Each story has an introduction by another writer. Lafferty's tales don't really need introductions, but it's a nice gesture. Neil Gaiman wrote the introduction for the whole collection, and two stories besides. One of them is called "Ride a Tin Can", which I did read here in fact for the first time. It's got Lafferty's wild humor, but also kind of hurts. Two folklorists are sent to an alien planet in order to find out more about the goblinlike natives. One of them goes native. But the real problem is the agenda of the sponsors of their trip.
These are my notes on the very sticky business. They are not in the form of a protest, which would be useless. Holly is gone, and the Shelni will all be gone in the next day or two, if indeed there are any of them left now. This is for the record only.
And another quote from the man, from the introduction to another of his stories:
Every expression in art or pseudo-art is a crutch that a crippled person makes and donates to the healthy world for its use (the healthy world having only the vaguest idea that it even needs crutches).
2 comments:
It appears R.A. Lafferty became popular in the years after I read one of his earliest books, The Reefs of Earth, and somehow never went back for another look. The story was about a family of an alien race, the Pucas, who look enough like humans to be known locally as goblins. Then the kids start murdering people (not without reason). It may actually have been good but at the time (1968) I was more interested in high fantasy and traditional sci-fi.
I hadn't yet developed my taste for absurdist literature and from the reviews I read of Nine Hundred Grandmothers I noticed two things - the first is that the book you have is a rare find and the second was a fascinating quote from the story 'Polity and Custom of the Camiroi' that goes like this:
"We miss a lot. The enjoyment of poverty is generally denied to us. We have a certain hunger for incompetence, which is why some Earth things find a welcome here: bad Earth music, bad Earth painting and sculpture and drama for instance. The good we must produce ourselves. The bad we are incapable of, and must import. Some of us believe that we need it in our diet."
I must have mentioned Iain M. Banks to you in relation to his novels about the Culture, a largely humanoid society comprising billions of people and associated beings. The books are entertaining to say the least but my all-time favorite characters are the super brilliant Minds who operate the Culture's systems. These are real AIs who build themselves and choose their own names like: "I Blame Your Mother", "I Blame My Mother", "Use Psychology", "Jaundiced Outlook", "It's Character Forming", "Unacceptable Behaviour", "Serious Callers Only", and "Meat Fucker". The Minds are fully sentient, they have their individual personalities, emotions, and motivations; in other words human-like characteristics coupled with vast intelligence.
Unfortunately, Banks died well before his natural time in 2012 and I've read little new sci-fi since. He wrote Space Opera of a particular kind - tongue in cheek and out to prove a beneficent galactic society can manage some remarkable adventures. Earth humans, btw, were not included. The ones I'd recommend if you feel like checking one or two out one day: The Player of Games, Consider Phlebas, and Look to Windward.
I've read The Reefs of Earth and enjoyed it. The Puca children killing people was, among other things, a mark of their exuberance and Lafferty's. I'll have to go back and read it again, though. I do seem to like a touch of perverse oddity in my sci-fi.
Nine Hundred Grandmothers--which, again, I'm pretty sure I have somewhere but I could spend days looking for it--is rare now but came out in a pretty cheap paperback copy in the 70s. For a while after that if you could find a used copy it could be had pretty cheap.
"The bad we are incapable of, and must import. Some of us believe that we need it in our diet." Could be cultural posturing, or it could be the real thing. Lafferty wrote a novel about Sir Thomas More, and he knew that Utopia was actually a satire. So the Camiroi have a Utopian society in outer space, but it's not necessarily someplace you'd want to live.
It sounds like I'd like Banks as well. The idea of AIs that give themselves names like "I Blame Your Mother" tickles me. I don't know if real-life AI will ever have those kinds of personality quirks, but it sounds fun to write about.
Any particular reason Earth humans were excluded, though? Does the Culture just thing they/we are a bad risk?
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