R. A. Lafferty: "All but the Words," "Dream," "The Transcendent Tigers," and "World Abounding"

Alright, four more stories from Strange Doings, the 1972 R. A. Lafferty collection.  I have the 1973 paperback edition from DAW, but if you read Dutch you can take advantage of the 1975 paperback from Het Spectrum, which has one of those out-of-focus-light-bulb covers and bears the title Niet Pluis, which google translate renders into English as Not Right.

"All but the Words" (1971)    

This one starts out as if it is going to be about how highly intelligent people (and people who think they are highly intelligent) have trouble relating to other human beings, and while they may be able to achieve great feats in the sciences, even world-changing feats, they may miss out on what really matters in life, like love and human connection.  But the ending is more ambiguous, perhaps suggesting the futility of trying to communicate with the alien other, or maybe just pointing out the way we exaggerate the value of communication and how we are never satisfied with the thing we wanted after we get it.

A team of scientists is working on a universal translation device that can open communication with anyone, no matter how alien, and the thing has already been able to get an inkling of what insects, plants and even weather patterns are thinking!  But the eggheads are stuck when it comes to communicating with extraterrestrial intelligences.  The head of the project thinks that the problem may be that the scientists don't like talking to people, so cannot build a rapport with alien civilizations.  So he puts the least intelligent scientist, an overweight woman named Energine who is the member of many lonely hearts clubs and has many pen pals, on the task.  She sits at the apparatus and instead of talking about scientific concepts as have her predecessors, she expresses her feelings to the aliens, her desire for love, her fascination with quotidian things like food and mundane gossip.  Immediately Lafferty puts us on notice that we are not to credulously take any and all "all you need is love" sentiments seriously--Energine and her Earthbound pen pals are not only vapid, but deceptive; they, for example, make it a practice to send each other pictures of comely individuals, fraudulently claiming they these lookers are themselves. 

Energine's emoting achieves success--soon she is having long heart-to-heart conversations with an alien!  The alien even comes to Earth and Energine thinks the tiny little color-shifting monster will marry her!  But disaster strikes.  The alien speaks incessantly, holding a press conference that lasts days--weeks!  Energine is forgotten and she joins a convent where she takes a vow of silence!  The leaders of the translation device project variously go insane, die, or beg the government to let them hand the project off to somebody else--maybe a robot!  Lafferty implies that the alien, by demonstrating how annoying and fruitless too much chatter can be, and by, as part of its endless press conference, giving a five-hour lecture on "the medicinal value of silence," has radically changed human society, or at least the behavior of the cognitive elite--Earth people become very terse and taciturn, conveying information with a minimum of words.

The supersmart scientists achieve their goal of communicating with aliens, but are not satisfied by it, and Energine believes she has achieved her goal of an intimate connection with another individual, only to be severely disappointed and ending up as a nun.  I am reminded of T. S. Eliot's The Waste Land, which (in some interpretations, at least) is about how people seek fulfillment in love, sex, work and money, and eventually come to realize the only path to a life of meaning is to go out into the desolate waste to live alone and foster a personal relationship with God.

Pretty good; fun and thought provoking.  Like so much of the best genre literature and popular culture, you can enjoy "All but the Words" on a surface level as a story about silly characters who say and do amusing things and then suffer an ironic twist-ending fate, but the tale can also inspire you to think a little more deeply and consider if the author is saying something insightful about life.  

"All but the Words" first saw print in Galaxy and has reappeared in Lafferty collections like the 2014 The Man Who Made Models, the first volume of Centipede Press's Collected Short Fiction of R. A. Lafferty series.

"Dream" (1962)

This story began its publishing life in Galaxy as "Dreamworld," but with one little snip transitioned into "Dream," the title it has appeared under in Lafferty collections since.   

Here we have an entertaining but minor twist-ending story; you might call it a good filler story.  We meet an odd man who eats a monumentally huge breakfast at a diner each morning; the fact that he eats these huge breakfasts is dwelt upon comically, but I'm not sure that it actually affects the plot.  

The plot involves the fact that everyone in the world begins having the same horrifying, disgusting, dream every single night.  In the dream, everyone, including the dreamer, is a creature who enjoys symbiotic relationships with rodents that live in his digestive systems and insects that live on his hairy hide and lives in a world where it never stops raining green sewage.  The guy who eats huge breakfasts is one of the first to recognize he is having this dream, though his realization is preceded and triggered by that of a woman sitting at a nearby table, who describes the dream to a friend.  

Over a few weeks, more and more people report having the dream, leading to worldwide psychological crises.  After unsuccessfully trying to escape the nightmare by sleeping less, people can't help but sleep more, so that they are spending half their lives in the horror world of green rain.  Then a voice in the dream begins telling people that our blue sky world is a dream and it is the green rain world that is reality!  A charismatic individual takes to the airwaves to tell the people of the world that we must choose which world we want to live in.  The next day the dreams stop--but which world did people choose?

A success, but not as noteworthy as many other Lafferty stories.  One of the characters calls the green rain world Hell, and perhaps the subtext of the story is the Catholic belief that we choose whether we end up in Heaven or Hell, and that people are all too willing to choose Hell even though the possibility of Heaven is right there before them.  Can the voice in the Hell dream be the Devil?  The charismatic man on the TV Christ?  And the huge breakfasts a reminder of the sin of gluttony, a foreshadowing that the people of the world are going to make the wrong choice?

"The Transcendent Tigers" (1964)

"The Transcendent Tigers" is a straightforward and easy to understand little story, and I can't come up with anything particularly interesting to say about it.  (I was hoping I could whip out a reference to "Gerontion," in which Eliot writes "In the juvescence of the year/Came Christ the tiger" but, alas, there is no call for such a reference.)

Among a little girl's birthday gifts is a little red hat--nobody knows who gave it to her.  Suddenly she demonstrates high intelligence and other impressive abilities.  At about the same time, horrendous disasters begin striking American cities--it is as if needles two miles thick are plunging down from the sky and punching holes in the cities, causing death and destruction on a monumental scale.  In the middle of the story we meet some space aliens.  These super-powerful entities have a policy of awarding tremendous power to a single native of planets inhabited by lesser beings--after assessing the psychology of the natives and finding a suitable recipient, of course.  A new man is on the job and his first assignment was Earth, and he bungled the assignment after having trouble finding anybody on Earth among the elite worthy of the power--he gave the power, invested in the red hat, to the most self-confident person he could find.  In the final scene we find that the cataclysms visited upon American cities are the result of the girl in the red cap punching holes in a map of the United States with a needle.  As the story ends she is about to strike New York City and her friends are going to get a map of the world.

(Now I know the inspiration for the image of a planet with needles and pins stuck through it on the cover of my DAW edition of Strange Doings.)

The comedic superior-subordinate relationship between the two aliens, and the idea of an alien contacting a human and incompetently vesting him or her with some kind of responsibility on him that the human in turn handles with total incompetence, reminded me a little of Barry N. Malzberg's work, I guess Day of the Burning and Overlay are the ones coming to mind.

"World Abounding" (1971)

"World Abounding," which appeared in the year of my birth, is the only fiction promoted on the cover of the issue of F&SF in which it debuted.  (This issue of F&SF also includes Malzberg's "Causation.")  "World Abounding" does not appear to have been reprinted as often as most of the Lafferty stories we have been talking about, though the issue of the French edition of F&SF in which "World Abounding" appears has a drawing of a topless insect woman on the cover, so there's that.

"World Abounding," perhaps, illustrates the ancient wisdom that there is no need to fear death because, if you embrace the possibilities offered by life and the world, you can accomplish enough, you can do all the things that are truly worth doing. But Lafferty does give us readers reason to entertain additional or even contrary interpretations--"World Abounding" may be one of the many SF stories that tell you that utopias in which the easy life is handed to you are not paradises but hells.   

(In grad school I think I read, and I at least read about, John Bunyan's Grace Abounding, and it is possible the title of Lafferty's story is a reference to that, though I don't recall enough about the book to be able to speculate on influences or connections.  Yet again I am confronted by the fact that my poor parents wasted a lot of money on all that tuition.) 

World Abounding is the name given a human-habitable planet that numerous Earth expeditions have explored--mysteriously, all the expedition members who have returned from WA refuse to share details of their findings, to describe fully what happened to them there, though it couldn't have been so bad, as everybody who has visited WA has come back whole and healthy.

The current expedition, whose adventure this story relates, is made up of seven members, three married couples and the unmarried captain.  WA is a planet characterized by extreme fertility, extreme fecundity--plants grow before your very eyes!--and an infectious sense of joy--the food is delicious, the animals are playful, etc.  The planet's unique "vibe" has a major effect on the behavior of the expedition members; for example, WA's "rutting season" comes almost immediately upon the expedition's arrival and moves the three married couples to marathon bouts of enthusiastic sexual activity.  Meanwhile, the captain discovers under successive layers of relatively recently fallen volcanic ash some curious human bodies, even though the planet has no native human inhabitants.  These well-preserved corpses are seated comfortably at tables, as if these people were killed all together at once during a happy feast and did not struggle to escape the volcanic eruption of which they could not have been ignorant.  On close examination, the current expedition members find that these people bear resemblance to members of the previous expeditions, as if these dead people were those earlier explorers' siblings or children.  

Just a few days after those extended sessions of sexual gymnastics, the women of the expedition give birth--like everything on this planet, labor is painless and free of  complication.  The kids can speak as soon as they leave the womb, and can walk hours later!  Days later they are sexually mature and the married couples are presented with grandchildren!  One of the first WA generation and the captain fall in love and produce a child, and in a few weeks everybody on the planet looks about the same age, so fast do the descendants of the expedition members grow and age.

One of the themes of "World Abounding" is the idea that a third entity, after the two parents, is involved in the creation of a human child--the planet the child is conceived and born on.  Children born on Earth are marked and shaped by the Earth, and those born on World Abounding are radically different creatures than their Earthborn parents or grandparents.  Maybe we should see this as an allegory of the nature vs nurture debate, a dramatization of how environment plays a role in creating a person as well as genetics.  I am also reminded of the idea that man and wife are not the only parties to the institution of marriage, that society and God also play a role in the relationship, have influence on it and a stake in its success.   

Life passes very quickly for the people born on WA, but they cherish and enjoy to the fullest every moment, every event.  They make music, they eat delicious meals, they create beautiful sculptures.  The WA people share a sort of collective consciousness, so while one of these new short-lived people is relaxing in the arms of a lover she can also experience the mountain climbing of another of her generation--these WA people are even tapped into the experiences of local fauna, the birds in flight and the fish in the water.  Having, collectively at least, experienced all that can be experienced that is worth experiencing, those born on WA accept death at the end of a mere month's time with equanimity, even welcome it.  They sit at a banquet as the ash of the periodic volcanic eruption covers and kills them; the Earthborn watch from safety, though the captain has to be dragged away, wanting to die with his beloved, the daughter of two of his colleagues.

The captain presents a mystery to me.  While every other person who appears on screen in the story is made happy by World Abounding, embracing with enthusiasm all it has to offer and then accepting the deaths of the native-born at the end of the magical month, the captain is always suspicious, always skeptical, even scared, and he is unable to calmly accept the final fate of the WA-born.  (Note: it is suggested that some of the members of earlier expeditions also found World Abounding horrifying.)  Are we to see the captain as making some kind of self-destructive error, or could it be that the captain is the smart one, that we readers should also be suspicious of or even horrified by what goes on on World Abounding?  Is the happiness of people on World Abounding somehow illegitimate, a false happiness because it is too easy, something handed to people rather than something earned through hard work, the product of something akin to drug use (there is a lot of talk about a hormone present on the planet) and because the happiness of WA is a selfish dead end, seeing as the grandchildren of the Earthborn expedition members produce no children of their own?    

"The Transcendent Tigers" reminded me of Malzberg, and "World Abounding" is reminding me of Theodore Sturgeon and his utopian planets like those in "The Skills of Xandau" and "If All Men are Brothers Would You Let One Marry Your Sister?"  While I often feel like Sturgeon in his utopian stories is haranguing us, attacking our society and offering designs for a better society that are so impossible to put into practice that ol' Ted's stories are no more than sterile wish-fulfillment fantasies, Lafferty's story here offers advice an individual might actually be able to follow to make his or her life better, and he doesn't insult you or express contempt for ordinary people.  At the same time, the ambiguous role of the captain and the sort of bittersweet aspects of "World Abounding" make it more believable on an emotional level than Sturgeon's stark, black and white, "this one weird trick will make everybody immortal and happy" tales.

"World Abounding" is the most challenging of the stories we are reading today, but it also offers a lot to think about, so I have a better attitude about it than I did "Continued on Next Rock," the most difficult story covered in our last blog post.

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We are almost finished with Strange Doings--next time, three stories and then on to other adventures.  As a final note, I'll point out a little recurring theme I noticed in today's stories, a skepticism about the value of communication and the written word in particular.  I've already talked about how "All but the Words" seems to suggest communication can be overrated, and in both "The Transcendent Tigers" and "World Abounding" we have humans who receive special powers from alien entities or circumstances, and in both stories the people so affected have little interest in reading, as if it is a waste of time, an inefficient way of acquiring information.  Perhaps a counterintuitive tack for a writer to take, but in line with a pervasive theme of Lafferty's work, experts and academics who are always screwing up and having their assumptions and assessments shown to be wrong.