Summa Risus: Collected Non-Fiction

by R. A. Lafferty

  This book was compiled and released by The Books of Sand and is licensed for distribution under the Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial 3.0 Unported (CC BY-NC 3.0). This means that it can be shared freely, but not for commercial purposes or without attribution. For more free original e-books, visit The Books of Sand at https://sites.google.com/site/thebooksofsand/

  Summa Risus is a compilation of the non-fictional works of R.A. Lafferty. Where multiple versions of the same work exist, the editor has included their most recent iteration.

  Table of Contents

  § It's Down The Slippery Cellar Stairs §

  The World's Narration

  The Ten Thousand Masks of the World

  Great Awkward Gold

  Something New Under the Black Suns

  More Worlds Than One?

  For a Little Bit of Gold

  Riddle-Writers of the Isthmus

  Through the Red Fire

  Tell It Funny, Og

  Rare Earths and Pig-Weeds

  The Gathering of the Tribes

  The Day After the World Ended

  It's Down the Slippery Cellar Stairs

  § True Believers §

  Shape of the S.F. Story

  Review: Some Things Dark and Dangerous

  Review: Tales of the Natural and the Supernatural

  Review: Mysteries of Time and Space

  Tolkien as Christian

  Review: Again, Dangerous Visions

  Review: The White House Transcripts

  Review: The Last Western

  Review: Sioux Trail

  The Case of the Moth-Eaten Magician

  True Believers (Verse Statement)

  That Moon Plaque

  True Believers (Prose Statement)

  § Introductions & Afterwords §

  Introduction (Ringing Changes)

  Memoir (About a Secret Crocodile)

  Memoir (Nine Hundred Grandmothers)

  Afterword (Land Of The Great Horses)

  How I Wrote “Continued On Next Rock”

  § Interviews And Miscellanea §

  Letter (Science Fiction Review #18)

  Notes From the Golden Age

  § The Fall of Rome (Alaric) §

  Cover

  Prologues

  CHAPTER ONE - All About Goths

  CHAPTER TWO - About Alaric of Balthi

  CHAPTER THREE - Of the School for Generals

  CHAPTER FOUR - Of Master General and Boy Giant

  CHAPTER FIVE - Being a History of the World

  CHAPTER SIX - About Little Moesia

  CHAPTER SEVEN - Of Gothic Lightning and Frankish Thunder

  CHAPTER EIGHT - As Good a Graveyard as Any

  CHAPTER NINE - Of the Return of East and West

  CHAPTER TEN - Of the Game Named King

  CHAPTER ELEVEN - Of Kings in the Day of Their Blessing

  CHAPTER TWELVE - Of Res Romana

  CHAPTER THIRTEEN - Of the Goth in the Mirror

  CHAPTER FOURTEEN - Of Pollentia and Verona

  CHAPTER FIFTEEN - Of the Seven Waves

  CHAPTER SIXTEEN - Of the Death of an Oak

  CHAPTER SEVENTEEN - Of the Empire Misplaced

  CHAPTER EIGHTEEN - The Day the World Ended

  CHAPTER NINETEEN - Which Is Epilogue

  The World's Narration

  Just where are we as we begin this explication? We are in a royal place: we are in one of the most authentic versions of the World.

  “Science Fiction is a group of symptoms and not a disease,” so a medical student (failed) told me once. “It's like the old disease hydropsy that doctors treated for so long before discovering that it was only a collection of symptoms, sometimes for a heart disease, sometimes for a liver or kidney disease, or sometimes even for a septic throat.”

  Well, the symptoms for Science Fiction are a prowling avidity to search out and read certain occult texts; an uneasiness or excitement that permates the whole routine of life; it's the ‘itchy ears’, as mentioned in Scripture, seeking for ‘new things’. The symptoms are usually a falcon-like hunting or questing; a series of sudden tuneful encounters; a group of euphorias and buoyancies that cry in opposite directions to be hoarded like misers' treasures and simultaneously to be shared with fellow sufferers of the symptoms; feeling that the ‘World We Live In’ is somehow masked and needs to be unmasked. These and other symptoms indicate either a strange disease or diseases, or they indicate a perpetually new kind of health.

  Tracing the symptoms back to the ‘disease’ does indicate that the disease is multiple, that it has such names as Hard Science Fiction, Soft Science Fiction, High Fantasy, Low Fantasy, Non-Conforming Adventure Fiction. And sometimes it bears such non-consensus names as Biological Fiction, Ontological Fiction, Eschatological Fiction (did Teilhard, for instance, know that he was writing Eschatological Fiction?), Theological Fiction, or Psychological or Philosophical or Technological or Geological or Historical Fiction. These things and many others share the same complex of symptoms.

  But do not be led astray. The medical student was mistaken. All these diseases are a single disease, or perhaps they are a single abiding health. Their old name was ‘Story’ and their new name is ‘Science Fiction’.

  The things common to all these variations of ‘Story’ are those fine edges of pleasure. ‘Invention’ and ‘Discovery’. And further things common to them are strong expectation, and the excitement of rampant danger or challenge combined with a safe refuge that is not always understood. Other things common to them are fascinations for the unrolling of the future (the ‘what-will-come-the-next-moment motif).

  This thing ‘Story’ or ‘Science Fiction’ is of the true royal line. It's a pampered prince, it's the lost Dauphin, it's King Melchisedech from the Beginning. Horses and dogs run, fish swim, squirrels climb, people narrate ‘Story’. All the sciences and arts are contained in this: all the speculations and innovations are in it. It is this ‘Story’ that was told at the first campfire. It is this ‘Story’ that had just discovered or invented the fire for that first campfire. It is the valid masquerade of the World. It is the parable that explains the World, and it is always holy. It is at least ‘low Scripture’.

  But the short term interlopers are not any of these things. The thing that is called ‘Main-Stream Fiction’ is an invalid masquerade of the world. It wears masks identical to the faces under the masks; it wears costumes identical to the clothes under the costumes; it enclosed the ‘world sets’ in ‘theatrical sets’ of the same appearance. What kind of masquerade is that which does not mask?

  I do not challenge the excellence of certain masterworks that have been called ‘Main-Stream Fiction’. I only maintain that if they are indeed masterworks, then they are called ‘main-stream’ in error; they are really ‘Story’ or ‘Science Fiction’. Oh certainly we can have the argument both ways! Science Fiction can have arguments as many ways as it wants them.

  A ‘Fiction’ means simply a ‘making’ or a ‘creation’. And ‘Science’ is only another word for ‘knowledge’, only another word for ‘power’, only another word for &Illumination’. Make no mistake about it: Science Fiction is the central narrative of the World. It is the King in the Graphic Kingdom of the World. But sometimes, for a few centuries here and there, it falls onto skinny times.

  The Fantasy elements may represent the skinny times for the Narration and the World. They were the times when we retreated to the ‘World Fortress’ (really only a cave) for safety. The Cave Paintings themselves were sorts of cover illustrations for the ‘Stories’. And the ‘Cave’ is always there to go back to.

  “Science Fiction is a sop for people who do not have the Faith Itself, or
any Strong Faith in anything,” a former Seminary Student (failed) told me once. “It is a very inferior sop, and it is taken up only by persons too small-minded to have commitments.” Then the student who had left his studies told me an American Indian tale for illustration:

  Every morning, whether you see them or not, persons go out into an open field and shoot arrows straight up into the air as high as they can shoot them. Most of these arrows come whistling back down after a while, things to beware of. But a few of the arrows do not come down. They are ‘accepted’, or they ‘stick in the sky’, and they do not fall back. The person whose arrow does not return to him is then blessed by a Strong Belief in something; this is by reason of the acceptance of the arrow. He is then a ‘True Believer’, a potent person.

  But the impotent persons must continue to shoot their effete arrows into the air every morning and have them fall back to the ground again. These impotent and daily-failing persons, so the seminary student said, are the sort of persons who are addicted to Science Fiction; they are the sort of persons who are addicted to — well, he mentioned another dozen or so silly addictions which he said are substitutes for life and for belief and for commitment.

  But that failed student was wrong. And he had used a science fiction story to slur Science Fiction. Most persons shoot their arrows because this arrow shooting, this speculation, is an enjoyable sport. And if some of the arrows stick in the sky, that is a bonus. But merely shooting them is fun and wonder enough.

  A word of warning to those who cease from shooting their arrows or speculations when one of them seems to have hit the mark. Many years later someone may rush in to that person with the sad news “Your arrow, it fell down after all this time, and it shattered into splinters. There'll be no shooting that arrow again ever.” So that person will himself be shattered. This happens often to persons of middle age when one thin arrow in which they have put all their faith comes tumbling down.

  But someone might rush in to another person with the same news “Your arrow fell down!”, and the answer might be “Which one of them, and what does it matter? I have half a hundred arrows in the high air all the time. When one of them comes down I shoot two more of them up.”

  “I walk on wonders, and I raise my bow to magic,” a post-archer wrote.

  This isn't entirely esoteric meandering. This is about ourselves, the Pleasant and Endowed People. This is about our Realm, no Mean Kingdom. It is not so much a strange place as an old and familiar place to return to. This is about one of the central pleasures of life, the ‘Narration of the World’. This is what the hydra-headed (there are good hydras as well as bad hydras, you know) creature that is named Science Fiction really is.

  I will review books, but only good books. I will puncture a few balloons, but only those filled with swamp gas rather than with honest air. And I'll try to keep things in proportion. As a shaggy-people joke has it — “Take off your shoes: you're standing on Holy Ground. Ah, better just take one shoe off: it's not all that holy.”

  May 18, 1979

  The Ten Thousand Masks Of The World

  Science Fiction is a collection of guerrilla bands each challenging the rights of the others to belong to the centrality. The band most challenged by the others is ‘high fantasy’, sometimes called ‘Sword and Sorcery’. There is a lot of stylized sneering at ‘S and S’.

  One difference between strict Science Fiction and High Fantasy is that the Science Fiction writers have names and the Fantasy writers do not. Oh, there will be names at the heads of the stories when they are printed, but Fantasy stories still have the aroma of anonymous folk tales even when fairly well-known names are attached to them.

  Fantasy Stories are a sort of dream material. They contain very much atmosphere. This background, troposphere, ambient, is what we know a world by, and every story of High Fantasy involved the presentation of a new world. (Low Fantasy uses the old world, and that is the difference between them.) And High Fantasy contains more irrational and evocative emotion than level reason. There is a touch of magic all through these heroic fantasy tales, but how much magic does it take to make a quantum? It usually takes several stories standing together to accumulate enough magic to make it visible. More than about other Science Fiction, there is an ever-freshness (not to be confused with originality) about High Fantasy, as when the genre was young.

  In Heroic Fantasy, almost every character is incognito, and is well-known in another place or context. And almost every fantasy world is incognito: it is suspected of being the ‘World Itself’, though somehow dazed or disguised. So the atmosphere, the masquerade-costume part of it, is very central in High Fantasy. Each story shows one of the ‘Ten Thousand Masks of the World’, of the ‘World Itself’ that can never be known in depth without knowing many of these masked versions of it. And each of the versions is told by one of the ‘Ten Thousand Tongues of Elsewhere’.

  It is all very stylized, as is all genuine dream material (the analysts must know this, though they never mention it). Heroic Fantasy is one of the ‘Games People Play’, and most of the fantasy worlds are game boards with the lines on them to be seen by one who looks closely.

  Now here is a book that is actually named “Heroic Fantasy” edited by Gerald Page and Hank Reinhardt, and published by DAW Books 1979. The difference between it and most recent fantasy anthologies is that this is made up of all new and original stories, and that most of the others are at least half reprints of old (though often excellent) material. Here are six of the stories by six of the ‘Ten Thousand Tongues of Elsewhere’:

  The Valley of the Sorrows, by Galad Elflandsson, a suspect name and tongue. Half-ghostly, claw-handed man-monsters rise out of the rocky earth and out of a mountain lake, and a heroic battle is offered to them by two sea pirates who happen to be on a stormy waste-land and away from the safe sea. The pirate-heroes lose and the man-monsters win. But nobody promised that the heroes will win every time.

  Ghoul's Head by Don Walsh. This is set in Medieval Japan and the characters are a Samurai Warrior, an Assassin Wizard, and some common bandits. It's a world of “corpse-devouring ghouls and faceless foul demons and snow-maidens lovely to behold but whose breath was icy death”.

  There are five headless bodies, and the five unencumbered heads fly abroad for their nights' pleasures. There are death duels that involve brawn, wit, swordsmanship, and magic, all of them being aspects of the same thing. And — “ — the sun was gone now, and from a ways away came a single strangling scream.”

  Every story of every sort should end with that sentence, and publishers would do well to add it automatically to each piece they put out.

  Death in Jukun, by Charles R. Saunders. This is set in the world of Medieval African Kingdoms, with intrigue and murder. There is the local rich man who has himself buried alive in a stratagem that backfires. There is the giant swordsman-hero and the wizened magician, and a triply giant hyena-ape, the killer of cattle and men. The battle between the swordsman-hero and the monstrous animal is worth the price of admission almost anywhere.

  The Hero Who Returned, by Gerald W. Page. The ferryman Dunsan, who lives the most uneventful of lives, takes countless heroes across the river Amdemon to a shore on which is the death castle of the ghost-warrior Kershenlee who has killed every hero who has arrived there and who now has cast down the greatest of heroes, Faulk. But it is the non-heroic ferryman Dunsan who saves Faulk and himself kills the dire ghost Kershenlee. Into every life some heroism must fall at least once. After all, Dunsan doesn't know that he is Charon and that he is already in high mythology. That other shore is Hades without its name, and the desolation of the place is strongly woven.

  The Age of the Warrior, by Hank Reinhardt. In all fantasy there is an unreality about both aging and death. Fantasy is full of gray-beards, of course; but the beards seem to be glued onto the faces, and the aging persons seem to be of a slightly different species from the commoners, mostly centuries-old wizards and magicians.

  But the great d
uke and warrior Asgalt, even after defeating the captain of the young guards at wrestling, sees the reality of his aging behind the conventional mask. So he makes his great gesture while he is still the greatest warrior of them all. He sends his band across the bridge over the chasm, then destroys the bridge to halt pursuit. And then, instead of swinging on the rope across the chasm after them, he cuts the rope with his sword. Thereupon he goes by himself down the slope to meet the horde of the enemy Shang and a happy and heroic (though needless) death, with only his sword in hand against the fierce enemy.

  The Mistaken Oracle, by A.E. Silas. The pair of inseparable friends, the huge warrior and the child-sized sorcerer, is a fixture in heroic fantasy; and a rebellious world does not stand much of a chance against the two of them together. But the oracle does call these two to a combat against a ravening giant.

  It is, however, the child-sized sorcerer and not the huge warrior who is able to take the magic sword out of the fire without being burned. And it is the little sorcerer who kills the giant. But this small sorcerer has been many different persons in his lives; he's been some of the greatest of the hero-swordsmen in his day. But, at the same time that he is able to be the great swordsman again, he is also the giant whom he kills, because he is a complex sorcerer.

  Oh, these six pieces don't seem so compelling as all that? But that is only because they are given here without the masking atmosphere and the dream quality. These are six flawed gems. I've always liked such. They catch and fracture the light in ways that the unflawed and orthoclastic gems do not. They contain fractured space, and they are bigger on the inside than on the outside.

  There are other stories in the book that are longer and by better-known writers, by Andre Norton, E.C. Tubb, Tanith Lee, H. Warner Munn, Manly Wade Wellman. But the better-known writers do not, in this particular collection, catch the rare flavor of heroic fantasy.