Summa Risus: Collected Non-Fiction

by R. A. Lafferty

  There's enough danger on the world to preclude blandness. There are things on the world that are beyond and between its different materialities. There are different ghostly levels, different para-realities, and there is plain spookiness in the ‘spirits of the earth’. In this there is the pleasant condition of what our grandfathers understood as ‘being in good spirits’.

  Both the social complexity and the industrial complexity are parts of the ‘spirits of earth’ condition. Those who make too much of ‘pure nature’ exclude too many things. It is a condition of nature to be mixed and impure.

  And it is a condition of nature to produce inter-category communications or ‘conversations’. Among these ‘conversations’ are the electronic media communications, the plastic and visible and audible arts, and the social and encoding arts. Writing in a human language is the most common of the encodings, along with filming and sound-tracking. So we have dramas, live and electronic; we have lyrics and literatures. These things are not additions to nature; they are as implicit in nature as oak leaves are in an acorn.

  Among the literatures is science fiction which is one of the favorite ‘conversations’ of an anomalous minority of people.

  What is science fiction?

  Where is it? Why is it?

  Is it mobile, and if so where is it going?

  Is it good for anything?

  Try to contribute at least one coordinate towards locating it in at least one of these aspects.

  Troy Gordon in his Tulsa World column has a couple of items recently that unwittingly contribute to the SF subject.

  “Joe Larimore Howe, sent me a list of eternal truths:

  1) It takes a fat dog to weigh 500 pounds.

  2) A 100-pound sack of flour will make one very large biscuit.

  Adds Joe:

  “Admittedly this is a very short list but then I'm new to the eternal truth business!”

  It's even harder to come up with eternal truths about SF than about things in general (‘What made the general sick?’ ‘Things in general’); and even general truths about SF are hard to devise. My list of eternal truths about SF is an irrational number quite a bit less than one.

  And then Troy had this one:

  “Claude Smith has a cannibal story:

  There was a soldier stationed in the South Pacific who asked a reformed cannibal ‘Have you ever eaten anyone from Oklahoma?’

  ‘Yes,’ was the answer. ‘They're delicious.’

  ‘Well,’ said the soldier, ‘have you ever eaten a Texan?’

  ‘No,’ said the cannibal. ‘We never eat those.’

  ‘Why not?’ the soldier wanted to know. ‘Are they tough and stringy?’

  ‘It isn't that,’ said the cannibal, ‘but did you ever try to clean one?’ ”

  But it's much harder to clean SF than to clean a Texan. It'd be easier to clean the Augean stables and to burnish all the brass hinges and turn-buckles of them than to clean SF.

  And for a third Troy Gorgonzolism:

  “Joann Witecrow read a magazine article in which actor Glenn Ford's wife was quoted as saying:

  ‘All he can really make is an omelet but he taught me how to throw it up and catch it in a pan.’ ”

  But this seems to be an unsanitary way of arriving at the essence of either an omelet or of SF, and there is not even a guarantee that it will work. A lot of it is easy to throw up, but when you've caught it in a pan, what have you caught?

  As to the name Science Fiction or its acronym SF, I once wrote a letter to Brad Balfour who has (or had) a magazine named Conglomeration: ‘You ask whether I might contribute an article on language, a subject that we are both interested in. This I will not do. Language can be used to express quite a few things, but when turned on itself it boggles down.

  I'll illustrate this by a recent conversation with an out-of-town friend: as a matter of fact he is from Ganymede. This alien has a mastery of English so profound that it gets in the way of communication. He couldn't understand the meaning of SF, one of the trades that I follow, and I wasn't able to explain it to him.

  ‘I understand the original pictographic value of the two letters,’ he said, ‘but they don't make much of a picture together. And you say that they sometimes stand for what?’

  ‘Science Fiction.’

  ‘Neither word has any real content. Science is scientis, from the verb scire, to know, and that tells us nothing at all. Scire comes from another verb scindere, to cut or to divide, apparently in the meaning to separate or to distinguish. We need a substantial example of it, and it happens that there is one, scindula, a shingle, that which is distinguished or split off from a block of wood. A shingle is something substantial that we can hold in our hand. Is this what you mean by science?’

  ‘No. But where did you get that shingle?’ I asked him, for he suddenly had a shingle in his hand.

  ‘I realized it, of course,’ he said. ‘Isn't realize your word for ‘making real’?’

  ‘Yes, but I never understood the force of the word before,’ I said. ‘You do know that you literalists can clutter up a place, don't you?’

  ‘Now the second element ‘fiction’ is merely the Latin fictio-n from fingere, to shape. It is that which is shaped or formed. The earliest use of the word seems to have been in the potter's trade, and here again we have a substantial example. Fictile, an earthen pot, is the first fiction. Is that not correct? I think I have you pegged now. You make shingles and pots?’

  ‘Not very well,’ I said. I saw that he had realized an earthen pot also. It was a pretty good one for having been done in so hurried a manner. Maybe I could keep flowers in it if I could get him to realize some flowers for me.

  ‘There is something wrong with the conclusions though,’ my friend said. ‘I find that the words ‘fact’ and ‘fiction’ are sometimes used by the people around here as though they were opposites, although they are identical. Facere, ‘to make’ or ‘to do’ is a doublet of the verb fingere, ‘to shape’. A factum or fact is simply a thing made up or done, a ‘feat’. And that also is what a fiction is. Both of the verbs facere and fingere have the further meaning ‘to feign’ and ‘to fake’. Both refer simply to things made; or is there some subtle difference in meaning between ‘to make’ and ‘to make up’? But you will agree that a ‘fact’ and a ‘fiction’ are the same things, won't you?’

  ‘I've got to when you put it that way,’ I said. ‘But SF sometimes means Science Fantasy.’

  ‘Fantasy is the Greek phantuzein, ‘to display’. Does it mean to put the shingle and pot on display, to hang them up? Lawyers and doctors and degreed dentists do ‘hang up their shingles’ as the term has it, so they do put them on display I suppose. I never understood the term before, but now you have made it clear to me.’

  ‘Sometimes SF means Speculative Fiction,’ I said.

  ‘ ‘Speculative’ is from the verb speculor,’ the Ganymedean told me, ‘which means merely ‘to watch’ or ‘to look’. But how to watch? Out of a specular or window casement? From a specula or watchtower? In a speculum or mirror? Would not speculative fiction mean something like ‘watched pot’ then? And is it not proverbial that it never boils?’

  This friend had now realized a speculum, a mirror, a nice one. He could make a good living just realizing objects. I was afraid that he would realize a watchtower, but he showed discernment and judgment in not doing so. But he did have a powerful way with words.

  ‘By the way,’ he said, ‘the first meaning of ‘speculator’ is ‘watcher’ or ‘spy’. Are you a spy?’

  ‘No, not a very good one. SF is imaginative stuff,’ I tried to explain.

  ‘ ‘To imagine’ is merely to make an imago, an image, a likeness,’ he said. ‘And the verbs ‘to imagine’ and ‘to imitate’ contain the same root. Are you imitative in your SF?’

  ‘Not me,’ I said. ‘A lot of the other guys are though.’

  ‘Yoi, yoi, it's always the other guys,’ the Ganymedean snorted in disgust. ‘But SF is
the phonetic equivalent of ‘as if’ in Milt Gross dialect, a very thoughty parallel.’

  ‘You know Milt Gross?’ I asked him.

  ‘The only twentieth century Earth writer who can be called grreat with two r's,’ he said. ‘We love him on Ganymede.’

  He left then. He had to catch the flight back home.

  He left three realizations behind him though, the shingle, the earthen pot, the mirror. I'm not sure whether or not they are the reduced content of SF. They may well be. I have them yet.

  This doesn't seem to have solved the problem of the real meaning of SF. But it has illustrated the use of the ‘SF hook’ and that is something. The ‘SF hook’ is simply a little something added to a piece to make people think it is SF, to try to make people buy it for SF. I have used the SF hook here in one small falsehood. My friend did not really come from Ganymede. He came from Jenks, Oklahoma.

  The most workable definitions of SF are somewhat clumsy and pragmatic. Hugo Gernsback, the father of it all, wrote “By Scientifiction I mean the Jules Verne, H.G. Wells, and Edgar Allan Poe type of story — a charming romance intermingled with scientific fact and prophetic vision.” And Peter Haining wrote of Gernsback as “The man who brought all the diverse material that comprised ‘Scientifiction’ together — adventures in space, time travel, alien beings, future catastrophe and future utopia, and so on.”

  Mirra Ginsburg in her translation from the Russian of ‘The Ultimate Threshold - A Collection of the Finest in Soviet Science Fiction’ writes of SF: “In theme and approach it ranges far and wide—time and space, man and machines, the structure of matter, antimatter, gravity, death and immortality, the creation of artificial intelligence, artificial biological processes, the creation of life and even of man, cybernetics, the existence of sentient life on other planets and in other galaxies, and so on. But above all, there is the concern of man in relation to himself and to others.”

  And she also writes “—and science fiction is, essentially, a literature of play, no matter how serious its preoccupations—”

  But the one thing that all these definitions leave out is the excitement, and the element of wonder and magic, in the SF experience. It's necessary.

  ‘Adventures In Time And Space’, the title of the great Healy and McComas anthology, is a sort of definition as well as a title, and it does convey a sort of excitement. A little ‘Adventures In Width And Breadth’ would not convey such an excitement. Is there something special about the cubical dimensions of Time and Space?

  Histories of SF that go back to the old Greeks are tedious, and yet the real father of SF was the Greek Zeno who thrived in the fourth and third centuries BC. But he didn't do fiction. He did mathematical puzzles. They are referred to as the Paradoxes if Zeno, and they have to do with the puzzling relationships of time and space and motion. They are wonder stuff, speculative magic.

  H.G. Wells, twenty-two centuries later, took up the same paradoxes of time and space and motion (they had to be the same ones; there weren't any others, though by pleasant trickery it is sometimes made to seem that there are more of them) and he encapsuled them in his definitive fictions. That also was wonder stuff.

  Zeno and Wells are science fiction. All the rest is commentary. All the rest is pushing around the crumbs that are left over and making designs out of them.

  But what of the other great things in science fiction? What of the projections and the world buildings? What of the great auras of ghostliness and supernaturalism that accompany science fiction at its best? What of uncanny creatures? What of the unknown? What of the elegant biologies and para-biologies?

  All the projections are inside the paradoxes and are part of them. All the world building and adventure building are according to the blueprint or vellum gray print of the paradoxes. Certainly there may be time travel. That's only moving in time as a cubic dimension. And the biologies and para-biologies are only the same paradoxes applied on the microscopic level. Of ghostliness and the feelings of the uncanny, the type of all ghosts is the mathematical flickering off and on of entities as they disappear from one quadrant and appear in another. The type of all uncanny creatures is the ‘Witch of Agnesi’ which is a mathematical antic. The extension of irrational numbers is irrational universes. The ‘unknown’ quality of supernaturalism is only things managing to attach themselves to the outside rather than the inside of time and space. The magic is all contained in the enabling paradoxes that are from the beginning.

  But mostly in the 1920's and mostly in the United States there did arise a local and particular form that claimed the name of science fiction. It homesteaded the area and it proved up on the homestead. The curious thing was taken out of the public domain, and title to it was given to a small and cranky group.

  It still consisted in pushing around gaudy crumbs into different patterns, but now there were seventy times seven baskets of these crumbs, newly discovered.

  It isn't true, though it sometimes is a telling comment, that science fiction is made up entirely of fringes and has no core. Not quite true. SF does have a hard little center or heart or hub or core. Some of the far-flung fringes are flung out from that center. Others attach to it accidentally. Many of the fringes were already there before SF came along, and they contribute matter to the new core. There are now such fringes as ancient fantasy and medieval fantasy (there cannot ever be such a thing as new fantasy; and there can rarely be a fantasy that is not elephantine), and the personality fringes of Lovecraftism and Burroughsism and Tolkienism. There are the UFO and Hollow Earth and Atlantis cults. There's the groupiness of the Star Trekkers and the Star Warriors and the Creative Anachronistics and the nostalgics. There are various fandoms looking for something to which to attach.

  Quite a few of the popular arts fed the SF creature when it still had pieces of its egg on it. There were comic strips and silent movies and pulp stories of other genres. There were ghost stories and fantasy stories and mechanical man stories (the mechanical men looked as though they were built out of Structo sets). There were the inventive boys literatures, the early Tom Swift stories, Patten's Frank Merriwell stories, Edward Ellis' stories (The Steam Man of the Prairies was a real iron monster story), and the adventure stories about Deadwood Dick, Nick Carter, and Buffalo Bill in his fictitious form. There were stories out of the German and Yiddish traditions, and of the really great adventure and fantasy and ghost story writers of the nineteenth century, overlapping a bit into the twentieth: Lord Dunsany, Walter de la Mar, William Morris, Poe, Verne, Bierce, Stevenson, Hoffman, Mary Shelley, Joseph Sheridan Le Fanu, Bram Stoker, Oliver Onions, Algernon Blackwood. And in the city outside there were the circus and carnival and hippodrome side-show monsters.

  Then the new thing went into the business in the form of a couple of little magazines. This happened in the United States in the 1920s, mostly in the city of New York. It was highly ethnic. It was locally epidemic, taking over some blocks and neighborhoods and leaving others untouched. It grew right out of the asphalt and concrete of city streets and sidewalks.

  To its strong comic strip and silent movie origins, ‘radio’ was added at the moment of its coalescing. It was more than coincidence that radio was a main hobby and livelihood of the father of science fiction, Gernsback. The radio effect was double. The early radio programs affected and were affected by the new science fiction. But there was also the personal gadgetry of the boy SF fans, the crystal set radio builders and short-range broadcasters to other gadgeteers. Radio was at the heart of the circle of ‘magical inventions’.

  The basic hardware of the new science fiction was ‘Other World Adventure’ and ‘Mechanical Men’. The companionship of SF was created entirely by juveniles behind the backs of adults.

  And I was a juvenile at the time, and I missed it completely.

  “Of course you missed it,” a lady said to me at a convention a while back. “How could you not have missed it? You're not even Jewish.”

  My own ethnicity was settled back in the first p
art of the nineteenth century: it would be Irish American. Most of my lines of kindred, the Laffertys, Burkes, Kelleys, Delahunts, Kanes, Kennedys, Whites, Carrigs, Clancys, Hughes, Sweeneys, McCarthys, O'Sullivans, O'Connels, Dignans, Heeleys, Byrnes, came from Ireland to escape the hard times there, and then to escape the famine there (this was all between 1815 and 1850). They were all farmers in Ireland, but most of them also followed a second trade: tailor, seaman, carpenter, schoolteacher, shoemaker. There do not seem to have been any city people among them. In America they were city people only very briefly for their arriving generation, in Philadelphia and Boston and Baltimore and New Orleans; then went inland, predominantly to Iowa (some of their Iowa locations were still part of ‘Michigan Territory’ in early letters). They became farmers, with secondary occupations yet. Both my parents homesteaded in Oklahoma and later traded their homesteads for other property. They went back to Iowa twice to live (I was born in Iowa on the second time of it) and returned to Oklahoma twice. My father was both a farmer and a carpenter before he became an oil lease broker. My mother was a schoolteacher, as her mother had been also. From them I learned that ‘books are treasures’, and almost all the books we had (there were very many of them) were good books. All our magazines were by subscription and were good magazines. So I was surrounded by reading early. I learned my way around the library by the time I was seven, but I didn't know about newsstands at all. Newsstands were in some other world. This is probably why I didn't make early contact with the writing going under the name science fiction.