sci-fi writer insist on making the barbarians the bad guys? Don’t you know we gave you pants? Sleeves for your legs! If not for us, you’d all be wearing togas, and let me tell you, I would not want to face the harsh Ontario winters without my trusty woollies.
Would You Like to Know More?
Though I must say, the blurb does a much better job of grabbing my attention than the one for Seeds of Change: it doesn’t promise a derivative story, and gives a hint of the desperate race against the clock our protagonist, Joe, finds himself in. Solid!
Story
Bill looked grim and exhausted himself. “If we don’t hear from Algor soon I’m going to set up a beacon on the Hill and see if we can find out what’s going on. When the Bakori attack gains some momentum our society could collapse very quickly.” — Renegades of Time, page 148.
Joe Simmons is a young everyman from Midland, U.S.A. who ends up in the wrong place at the wrong time. He interrupts his friend, Bill Bradley, whilst he’s communing with Tamarina, an Algoran — masters of spacetime who walk between worlds as easily as you or I walk between rooms of our homes. The ensuing catastrophe catapults Joe and Tamarina to another planet. There, he falls in love with her while they wait for rescue by the Algorans, despite the fact she’s railing at him for screwing up her day, but when they get home, it turns out Bill also has his eye on Tamarina.
The Algorans reveal to Joe and Bill that this seemingly victimless disaster is far worse than it appears. It has drawn the attention of another alien race, the Bakori, an intergalactic army bent on conquering the universe. The Bakori have advanced space travel, but it’s the spacetime-skipping powers of the Algorans they truly covet. With Algoran technology, they could conquer the universe in a day.
The Algorans recruit Joe and Bill into their ranks to build a device that will utterly wipe out the Bakori, but they’re racing against the clock. The Bakori have set their sights on Earth, and we have no way to resist their onslaught.
There is one concept, one sequence, that is absolutely thrilling in this book, and could easily be the kernel of its own story.
The Bakori do not invade planets the way you’d expect. They’ve little need for warships, lasers, or weapons of mass destruction. They are a psychic people, and so they wage war psychically.
As soon as Joe and Bill begin work on the device, the Bakori begin their attack. It starts small: a woman hallucinates blood running out of her faucet instead of water. But it quickly gets worse: pilots of jetliners crash whilst trying to avoid non-existent obstacles, giant sea creatures appear in the centres of towns, and humans everywhere can’t sleep because of persistent, terrible nightmares.
It’s like The Call of Cthulhu meets It.
Imagine an enemy who can reach inside your head, pluck out your worst fears, and make them feel so real that you swear you can touch them, smell them, feel them eating you one bite at a time. You have no defence, no way to fight back. You’re too scared to go outside because you don’t know what horrors are waiting for you. All the while, you have to maintain concentration to develop some kind of countermeasure or weapon to destroy your attacker.
It’s such vivid writing, I’m amazed Harlequin printed it.
SPOILER!
This is the second Laser Book in a row that ends with mass genocide.
The love triangle of Joe, Bill, and Tamarina is broken when poor Bill gets captured by the Bakori in the penultimate chapter. He is killed when the device goes off which destroys Bakor and all its conquered worlds.
Now, the Bakori are set up to be bad guys (barbarians, as the blurb says), so naturally they cannot be reasoned with or bartered with. They take what they want and kill whoever gets in the way. And yes, they’ve committed genocide on an unspeakable level themselves.
But still, I’m kind of shocked how casually this is used as a means to resolve the plot, especially in 1975, with the Irish Troubles at their peak, the Khmer Rouge rising to power, and the very recent Bangladesh Genocide. And that’s not even taking into account the deluge of New Wave sci-fi works which were challenging traditional narratives of “Us vs. Them”.
Conclusions and Recommendations
Jones spins a tighter yarn with his Laser Books entry than Monteleone, but it would still be hard for me to recommend reading it as-is. Really the best part is the Bakori attack chapters — the implications are so terrifying that they overshadow the rest of the story. My recommendations are simple:
Recommendations
- Cut this down to a short story or novella purely about the Bakori’s psychic invasion
- Depict the ever-increasing collapse of civilization as Joe, Bill, and their team of scientists try to find a way to block the psychic signals of the Bakori, or even fight back
- Go further on the horror elements: how quickly would society break down if their worst nightmares suddenly began walking the streets? What are the most terrible shapes those nightmares might take?
My Goodreads Review
Most of this book reads like a classic Golden Age sci-fi tale, but there is a sequence toward the end of the book which is absolutely horrifying. The villains of the story, the Bakori, launch a psychic invasion of the planet Earth, plucking humanity’s worst nightmares from our skulls and recreating them before our very eyes. Water turns to blood, planes swerve to avoid non-existent birds, sea monsters flop up onto land, and acid sludge covers our coastlines. It’s all a mass hallucination, but imagine how quickly society would break down under such a psychic attack? How could you resist? How could you even live? Other than that sequence, there’s not much to recommend this to modern audiences.
Look at that! We’re already done our (official) first entry in the Laser Books. I gotta say, this one makes me optimistic. While Laser Books have a formula, it seems like some of their authors are intent on injecting some truly original ideas into these books. Let’s see who’s on deck.
Who’s Next?
Book 2 is Herds, by Stephen Goldin! Remember that name, because you’re going to see him more than once; by my count, he’s penned four novels in this series.
Blurb
The wife of a powerful figure in California is found brutally murdered in the couples’ lonely mountain retreat. Wesley Stoneham made certain that all the evidence concerning the murderer of his wife pointed to a nearby hippie community. He had three goals in mind: to get rid of his wife, to drive out to the hippie commune and to enhance his own power in the State. He was at the point of achieving them all when Garnna, from the peaceful planet of Zartic finally made contact with Debby, a hippie from the commune, who had problems of her own. Then Stoneham’s troubles began.
One down, fifty-six to go… I’ll see you guys next week for the next installment — or sooner, if one of you happens to be a time-skipping Algoran.
An Adventure in Midland, ON
Ah, you thought I’d forgotten, didn’t ya? A Dick never forgets! I promised you the Midland adventure, and I’m damn well gonna deliver, because it’s cute.
Over the course of 2025, I’d gotten to know an incredible woman (whom I shall call “L.”), an actor, director, and writer of no small talent. By August, I’d say that we were very close friends.
But mid-August, our relationship took a turn for the Rom Com.
At the end of one of our movie nights, after we’d both had considerable to drink, I stood on the steps of her apartment and stole a small kiss on her lips. I immediately apologized and regretted my behaviour, at which point she asked me, “Did you want to kiss me on the lips?”
I did. I really did. But instead I said, “I want to make decisions when I’m sober.”
She gave me a peck on the cheek to send me off, and with that sexual tension brewing between us, we both prepared for our long-planned day trip to the Tall Ships Festival in Midland, ON.
I’m glad to say that unlike Joe and Tamarina, we had no arguments, no moments of discord, but we did have a run-in with some barbarians — and not the kind that invent pants! Concurrent with, and adjacent to, the Tall Ships Festival was… a Southern BBQ sauce festival.
And God forgive us, we made the mistake of paying $2.00 CAD entry fee for the promise of cheap beer.
There we were, at the centre of the horde, surrounded by doods selling ten-gallon hats and Medieval helmets, brood mothers who looked like they couldn’t even pronounce the words “birth control”, and young women who were all boob giving free samples of BBQ sauce over the table… and who-knew-what under it.
Were these my people? Were these true Canadians? They couldn’t be! If they were, they must’ve been mind-controlled by devious Texans.
L. leaned over to me and whispered, “I feel like these people think about the Roman Empire.”
I shuddered and replied, “So do I.”
We lacked a means to save these poor souls, and we had no device to blow them to kingdom come; the most we could do was save ourselves. We tore the paper wristbands from our flesh and ran for the shelter of the nearby harbour restaurant. The beer there was not cheap, but at least we weren’t at risk of brainwashing. Once we’d rested and eaten, we boarded the Empire Sandy and set sail on an evening cruise.
On the drive home, L. had a bout of sciatica and was in terrible pain for the last hour of the drive. I felt it best that I heave ho and part company as fast as possible so she could go home and get horizontal.
In the morning, I woke to find the following text on my phone:
I had wanted to let you know that when you kissed me after dinner the other week, it made me realize that I wanted you to. And I know that’s complicated. And I don’t think I know any more of my feelings besides that. But I wanted you to know.
Well, we both know now. We’re four months going strong, and I can’t wait to see what the new year brings for us. You ride dragons with the best of ’em, babe.
Love you!
