Memoir by R. A. Lafferty
Galaxy was the golden magazine of science
fiction. At its best, there were nuggets in at least half its issues.
No one else came close to that.
Let the hills leap like
little lambs at the memory!
“About a Secret
Crocodile” was a shot in a war (since lost) against a cabal that was forcing “trendiness,”
whose other name is “unoriginality,” on the world.
Oh rise again and fight
some more, dead people!
Galaxy died several times from embracing this trendiness or
unoriginality. The “magazine-that-is-different”
became quite like all the other “magazines-that-are-different.” And it died because it spent all its
retrospection on things past.
The newest Galaxy editor, Hank Stine, is an experienced
resurrectionist. He brought a dead and
rotting Louisiana alligator back to life by laying his reanimating hands on it
and breathing into its nostrils. Later
he brought back to life a dead rabbit, a dead goat, and a little dead boy.
(He has not told these
things himself. Others have told them of
him.)
Now he will, probably
raise the magazine from its second or third death. You’ve got to have faith!
(If he isn’t still at
the helm when this appears, that just means that good guys move around a lot.)
Never trust a retrospectionist who isn’t two-faced. A little of that retrospection for the
future, please!
Galaxy, esto perpetua: Thou
art forever! (I hope.)
But, for all that, the
way-it-used-to-be was quite extraordinary.
The editors (Frederik Pohl, Martin H. Greenberg, and
Joseph D. Olander) introduce Lafferty’s memoir piece, which is followed
immediately by his collected short story ‘About a Secret Crocodile’, this way:
Raymond
[sic] Aloysius Lafferty began writing science
fiction when he was well past forty, producing a large body of work that can
only be described as wonderful, wild, and often bewildering. His is an original voice, and his contributions
to sf are only now becoming apparent.
Lafferty also meant a great deal to Galaxy in the 1960s, with something like 20 stories, including such major
works as “Sodom and Gomorrah, Texas” (December 1962), the fabulous “Slow
Tuesday Night” (April 1965), “Thus We Frustrate Charlemagne” (February 1967),
and “Primary Education of the Camiroi” (December 1966) and its “sequel” “Polity
and Custom of the Camiroi” (June 1967).
“About a Secret Crocodile” is one of
his best and most famous stories, one that rewards rereading time and time
again. Lafferty’s agent, Virginia Kidd,
tells us that whent eh story appeared in Galaxy, she received an indignant call from the
editors of Playboy magazine wanting
to know why they hadn’t seen it first.
Virginia says, “Frankly, it had never occurred to me that it was
anything but a Galaxy story, so that is where I sent it.”
[I for one can vouch that this particular story has
hit me with new and profound depths of both artistry and significance every
time I’ve read it over the years. It is
of keen relevance to our current meta-culture of opinion-forming social
networks such as Facebook, Twitter, Tumblr, Google +, Buzz Feed, and so on. Lafferty did oddly fit the usual projected
role of an SF writer being a ‘prophet’, but he did so, as Neil Gaiman has
recently remarked, in an uncanny social, cultural, psychological, and
philosophical way rather than in a technological way. Then again, his social ‘predictions’ are all
about current information technology. So
really, he fit that aspect of the role too.]
