Summa Risus: Collected Non-Fiction

by R. A. Lafferty

  Most Science Fiction takes itself seriously, which is grotesque. Intensity is a characteristic of this inexcusable seriousness. But intensity for the sake of intensity is on par with loudness for the sake of loudness, ugliness for the sake of ugliness, pomposity for the sake of pomposity, phoniness for the sake of phoniness, hatred for the sake of hatred, tedium for the sake of tedium. It's true that rancid seriousness, intensity, loudness, ugliness, pomposity, phoniness, hatred and tedium are all presently red-hot items in the market place. But they should not be.

  Introduction (Ringing Changes)

  Most of these stories were written in the years 1968-1974. They are of various sorts, but several of them are against-the-grain stories; songs-of-rebellion stories even, though their singing may be a little cracked and croaky. This is because the world was unpatterned and unstructured during those years, and intolerably narrowed and shriveled. (They conquered us so easily!) We were a mesmerized world, and we were lost on a day when there wasn't even a battle scheduled. So several of these pieces are restructuring and rebirthing myths, and there is a touch of groaning and travail in them.

  But most of them are no such things. The stories are these:

  “Parthen.” The aliens had landed!…The world rang with cracked melody and everyone was in love with life…Never had the girls been so pretty…I believe that our minds are now on a higher plane…And every one of those men died happy. That's what made it so nice.

  “Old Foot Forgot.” One does whatever one can for “the oneness that is greater than self.”…They say “Pray for the happy obliteration.”…But somewhere there is a person who revolts and cries, “I would rather burn in a hell forever than suffer happy obliteration. I'll burn if it be me that burns.”

  “Dorg.” Rain dances are good; fertility dances are good; so is prayer and chanting. But there is nothing like ritual drawing and painting on cave walls to keep the world well-fed. What did you think was keeping the world so fertile and burgeoning these days?

  “Days of Grass, Days of Straw.” Without the special days that are not in the regular count it just wouldn't be worthwhile. We need them, we need them, and some of the champions will have to wrestle with the principalities and powers to get them.

  “Brain Fever Season.” The seasons have returned in their appointed strengths. Now we can live again. Now we can be seasonable fools again.

  “And Read the Flesh Between the Lines.” We'll not allow ourselves to be narrowed down forever in a straited world. We'll explode and regain our real spaciousness. We'll explode, we'll explode!

  “Old Halloween on the Guna Slopes.” O ghostly night, O antic night, when we were ourselves young and ghostly.

  “The Ungodly Mice of Doctor Drakos.” Maybe life is no more than globs of gas plasma, green and faintly translucent. But how is it possible to grow hairs on globs of gas? This is a sympathetic story about the only animals that everybody loves, mice.

  “The Wooly World of Barnaby Sheen.” Barnaby's world was about a cubic meter in volume and it weighed 4,500 pounds. It had a good selection of rocks, and it developed weather and lively inferior fauna. Then it got a little bit out of hand. This tale contains the saddest lament in all literature: “My house is on fire, my shirt is on fire, and my houseboy has fleas. What worse can happen?”

  “Rivers of Damascus.” There are several ways of looking at any past event in history. The para-archaeological probe, with a little dowsing added to it, may not be the ideal way, but it sure can cut through that polarized data of what is sometimes called “conventional history.”

  “Among the Hairy Earthmen.” This was the “Long Afternoon” that lasted two and a half centuries, possibly the most puzzling two and a half centuries in the history of our world.

  “In Outraged Stone.” This is the stubborn refusal to accept that there is no transcendence, that there is no ultimate reality.

  When they try to tell you that you are only an artifact in a collection, that you are not alive, that you have never been alive, that is the time to get mad.

  “And Name My Name.” Is it possible that our true identity has been taken away from all of us, that we are only an apish shambles now?

  “Why is our identity stolen from us. Why are we robbed of it?” we ask.

  “You aren't robbed of it. You threw it away,” we are told.

  “Sky.” Yes, you can pick and choose from among the various realities, selecting the best and most eventful of them and then selecting from the still more rarefied best. You can do this for quite a while, so long as you are not spooked by things that are the wrong color of white, so long as you are able to refinance your bill with the piper, so long as you have hollow bones and a hollow heart.

  “For All Poor Folks At Picketwire.” It wasn't a bad place at all compared to some others. Consider that you can have a workshop in total vacuum, that it is dust-free and without gravity, that it is spared the effect of every magnetized cloud, of every voltage differential, of every solar wind. And it's beyond the influence of time and temperature and hard radiation and “all baleful beams.” Nuggets of gold and orichalcum! What a place to work! Even the main disadvantage of it can be turned to an advantage, sort of, sort of.

  “Oh Whatta You Do When The Well Runs Dry?” On November 7, 1999, the well ran dry. This was the well of Wit and Idea. It was the Well of the World.

  Ah, but there was a way to get more water out of the well. There were shabby people who still had plenty of shabby water, and they were willing to share it. But it was stronger water than any of the people had met before. It was raunchy water, it was vile water. And the wit and ideas that came from the well now were raunchy also.

  There's a twist to the tale of course, but it doesn't make the condition any less raunchy.

  “And Some in Velvet Gowns.” Well, if you got all the skin burned off you by space winds, maybe you'd cover yourself with gaudy clothing too. This is a “the-aliens-are-in-town-and-they're-taking-us-over” story. But most of them weren't really wearing velvet gowns. They just had their torsos painted to look like that.

  “The Doggone Highly Scientific Door.” If you turned into a dog, would you be the first person or the last person to know it? And if you turned into a dog interiorly but still kept your human appearance, who would know it first? If there is an electronic device that can discern between dogs and people, where will it draw the line?

  These questions are important since a lot of people are turning into dogs lately.

  “Interurban Queen.” This is a “what-if” story. What if the gasoline-powered internal-combustion “automobile” had not been outlawed early in its career? What would the effect on manners and mores have been if the automobile. the “selfishness symbol,” had been allowed to compete with such communal symbols as the Interurban Electric Trolley Cars?

  “Been a Long Long Time.” We will not give a commentary or résumé of this story. Should we begin to do so, you'd say “Oh, that's old, I know that one,” and you'd be wrong.

  These stories are intended to be entertainments, even the several of them that leak a little blood out of them. They are amusements.

  Be entertained then, be amused! And the superior ones among you will even be delighted in several places.

  Memoir (About a Secret Crocodile)

  From Galaxy: Thirty Years of Innovative Science Fiction, edited by Frederik Pohl, Martin H. Greenberg, and Joseph D. Olander

  Galaxy was the golden magazine of science fiction. At its best, there were nuggets in at least half its issues. No one else came close to that.

  Let the hills leap like little lambs at the memory!

  “About a Secret Crocodile” was a shot in a war (since lost) against a cabal that was forcing “trendiness,” whose other name is “unoriginality,” on the world.

  Oh rise again and fight some more, dead people!

  Galaxy died several times from embracing this trendiness or unoriginality. The “magazine-that-is-different” became quite like all the other “maga
zines-that-are-different.” And it died because it spent all its retrospection on things past.

  The newest Galaxy editor, Hank Stine, is an experienced resurrectionist. He brought a dead and rotting Louisiana alligator back to life by laying his reanimating hands on it and breathing into its nostrils. Later he brought back to life a dead rabbit, a dead goat, and a little dead boy.

  (He has not told these things of himself. Others have told them of him.)

  Now he will, probably, raise the magazine from its second or third death. You've got to have faith!

  (If he isn't still at the helm when this appears, that just means that good guys move around a lot.)

  Never trust a retrospectionist who isn't two-faced. A little of that retrospection for the future, please!

  Galaxy, esto perpetua: Thou art forever! (I hope.)

  But, for all that, the way-it-used-to-be was quite extraordinary.

  Memoir (Nine Hundred Grandmothers)

  From Worlds of If, edited by Frederik Pohl, Martin H. Greenberg, and Joseph D. Olander

  In the years when Galaxy was counted as the best science-fiction magazine by a disproportionate number of science-fiction readers, there was the paradox that Worlds of If, the little brother of Galaxy, consistently published better fiction than Galaxy did. This was a fairly open secret, and yet at least one, and possibly two, of the editors of the magazines did not seem to be aware of it. But if a magazine is better than the best, should it not be accounted as the best? Probably not, not if it's If.

  Galaxy had the features, the better reviews, the science articles (including the wonderful pieces by Willy Ley for some of those years). And it was apparently intended to have the best fiction. It had the name writers, it had the hokum, it had the pomposity; all those things count heavily with the readers. And Galaxy had much the better art. But Worlds of If did have the better fiction.

  I was fortunate in selling quite a few stories to each of the magazines. Whenever one of them was taken by Galaxy I knew that it was a little bit lacking; but I also knew that I would get more money for it than I would if it were taken by If.

  “Nine Hundred Grandmothers” is a story that doesn't have any story line and doesn't have any ending. In those years, the preachers preached that a story should have both of these things. For a while I was almost, but not quite, convinced that they were right. They weren't, of course. A story line and an ending, if handled right, will not hurt a story, may even help it; but they are not essential. Stories without these two things could sometimes be published in If. There was no way they could have bee published in Galaxy.

  “Nine Hundred Grandmothers” is a good story. And I don't see any way that Worlds of If: A Retrospective Anthology wouldn't be a good book. A bucket could be dipped down almost anywhere into the hundred or so issues of If and it couldn't help but bring up a couple of good stories. There would be no danger of it bring up any of the Royal Turkeys that Galaxy often had in those years, though it never had them to the extent that Astounding or the Magazine of Fantasy & Science Fiction had them. Why, just one of its dozens of good writers had such masterworks as “Six Fingers of Time,” “Seven-Day Terror,” “Ride a Tin Can,” “Golden Trabant,” “In Our Block,” “McGonigal's Worm,” “Boomer Flats,” “Mad Man,” and “In the Garden” in Worlds of If in its excellent years. Incredible!

  “Why, I could read it with my eyes closed and still get a big bang out of it,” a friend of mine said of another book recently. And Worlds of If: A Retrospective Anthology should be the bangingest SF anthology around for quite a season.

  Afterword (Land Of The Great Horses)

  From Dangerous Visions, edited by Harlan Ellison

  We are all cousins. I don't believe in reincarnation, but the only system of reincarnation that satisfies justice is that every being should become successively (or sometimes simultaneously) every other being. This would take a few billion lifetimes; the writer with a feel for the Kindred tries to do it in one.

  We are all Romanies, as in the parable here, and we have a built-in homing to and remembrance of a woolier and more excellent place, a reality that masquerades as a mirage. Whether the more excellent place is here or heretofore or hereafter, I don't know, or whether it will be our immediate world when it is sufficiently animated; but there is an intuition about it which sometimes passes through the whole community. There is, or there ought to be, these shimmering heights; and they belong to us. Controversy (or polarity) is between ourselves as individuals and as members of the incandescent species, confronted with the eschatological thing. I'd express it more intelligently if I knew how.

  But I didn't write the story to point up this notion, but to drop a name. There is a Margaret the barmaid—not the one in the story, of course (for we have to abide by the disavowal “Any resemblance to actual persons living or dead is purely coincidental”), but another of the same name—and she is a Romany. “Put my name in a story, just Margaret the barmaid,” she told me. “I don't care what, even name a dog that.” “But you won't know it,” I said, “you don't read anything, and none of the people you run around with do.” “I will know it exactly,” she said, “when someone else reads it someday, when they come to the name Margaret the barmaid. I know things like that.”

  Not from me, but from someone who reads it here, Margaret will receive the intuition, and both parties will know it. “Hey, the old bat did it,” Margaret will say. I don't know what the reader-sender caught in the middle will say or think.

  I am pleased to be a member of this august though sometimes raffish company playing here in this production. It has an air of excellence, and some of it will rub off on me. We are, all of us, Counts of Con-dom and Dukes of Little Egypt.

  How I Wrote Continued On Next Rock

  To ask how any story or tune or statue comes about is to ask “How is it done?”; “What does it take?” Have you heard of the Dutch boy in this country who was going to butcher school, whose schoolmates tried to mix him up? The heart, they told him, that is named the liver; the bladder is called the stomach; the tongue is the coccyx; the loin is known as the chuck; the brisket is the flank; the lungs are named the trotters; and so on. This Dutch kid was very smart however; he figured out that they were having him, and he figured out the right names for everything, or for almost everything. And he passed his final examination with top grades both in meat-cutting and nomenclature. “How were you able to do it?” the instructor asked, “with so many things going against you?” “I've got it up there,” the Dutch kid said, and he tapped his head. “Kidneys.”

  It isn't exactly that one should use kidneys for brains, but the sense of grotesque juxtaposition does come in handy. You can't be sure you are looking at something from the right angle till you have looked at it from every angle. How did I write “Continued on Next Rock” then? Upside down and backwards, of course. I started with a simple, but I believe novel, idea that had to do with time. Then I involuted the idea of time (making all things contemporary or at least repeating), and I turned the systems of values backwards, trying to make the repulsive things appear poetic (“the nobility of badgers, the serenity of toads”) and trying to set anti-love up as comparable to love (the flattest thing you can imagine has to have at least two sides; it can have many more). I let the characters that had been generated by this action work out their own way then. After this, I subtracted the original simple but novel idea from the story, and finished things up. (The original idea was a catalyst which could be recovered practically unchanged at the end of the reaction.)

  The beginning idea, which I give to anyone who wants it, was simply to have archaeologists digging upwards through certain strata, for rather vague topographic reasons, come to deposits of the fairly recent past, or the very recent past, of the near future (a discarded license plate from fifteen years in the future, for instance), then the more distant future, then to realize that the strata still remaining above them had to contain the remnants of at least a hundred thousand years of unfaked fu
ture.

  So much for the genesis of one particular short story. Each one is different but each one is anomalous; and there is a reason for that. No normal or reasonable or balanced or well-adjusted person is going to attempt the making of a story or a tune or a statue or a poem; he'll have no need for such abnormal activity. A person has to be somehow deficient or lacking in person or personality or he will not attempt these things. He must be very deficient or lacking if he will succeed at all in them. Every expression in art or pseudo-art is a crutch that a crippled person makes and donates to the healthy world for its use (the healthy world having only the vaguest idea that it even needs crutches.

  There are, I know, many apparent glaring exceptions to the rule that only persons who are deficient or lacking in person or personality will contribute any creative content. Believe me, these exceptions are only apparent. There is something badly unbalanced in every one of them.

  Carry it one step further, though. One of the legends, unwritten from the beginning and maybe unwritten forever, is about a Quest for the Perfect Thing. But it is really the quest for the normal thing. Can you find, anywhere in the world, behind or before or present, even one person who is really normal and reasonable and balanced and well-adjusted? This is the Perfect Thing, if it or he or she is ever found, and if ever found there will be no further need of any art or attempted art, good or bad.

  Enough of such stuff, end of article, if this is an article. I am both facetious and serious in every written word here.

  Letter to Science Fiction Review 18

  Imagine My Surprise