Today we finish up our look at the early Seventies collection of stories by R. A. Lafferty entitled Strange Doings. Only three stories remain for us to read today; at the bottom of the blog post I'll include links to my discussions of the other 13 stories in the book.
"Ride a Tin Can" (1970)
"Ride a Tin Can" debuted in an issue of
If ("the magazine of alternatives") which also includes a story by Gene Wolfe I haven't yet read and an essay by Lester del Rey on Buck Rogers, the comic strip (published 1929 to 1967) and the strip's original source material, short fiction by Philip Francis Nowlan that appeared in
Amazing in 1928 and 1929. Del Rey moans at length that the strip is racist, with the white people good (except for the white character who is evil) and the Mongols and Martians evil, and even suggests the strip might have played a role in American misbehavior in World War II, like the internment of Japanese-Americans (did FDR read
Buck Rogers?), and the Korean War, in which, as del Rey tells it, some American had a dim view of Koreans. After this, del Rey does admit the strip is fun. More interesting is del Rey's discussion of whether Buck Rogers constitutes science fiction; he insists that the comic strip is
not science fiction, while the two novelettes in
Amazing by Nowlan
are science fiction, in part because Nowlan does world-building and because the stories are less racist than the strip (though still racist.)
(For the record, while I am a big fan of the Flash Gordon strip by Alex Raymond because I think Raymond's art is terrific, I haven't delved deeply into the Buck Rogers strip because the art looks pretty lame. Buck's early comic adventures most certainly are on my to do list, however.)
Alright, let's get to the reason we are here, R. A. Lafferty's "Ride a Tin Can." This is a clever and fun little story, gruesomely humorous and maybe a little sad, that, perhaps, is about how ethnic or political groups who want to exploit or destroy members of another group first dehumanize them. This story might in particular appeal to our anti-capitalist friends, as the villain is a big company and the consumers who eagerly buy their products and Lafferty also pokes fun at how large business concerns will make charitable grants and donations to salve their consciences.
According to the experts, the extraterrestrial goblin creatures known as Shelni have no intelligence or language--their speech is "meaningless croaking." But doctor of primitive music Holly Harkel thinks the Shelni are not mere animals, but people with intelligence and a culture, including music and stories. Holly is an odd scholar, a short ugly woman who, when she studied amphibians and reptiles, started looking like a toad or a snake. She and the narrator, a folklorist, get permission and a grant to record the lore and music of the Shelni, and Holly leads the way to the subterranean lair of the goblin people, where our heroes record four of their traditional stories. Under Holly's influence, the narrator can understand the Shelni language and appreciate Shelni music, something no human besides the two of them can do (or perhaps something no other human chooses to do, as the establishment has a psychological and financial stake in not considering the Shelni to be people?)
As has been foreshadowed, we learn that the dimwitted Shelni, who have very strange ideas about birth and death--they seem to have no inkling of where they come from and their folklore is full of stories of Shelni being dismembered but continuing to live--are being exterminated by humans who offer the Shelni a free ride to Earth. All the Shelni are eager to take advantage of the offer, and they are processed (deboned) and put into tin cans and sent to Earth, where they are sold as food for children. Holly, who has taken on the appearance of a Shelni, is herself torn to bits and put into an Earthbound tin can. The narrator (who retrieves from the food processing plant and keeps Holly's bones) vows vengeance on the company that destroyed the kind and loving Holly as well as the innocent and naive race of the Shelni.
Thumbs up. You can catch "Ride a Tin Can" in various Lafferty collections as well as an anthology by Terry Carr with a Kelly Freas cover and a German anthology with a (repurposed from Ace F-282) Frank Frazetta cover.
"Entire and Perfect Chrysolite" (1970)
Here's one of Lafferty's
Orbit stories. "Entire and Perfect Chrysolite" would reappear in a number of other anthologies, including a German one that draws stories from
Orbit 5 and
6, and a French anthology,
Univers 05, that also includes David Gerrold's
"Afternoon with a Dead Bus" which I condemned back in 2022.
"Entire and Perfect Chrysolite" takes place in an alternate universe, perhaps based on ancient Greek cartography, in which Ireland, America, and sub-Saharan Africa do not exist--the world consists of Europe, Asia and Libya. The inhabitants of this world know about black Africa and America the way we know about Atlantis, and think about black people the way we might think of elves, about giraffes and hippos the way we might think of unicorns and dragons--as lands, people and beasts of fantasy, products of cultural imagination and the collective unconscious.
Our characters are eight people aboard a ship, sailing within sight of the southern coast of Libya. These people are interested in the occult and supernatural, and will often hold seances and do other strange things. Today they are trying to conjure up mythic Africa, which, if real, would be right beneath them. They succeed--a crocodile attacks one of the characters, tearing her to pieces, and the ship disappears, leaving the cast in a swamp, surrounded by lions and giraffes and the like, the African animals they think are fairy tales. As reptiles and great cats approach menacingly, the adventurers insist these creatures are harmless illusions, constructed out of their own imaginations. A black man appears and tries to save them, but they think he is an illusion too, and his reward for his selfless efforts is death under the hooves of a water buffalo. The adventurers reverse their spell, and Africa vanishes, and their ship reappears. Their comrade who was killed by the croc does not reappear, but her husband is confident she will eventually make her way back to reality. We readers cannot be sure if the poor woman will reappear, nor if the cast really did visit our world and leave one of their number behind, or if they did nothing more than experience an illusory and harmless vision of a world much like our own. Maybe you and I, and all our trials and tribulations, are the fantasies and dreams of these goofballs.
Pretty good.
"Cliffs that Laughed" (1969)
We finish our current exploration of the stories of R. A. Lafferty with one of the more challenging, one of the more confusing ones. We've got a narrator, but most of the "main" story is told by another character, Galli the native Pacific Islander, a traditional storyteller who relates to the narrator an adventure/horror story. "Cliffs that Laughed" has multiple levels or angles of unreliability. Galli openly admits he cobbles his stories together from various sources, including American comic books, and in fact he has agreed to teach the narrator the art of storytelling in return for the narrator giving him a Wonder Woman comic. (Perhaps it is meaningful that Galli and the narrator don't just buy these comics, but steal them. Recall that T. S. Eliot's work is famously full of images and phrases stolen from every level of culture, and Eliot was unabashedly open about this theft.) Some portions of "Cliffs that Laughed" are in quotes, probably but not necessarily Galli's exact words, while other parts of the tale Galli tells appear to be the narrator's paraphrase; and then we have italicized sections that I initially thought Galli's words but now believe are the narrator's. One of the jokes of "Cliffs that Laughed" is that Galli's storytelling ability is open to question. For example, many times he does that thing people telling stories in real life do, realizing they have forgotten to tell you some fact or other and saying, "Oh, I forgot to tell you that so and so was also there and had already blah blah blah...." Sometimes these facts are significant, other times of questionable value. The narrator also does this, though less often and more subtly--the narrator has integrated the techniques of his teacher into his own repertoire.
(Another idiosyncrasy of Galli's storytelling technique is that he tries to incorporate music into it, telling the narrator to imagine he is hearing flute music of one or another tempo at this or that point, to set the mood--while a traditional native storyteller, Galli is strongly influenced by modern forms of storytelling, like comics, the theatre, cinema. In the final lines of the story the narrator follows his teacher's example.)
The "main" story involves an island that, back in the 17th century, became the HQ of a pirate, a Welshman, Jones, who seized a Dutch ship as well as the ship owner's daughter, Margaret, and the Dutchman's spice-producing island, the island in question. The Welshman tried to get the beautiful Margaret to fall in love with him--not easy, as he had murdered her father and stolen all her estate. It takes a year of wooing, but she does eventually agree to marry him. Not long after the consummation of their marriage in the big house Jones built on the island with his ill-gotten wealth, Jones left Margaret behind to go on further pirate adventures. He returns twenty years later to find two women on the island who look just like his beloved did the day he left! One is presumably the Dutch beauty's and the Welsh pirate's 20-year-old daughter, and the other must be Margaret herself. Margaret has acquired black magic skills and facility with esoteric herbs and drugs, so maybe she is old but has preserved her looks, and maybe she is dead and a sort of zombie or lich--there are also clues that suggest that the daughter has been killed and is thus (also?) an undead monster. Jones will never be able to tell which of the two is his wife and which his daughter, and which is alive (if either) and which (if it isn't the case that both are) one of the living dead. (As we've seen over the last few blog posts, Lafferty stories are full of women who have superpowers and incredible physical strength--Margaret apparently lifted up men and threw them overboard during the fight on her father's ship.)
Jones, unable to satisfy his desires for fear of committing incest and/or necrophilia, declares vengeance on the world--he will kill any men who come to his big house, and they are sure to come, because the two women are sexually irresistible, perhaps because of herbs they have ingested.
Adding to the content of the story, and the confusion, this 17th-century story is interwoven with the story of some 20th-century American servicemen, who, stationed on the pirate island at the end of World War II, had some horrifying supernatural and unforgettable erotic experiences with the two women, ghosts or the living dead, at the decayed big house. Either the narrator or Galli, and perhaps both, seemingly unintentionally, present this 20th-century horror story in dribs and drabs, mixing elements of the soldiers' story in with the story of Jones the pirate--Galli and/or the narrator heard this story from one of the soldiers himself, and speak some of its component parts in the voice of the soldier, so it seems we've got three storytellers in this story, and we hear what two of them have to say distorted through the voice(s) of one or two others. Of course, we are also given reason to suspect the narrator might actually be one of the three soldiers; also, that the soldier may himself be a ghost or one of the living dead.
Oh, yeah, I forgot to mention the three golems and the discussion of whether golems are mechanical men or mere vehicles built by Jewish or Arab wise men and then animated by bodiless spirits who covet a physical body and flock to the artificial bodies as a bird might flock to a manmade birdhouse.
If we piece together chronologically the various plot elements of "Cliffs that Laughed," we have a cool Weird Tales-type story about a pirate who suffers revenge at the hands of a witch he wronged, a pirate and a witch who live on, perhaps undead, into the 20th century to torment and murder horny men. But the way Lafferty dices up the plot so it presents the reader with something of a puzzle suggests that "Cliffs that Laughed" is also, or "really," about storytelling, a demonstration of the fact that stories and their tellers are totally untrustworthy, that stories are all made up and stolen. Like men clamoring to get their mitts on dangerous women in a ruined house, we eagerly consume stories no matter how fake and manipulative we know they are likely to be.
I spent quite a bit of time figuring out this story, but, like everybody, I find pirates, witches, golems, the living dead, mass murder and disgusting self-destructive sex to be compelling, so it was all worth it. Thumbs up!
"Cliffs that Laughed" first appeared in Robert A. Lowndes'
Magazine of Horror, a periodical that consisted primarily of reprints but did offer occasional new stories like this one. "Cliffs that Laughed" would be reprinted in
Amazing in 1993, where it is accompanied by a pretty long essay about Lafferty by Michael Swanwick, and in
The Best of R. A. Lafferty in 2019.
**********
Well, we did it--with Strange Doings we are strangely done. These stories posed more of a workout than most of the stories I read that feature aliens, alternate universes, witches and murder, but no regrets! Below find links to my chit chat about the other stories in Strange Doings. And live in suspense because neither of us knows if the next MPorcius Fiction Log post will feature more of these sorts of brain busters or stories about outer space, the future, and the supernatural that are nice and easy.
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