Mark Twain meets Isaac Asimov

[mtvessel]

Nov 2019
The Best of R.A. Lafferty - R.A. Lafferty ed. Jonathan Strahan – Gollancz, 2019
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One of the great things about SF is its embrace of the short story. There have been some true geniuses in the field - Ray Bradbury, Isaac Asimov, Arthur C. Clarke, Kelly Link and Ted Chiang come immediately to mind. But ask many SF writers, and they will mention a name that is not so well-known: R.A. Lafferty. His general lack of recognition suggests that, like dark chocolate or continental coffee, he might be something of an acquired taste. Having read this book of what are generally regarded as his best stories, I have to say that this would seem to be the case. I enjoyed his original ideas and the unique ways in which he approached them, but they didn't have the emotional oomf that I found in the writers mentioned above.

In part this is because I don't really get on with folksy idioms in the Mark Twain mode, and Lafferty writes almost exclusively in that style. His characters often have cutesy names (Willy McGilly, Nina Rampart, Gregory Smirnov) and usually the upbeat cheery banter of many of Isaac Asimov's creations, with a similar lack of a sense of an internal life. The word "whimsical" comes forcefully to mind in the choice of details through which the story is told, which is a shame because many of the ideas on which they are based are anything but. The first story in the book, Slow Tuesday Night, is perhaps the best example. At its core is a simple but brilliant idea - that there is a brain structure which slows people's thinking, and which can be removed by "simple childhood metasurgery", allowing people to act and make decisions far more quickly than was previously the case. Lafferty takes the implications of this to their logical extreme, describing a slow Tuesday night in which characters invent a trendy new "Manus module" or write a book of philosophy in the space of a few minutes, which become highly fashionable for a few hours and are then forgotten. It is a quite astonishing pre-satire of the shallowness of internet and social media culture with its come-and-gone personalities and memes, written some fifty years before it even existed.

For me, such social commentaries are where Lafferty is at his shining best. I also loved Interurban Queen, an alternate history in which local railroads become the dominant form of transport in the USA, which is told ingeniously from the perspective of someone who had to choose whether to invest in them or in petroleum-powered automobiles, and which has a terrific kicker of a final scene showing just how different life would have been. On My Block, a simple description of some of the - unusual - people who have taken up residence in the protagonist's neighbourhood, is a joyous celebration of the benefits that immigration brings to societies that can accept it. I also admired Thus we frustrate Charlemagne, which makes an obvious point about attempts to change history by time travel but in a very clever way, and Continued on Next Rock, a love story about an archaeologist and her (apparently) time-travelling admirer.

Alas, not all the stories have such strong ideas at their core, and when they don't, the manner of their telling just makes them forgettable whimsy. For me this applies to the majority of the stories in the second half of the book. Lafferty described his hobby as language and it kind of shows, with the style overcoming the substance. Selenium Ghosts of the Eighteen Seventies, for example, is quite a clever alternate history of television, but is told through an interminable series of whimsical episode reviews. Similarly, Eurema's Dam, which won a Hugo, is a very Mark Twain-y story of a crazed inventor that left me completely cold.

Still, when Lafferty is good, he is very good, which makes him worth seeking out. Just be aware that some of his stories are only likely to appeal to writers and not to ordinary folk.