The early lafferty ii, p.1
The Early Lafferty II., page 1
03-04-2023
The Early
Lafferty
II
ump
Contents
Its His Voice
~ by Darrell Schweitzer
© Copyright 1990 by D. Schweitzer
Day of The Glacier
~ first appeared in the Jan. 1960 edition of ORIGINAL SCIENCE FICTION STORIES
© Copyright 1960 by Columbia Publications
Almost Perfect
~ first appeared in WHO DONE IT?,
© Copyright 1980 by A. Laurance and I. Asimov written Sept. 1959
Ghost in The Corn Crib
~ first appeared in issue#l, THE HAUNT OF HORROR, June 1973,
© Copyright 1973 by the Marvel Comics Group, written in 1959
Maleficent Morning
~ is original to this collection, written April 1960,
© Copyright 1990 by R.A.Lafferty
Beautiful Dreamer
~ first appeared in the Sept, issue of SHOCK MAGAZINE, 1960,
© Copyright 1990 by R.A.Lafferty
McGonigal’s Worm
~ first appeared in the Nov. 1960 WORLDS OF IF,
© Copyright 1960 by Digest Productions
Title page illustration © Copyright 1990 by R.Ward Shipman
170 West 32nd St., Hamilton, Ont. L9C-5H2 CANADA
THE EARLY LAFFERTY II is © Copyright 1990 by R.A.Lafferty
Published by UNITED MYTHOLOGIES PRESS, Box 390, Sta.A, Weston,
Ont., CANADA, M9N-3N1 ALLRIGHTS ARE RESERVED
ISBN -0-921322-14-3 Signed -0-921322-15-1
IT’S HIS VOICE is © Copyright 1990 by D. Schweitzer
Its His Voice
It’s an old adage at science fiction conventions that you can’t put a bunch of writers on a panel for very long before they talk about marketing. Art, yes, and inspiration, and even the dread Where Do You Get Your Ideas, but those are, really, private things, and in public the talk always seems to devolve onto bucks and books and genre labels.
I’ve never been on a panel with R.A.Lafferty, but I bet he wouldn’t talk about marketing.
Lafferty is unique in the strictest sense of that very over-used term of literary praise. There is indeed no one else like him.
If Mark Twain collaborated with Thomas Pynchon, the result might be a ghostly, almost-Lafferty simulacrum, but the relevant fact here is that they didn’t.
So we have to settle for the real thing. In the present pamphlet we have six examples, all of them early, but of them, I’d say only “The Day of The Glacier” is apprentice work. But “Ghost In The Corn Crib” is purest vintage Lafferty. His manner is fully formed, folksy without being cute, and playful in often sinister ways. When I first read that story in HAUNT OF HORROR in 1973, I had no reason to believe it other than recent work. That it took him thirteen years to sell it, that he failed to sell “Maleficient Morning” for twenty-nine years is still puzzling.
And thus we are brought back to the subject of marketing. It is his distinct voice, the quality of his prose which sets Lafferty apart from other writers, and which unifies the entire corpus of his work. We, devoted Lafferty readers, don’t really care that ARCHIPELAGO isn’t quite a fantasy novel (though at times we are not sure), or that THE FALL OF ROME isn’t quite a novel at all. They are Lafferty. That is enough.
Consider THE FALL OF ROME, my own personal favorite of his books. Ostensibly it is a popular history, dealing with the events leading up to the sack of Rome by Alaric the Goth in A.D. 410. It was published, not as fiction, but as a straight history book. Yet there’s a ghost in it. There are also lots of unverifiable details. This is the sort of thing that drives marketing people crazy. What category do we put this book in? What label does it get?
THE FALL OF ROME belongs to a category that hasn’t been added to much in the past thousand years: history as art. It is historical narrative in the genre of Tacitus and Ammianus Marcellinus, filled with magnificent prose, resounding passages, and in an artistic (and oftentimes, coincidentally) factual sense, the truth.
Let’s see a commercial editor explain that at a sales meeting. Even Lafferty’s science fiction novels have problems getting into print and staying there, despite their undeniable excellence, because they aren’t like, other science fiction novels. They don’t obey rules. They don’t necessarily fulfill audience expectations.
In short, Lafferty is a category unto himself. Fortunately there is an active small press, versatile enough to slip into the areas the musclebound giants cannot reach. For a writer who isn’t “commercial”, Lafferty has a surprising number of books and pamphlets published each year. Chances are you got a sheet listing them when you bought this pamphlet. Lafferty is published by United Mythologies, and Morrigan, and Corroboree, and Chris Drumm. I am proud to say that I once pointed out to the editor of Donning that large numbers of Lafferty novels were available, and thus am responsible in a small way for the publication of AURELIA. Donning also got within an inch of doing MORE THAN MELCHISEDECH.
I don’t doubt that the small presses will eventually publish every last word of unpublished Lafferty.
That is enough. As long as the texts are available, as long as people can read what he wrote, Lafferty’s reputation can only grow.
Darrell Schweitzer
Day of The Glacier
The Fifth or Zurichthal glaciation of the Pleistocene began on the morning of April 1, 1962, on a Sunday about nine o’clock by eastern time. This was about twenty-five hours earlier than Doctor Ergodic Eimer had calculated; it threw him into panic, as his preparations were not entirely completed.
Lesser persons had been thrown into a panic nearly an hour before by a series of lesser events. And yet on an ordinary day they would have been of major magnitude.
It was that the thirty-three ICBM launching bases of the United States and Canada had been destroyed simultaneously. Full details were not immediately available, and now due to subsequent catastrophes they are lost forever.
Radio and TV news flashes tried to give a warning and fragmentary details, but on every channel and fequency the same cool voice would always cut in: “This is an April Fools’ Day simulated news broadcast. Do not be alarmed. This program is fictional.”
Congress had been in session for three months, and the new Peace Faction was completely dominant. As is known to all who are aquainted with Mergendal’s Law of Parliamentary Subversion, in all of the once free countries that had succumbed to the Controlled Statists (now thirty-seven) it was subsequently discovered that twenty percent of the elected had clandestinely been working for the Controlled Statists all along; that sixty percent had no true principles or basis of belief of any sort and no practical aim except to be on the winning side, and that a final twenty percent were to some degree die-hards, more or less devoted to the old way.
Incidentally,at this moment the latter percent had virtually ceased to exist. A series of nearly one hundred mysterious early morning murders in Washington, Chevy Chase, Silver Spring, New York and other not-too-widely scattered locations had done for most of them. This was not widely known even now, several hours later; although curiously the accounts of several of their deaths were in the Metropolitan papers before they happened. In the case of one, at least, it did not happen at all; he had forewarning and was miles away at the time of the attempt.
It had been unseasonably warm and dry for six weeks, for which reason nearly everyone except Doctor Ergodic Eimer and his cronies were surprised by the sudden chill and quick heavy snow.
These were in feverish preparation, having to telescope many hours of work into one. When they got to the airport, three inches of snow had already fallen, and it was as though it had only begun. They left quickly in three chartered planes, the last ever to leave there.
In the great cities of the Eastern Seaboard, only a little over five inches of snow fell in the first hour; but in the second hour more than seventeen. Many people of the nation seeing the fantastic accumulation simply went to bed for the day. And millions of them stayed there till they died; there was no way out.
America died that week except for a few lingering communities on the Gulf of California, and the lower Mexican deserts, and the snow dusted Indies. Europe died, and most of Asia, and the southern continents froze from the bottom up. Melbourne and Sydney and Port Elizabeth were buried, as well as Buenos Aires; and even Rio right on the tropic had seven feet of snow.
“The last time it happened,” said Doctor Eimer, “the Padiwire Valley was a good place. We know this from our previous studies and our preparatory expedition there last year.”
“Who would have thought,” asked Professor Schubert, “that an ice age could have come so suddenly?”
“Apparently only myself,” replied the good doctor. “I told everybody worth telling but had very little response for my trouble.
It isn’t as though we haven’t had four very recent ones to study. It isn’t as though it weren’t written plainly in the rocks for everyone to see. Though I must say,” he continued as he shivered in his great coat, “that this was a mighty short inter-glacial - actually less than twenty thousand years of what we might call really nice weather.”
“Will it snow long?” asked Violet, his somewhat overcharming secretary. Dr. Eimer often said that he kept Violet for her looks only, as she was not much smarter than the average Ph.D.
“I think not,” he answered. “Possibly not more than ninety thousand years of maintained snow, and the accumulation itself will come in the
This will be a sort of sport among the ice ages. There is no good reason for it to happen, and it could have been prevented. However, once the balance is tipped, it takes it a little while to swing back. We can be thankful that it will not be as long nor as cold as Wurm.”
“Or Mindel or Riss,” said Professor Schubert.
“Or Gunz,” said Professor Gilluly. “I’d ha*te to have to go through that one again.”
“None of you act as though it were serious,” said Violet.
“Yes,” said Doctor Eimer, “the world is dying and that is serious But we will save ourselves, and part of the luggage we take with us is a little good humor. If we are too serious, we will die also.
The serious always die first.”
“What was wrong with your calculations?” asked Professor Schubert If we hadn’t cut and run for it, we’d never have made it. Another half hour and we’d have been trapped for good.”
“My calculations, as always, were perfect. But the balance was so delicate that a bit of unlooked for turbulence set it off.”
“Turbulence ?”
“Possibly less than two hundred fission warheads that struck our launching bases. Who would have believed that such a little thing could upset the balance a day early. But the balance was delicate.”
“LaPlace-Medira said that an ice age must be proceeded by a thirty thousand year cooling-off period.”
“LaPlace-Medira is an idiot. The Siberian mammoths were frozen solid with green grass between their teeth. There was no more a cooling-off period then than now. In ninety or a hundred thousand years from now, black Angus cattle will be found in the Kansas snow frozen solid with green grass in their several stomachs. It will be a wonder - black, proto-bovine animals with incredibly short legs, and looking almost like a cross between a pig and a cow. You know, of course, that all cattle at the beginning of the fifth interglacial will be red, or red and white, and quite tall.”
“I had not known that.”
“It seems that almost anybody would be able to predict the way the combination color and shoulder-height-coefficient gene would respond under moderately prolonged glacial stress.”
“To tell you the truth, Doctor, I’ve never given it a thought.” Professor Gilluly, in some ways, seemed not to have a complete scientific devotion.
“But it never before glaciated the whole surface of the earth.”
“Nor will it now.”
“But you said that even the Padiwire Valley where we are going will have ice and snow.”
“Oh, that is only temporary - a period of so short duration that we can disregard it, except of course to take precautions that we don’t freeze to death. I venture that it will not have fallen to within fifteen degrees above zero when we land there, and there will be less than nine inches of snow. You must remember that it is nearly on the equator, and we are less than two weeks from the vernal equinox. The quick-freeze period will last less than ten days. Then the clouds will clear, for the simple reason that all the moisture will have fallen, and the sun will have come through. And here, at least, the snow will somewhat melt - though further north and south it will not.
“For a period of about seven years there will be very heavy snowfall and the ocean depth will drop about five feet a year. Then we enter the next phase - which will last no more than eighty-five years - when the snow will continue to accumulate on earth, but at a reduced rate, and the sea level will drop only about a foot a year.
After that, the ice age will be barely able to maintain itself and will essentially be over.
“It is true that the snow will linger for another eighty-thousand years, but it will not greatly increase. And one day it will begin to diminish, and this will be much more rapid than experts believe.
Then the oceans will rise at the rate of a foot a year for a hundred years, and a large part of the land will have different and larger rivers, and some former islands will be joined to the mainland, and new islands will be sliced off.”
“You can predict ninety-thousand years, but can you tell us what is happening right now? How did the other two planes get ahead of us?”
“If they did, then I can only say that they passed us in the snow - for it does look as though two planes have already landed.”
“Well, does it look as if we have already landed too?” asked Violet. “There is a third plane down there. Is that us?”
“Obviously it is not. Are you getting light headed? There are, if you will look closely, at least seven planes there. Well, we have made no preparations for landing elsewhere. We will land as we planned.”
And as soon as they touched down they were taken into custody.
Nauchnii-Komandir Andreyev, known in scientific circles as the Anagallic, was pleased and perfunctory.
“Ah, liddle Doctor Eimer, is it true you are not a complete idiot? I had thought you were nearly complete. An idiot may, or may not know enough to come in out of the rain, but you have come in out of the snow. You surprise me. As you see we are in total control.
These three are your only planes?”
“No. No. We have quite an armada on the way.”
“Those who are not practiced should lie little or not at all.
But there has been stupidity all around. This morning our leaders thought they would have the whole world in their hand, and this afternoon it is some of their delegates who do have all that will be left of it. It pleases me the way it happened. I would not have changed it if I could. I am now the commander of the world.”
“You are not our commander.”
“You are dogs. Learn that. We have studied the eskimo, and one rule they have: the dogs do not sleep in the house or the tent. The dogs grow lazy if they sleep inside. We have your equipment. You are the dogs and you will sleep in the snow and learn your place.”
“We will see.”
“We have already seen. We have you outnumbered now by three hundred to fifty. It will not always be so we hope - the working dogs should outnumber the men. But our positions will not change. You know (though few others hold theories that coincide with my own) that during the last ice age, the Wurm, there were two types of men or
near-men: the Neanderthal who were the masters, and the Grimaldi who were their slaves. We are the new Neanderthalan and you are the new Grimaldi. We had thought to use a few jungle Indian remnants for that, but now we will use you.
“But you must be more numerous. There seems to be only twenty seven women among you, and my census clerk has just reported that fifteen of them are without mates. This will be corrected. Arrange it among yourselves, but arrange it by nightfall. And remember, we expect fruition within nine months. I believe that in one of your obsoleted books there is a phrase about cutting down the tree that will not bear fruit. And do not any of you get peculiar ideas about resisting. We have with us a sadist group. I shudder at these things myself, but those to whom I delegate them will not shudder.”
They were in a white and brown world. The savanna vegetation on the fringe of the jungle, unacquainted with frost for thousands of years, withered at its touch. Every growing thing seemed suddenly to die. Yet the snow could not yet cover it all, it was too lush and high and thick; the small trees would bend with its weight, and then spring free and shake it off their crowns, so that when it finally covered them it covered them from the bottom up.
