R A Lafferty: "What's the Name of that Town?," "Hog-Belly Honey," and "The Hole on the Corner"

Let's read three more 1960s stories by R. A. Lafferty that were included in the 1970 collection Nine Hundred Grandmothers.  Over the years, we've already talked about quite a few stories from the collection, including "Slow Tuesday Night," "All the People," "Through Other Eyes," "The Six Fingers of Time," "Snuffles," "One at a Time," "Land of the Great Horses," "Thus We Frustrate Charlemagne," "In Our Block," "Seven-Day Terror," "Name of the Snake," and "Ginny Wrapped in the Sun."  After today's three, we will be pretty close to having covered them all.  We may live to see such a day, my friends!

"What's the Name of That Town?" (1964)

It is the year 2000.  The eggheads at the Institute set one of their most powerful computers, a machine with a reputation for telling jokes and concocting hoaxes, a difficult task: "seek to discover something not known to exist, by a close study of the absence of evidence."  The supercomputer uncovers a number of odd anomalies--two examples: young bears are called "pups" nowadays but there are hints they were called something else in the past; there is a mysterious extra space lying between two words in an Hungarian encyclopedia--adds them up and makes a startling discovery.  Back in 1980 a Midwestern American city of seven million people was totally destroyed, and everyone in the world resolved to forget this heartbreaking catastrophe--to that end one of the scientists at this very Institute invented a marvelous machine that erased every reference to the city and the disaster from recorded history!  In addition, a hypnotic signal was broadcast throughout the world that made everyone suppress the memory of the town and cataclysm.  When the computer reveals to the collected scientists that once there existed a city named Chicago and it was wiped out, and they were essential parties to the suppression of the memory of his horror, the hypnotic effect is so powerful the scientists refuse to believe it, thinking the machine is playing an elaborate joke on them.

A fun little tale, and our second joke about the Chicago Cubs in less than a month (the team was the butt of a joke from Fred Saberhagen in his novel Love Conquers All, you may recall.)  The story raises an interesting question--do we, in real life, actually try to forget historical calamities, wars and revolutions and plagues and so on?  Or do we endlessly memorialize them, even build our identities and political programs around them?  Maybe we strive to remember some disasters and forget others?  Is Lafferty spurring us to consider whether forgetting terrible events is a good or bad idea, or just sort of riffing on the standard SF idea that we see so often in Lovecraft- and Howard-style fiction that the human race has forgotten a past full of strange human civilizations as well as aliens and magic or whatever?

"What's the Name of that Town?" first appeared in the same issue of Galaxy in which editor Fred Pohl  dared to present to the public "The Children of Night," a story by Fred Pohl which I recently denounced as lame.  "What's the Name of that Town?" would go on to appear in Groff Conklin's anthology Science Fiction Oddities, and in the souvenir book, Fantastic Chicago, put together by Martin H. Greenberg for the 1991 SF Convention held in the Windy City.  A final fun note: An Italian Lafferty collection based on the contents of Nine Hundred Grandmothers took "What's the Name of That Town?" as its title story and bearing a Karel Thole cover illustrating the story with the images of a clownish computer and a distorted Chicago skyline.  Karel Thole is like a hero; not only is he an able artist when it comes to line, color and composition who works in a distinctive style, but he actually reads the fiction of the magazines he illustrates and tailors his illustrations to match the specific stuff that happens in the stories, often in surprising and creative ways.  He deserves some kind of medal.    

"Hog-Belly Honey" (1965)

The narrator of "Hog-Belly Honey" is what we might call an idiot savant: the text is full of grammatical mistakes and weird spellings and/or pronunciations and our hero's behavior betrays a total lack of understanding of social conventions and etiquette and an absolute dearth of empathy.  Despite committing a dozen solecisms on every page, the narrator is an inventor who has made a bazillion dollars and can do complex math in his head as fast as a computer.  

The narrator meets another genius and together they invent an intelligent "nullifier," a device of use in cleaning and tidying--it can make things disappear, and with great discrimination select what should be saved and what is only worthy of being discarded.  "It can posit moral and ethical judgements....it can set up and enforce categories."  If directed at a man's face, it will shave him, but leave a mustache and beard if this would enhance his appearance.  Aimed at a drawer full of love letters, it will make vanish the insincere ones and let alone those expressing genuine passion.  And so on.

The punchline of the story is that the nullifier starts making a small percentage of people that come within its range disappear, people the machine deems worthless.  Friends and relatives of the disappeared violently disagree with the nullifier's murderous assessments, and while the narrator escapes their wrath his partner is lynched.  Is Lafferty suggesting it is folly to leave moral and ethical decisions to a machine?  If the vanished individuals are missed, surely somebody saw value in them, and so the machine's judgement that they were worthless is faulty.

Entertaining.  "Hog-Belly Honey" debuted in F&SF, and was later included in a volume of The Best from Fantasy and Science Fiction and, in 1973, the French edition of the magazine.     

"The Hole on the Corner" (1967)

"The Hole on the Corner" was first printed in Orbit 2, and Damon Knight liked it enough to include it in the Best of volume covering the first ten Orbit anthologies.  It also made its way into themed anthologies on time travel and alternate dimensions.

"The Hole on the Corner" is more absurd, less surprising, and less philosophical than the last five (six if we count "Snuffles") Lafferty stories we have read, and less rewarding, but still not bad.

Homer comes home to find his wife Regina in a clinch with a green-skinned, hooved and tentacled monster that looks somewhat like Homer, and which Regina seems to think is Homer, despite the physical dissimilarity.  She also seems to be enjoying this Homer-like monster's caresses, even though to Homer and the kids their embraces resemble the life and death struggle between a carnivore and its intended prey.  Suspecting somebody here is insane, Homer hurries to his headshrinker, who tells him that he has had numerous patients report very similar events just this day.  The psychologist suspects the local mad physicist is somehow to blame and he and Homer accost this gentleman.  Sure enough, Diogenes the genius explains why these bizarre events are plaguing the neighborhood.  Diogenes has discovered a means to open up passages between our dimension and several parallel dimensions, and those other dimensions' analogues of Homer and other men have been slipping through these passages, perhaps not realizing they have done so, and just going about their normal business.  The story ends with Homer in the clutches of a Regina from another dimension, whose show of physical affection resembles nothing so much as breaking his limbs and devouring him alive.

Perhaps the most novel and interesting part of "The Hole on the Corner" is Lafferty's raising of the idea of how we identify other people; in explaining why Homer's husband would welcome the caresses of a green-skinned version of himself with tentacles and hooves, Diogenes says,

"...nobody goes by the visual index except momentarily.  Our impression of a person or thing is much more complex, and the visual element in our appraisal is small." 

Most disturbing about the story is its attitude about sex.  Not only is sex in the story likened to one person violently slaying and devouring another, but Regina relishes the alien Homer's violent caresses, expressing her preference for the alien to her own husband.  Perhaps significantly, while Regina is thrilled by the caresses of the alien version of her husband, when the shoe is on the other foot and Homer is being devoured by a spider-like alien Regina, he experiences it as a horror, crying out for help and making desperate, and unsuccessful, efforts to escape.  If you want to enliven your Gender Studies class with discussion of Raphael Aloysius Lafferty, just offer the observation that "The Hole on the Corner" reflects cisgendered heterosexual men's fear of women's sexual appetites.

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Three more thumbs up for R. A. Lafferty; it is good to know that there are hundreds of more pages of Lafferty material out there I haven't read yet.

More 1960s SF in the next exciting installment of MPorcius Fiction Log.