(SFF Bingo): The Best of R. A. Lafferty

One of the main reasons I got back into reading a lot of fiction in the last year or so is reddit bingo, and one of the main reasons I got into that was a group of SFF nerd friends at work, the ringleader of whom I'll call J. In some ways, our tastes line up very well--he's one of the rare Steerswoman fans I've met in the wild, and he cares enough about RL sports to argue over the weaknesses about Quidditch from a sports worldbuilding sense. And he keeps up with a lot of contemporary short fiction, which is a useful perspective for me as a (very amateur) writer. On the other hand, he has a lot higher tolerance for didactic/ambiguous/Deep stuff than me. So knowing that R. A. Lafferty is his favorite...I wasn't sure whether that would be a rec or an anti-rec for me. But when I saw a chance to read at least some of this anthology in hard copy, I figured I might as well use it for the "author uses initials" bingo square.

The verdict: by and large, Lafferty does not do it for me.

Here are some themes: distortions in space and time (hours that pass like weeks, a valley that is either half a mile or five feet across), children that don't sound like children and do sound bizarrely genre-savvy (“Great green bananas,” said Cyril, “I’m only three years old. I don’t see how it’s even my responsibility.”), negative views of urbanity, characters who speak a vernacular with odd syntax (“Oh look, is snakes behind you!” the girl cried. “Oh how you startle and jump!” she laughed. “It’s all joke. Do you think I will have snakes in my nice bar?”), and extremely bizarre prose:

“Here is the change of person-subject shown by the canted-eye glyph linked with the self-glyph,” Steinleser explained. “It is now a first-person talk. ‘I own ten-thousand back-loads of corn. I own gold and beans and nine buffalo horns full of watermelon seeds. I own the loin cloth that the sun wore on his fourth journey across the sky. Only three loin cloths in the world are older and more valued than this. I cry out to you in a big voice like the hammering of herons’ (that sound-verb-particle is badly translated, the hammer being not a modern pounding hammer but a rock angling, chipping hammer) ‘and the belching of buffaloes. My love is sinewy as entwined snakes, it is steadfast as the sloth, it is like a feathered arrow shot into your abdomen—such is my love. Why is my love unrequited?’”

 

Lafferty was a white man from Tulsa, Oklahoma. Oklahoma, as many of the writers who contributed introductions can point out, is notable for being a longstanding "Indian Territory" before the entry of colonists from the greater US. So there are a lot of stories that deal with colonization and/or resistance thereto, both with indigenous Americans and others. Part of me sometimes wonders "would this get published today" when reading older stories, and often it's from a perspective of "what would the market want"--like, does anyone want to hear a white person with these takes, or his experience sufficiently inauthentic? But sometimes it's from a perspective of "is this even good?"

This is kind of an unfair sample (some of his verses are better), but take this from "Ride a Tin Can":

“Knockle, knockle.”

“Crows in cockle.”

“Wogs and wollie.”

“Who you?”

“Holly.”

“What’s a dinning?”

“Coming inning.”

I forget where I read it but I think someone said something similar about Dr. Seuss last year. He's not problematic just because some of his characters ride a camel or eat with chopsticks, but he is overrated because anyone can come up with rhymes for "pocket" if you're allowed to make up the word "wocket!" ;)

The introduction to "Thus We Frustrate Charlemagne" points out that it's "classic counterfactual fiction: it is an illustration of what happens when you change history to create alternate history; and it comes into being through the writer’s choice of a divergence point, which creates a new branch that confounds history as we (think we) know it." The characters try to take careful notes to compare branches of history, but once they change the past, the new timeline has always been that way, so no one remembers changing history. Fairly standard SF premise. The introduction goes onto speculate "whether this is a science fiction story at all … or whether it might just be an anti–science fiction story." I would say this is right for the wrong reasons; Lafferty isn't subverting SF just because his characters don't remember the changes they've made, he's frustrating because (in general, not just this story) there are no "hard" rules, things just happen, characters attempting to make sense of the world are thwarted, and when characters break the fourth wall to laugh about it (the punch line of one story is "that was just for dramatic effect"), it feels unearned.

But there's always an exception that proves the rule. For me, the highlight of the collection was "Land of the Great Horses." At first it seems to be another "aftermath of displacement/diaspora" story, this time focused on the Romani people, which could be boring at best and cringeworthy at worst. But the end goes in a phenomenal and entirely unexpected direction, and sticks the landing. I'm always a fan of in-universe documentation when it's done well, and this was fantastic. So while I wouldn't recommend this book overall, someone else might find a different needle in the haystack!

Bingo: using it for "Author Uses Initials." Would obviously fit for "5+ short stories." Apparently as an anthology it was "award finalist but non-winner," it seems a bit of a stretch to use an anthology for that since at least one of the stories included won an award on its own (Eurema's Dam, Hugo 1973).