Who Goes There?

From about 1960 to the mid-’80s, R. A. Lafferty stood out as one of the true mavericks of the field, having a style that would be nigh-impossible to emulate. He has a reputation as something of a writer’s writer, not helped by many vocal Lafferty fans being writers themselves. It’s not that Lafferty was a poet (although he did have a capacity for poetry, unlike most SFF writers) or a mean wordsmith, but that nobody else wrote quite like him at the time. He got lumped in with the New Wavers, even appearing in Dangerous Visions, which in hindsight was a bit odd, given a) he was a good generation older than the New Wavers, and b) he was an outspoken conservative in what was considered a generally left-leaning movement. I don’t consider myself a Lafferty fan, because I tend to find his quirkiness and old-school Catholicism a bit stifling. It came as a bit of a shock to me, then, that I quite liked today’s story, which is an early and somewhat obscure Lafferty tale. “The Transcendent Tigers” predates the New Wave by a couple years, but it’s one of those stories that anticipates the movement. It’s also a darkly funny and pessimistic story, even for Lafferty.

Placing Coordinates

First published in the February 1964 issue of Worlds of Tomorrow, which is on Internet Archive. It was reprinted in Young Demons (ed. Roger Elwood and Vic Ghidalia) and the Lafferty collections Strange Doings and The Man with the Speckled Eyes. It also appeared on Sci Fiction, which you can read free of charge with the power of the Wayback machine. Surprised this one hasn’t been reprinted more often.

Enhancing Image

Carnadine is a little girl who gets four presents for her birthday: a white rubber ball that’s hollow inside, a green plastic frog, a red cap, and a wire puzzle. “She immediately tore the plastic frog apart, considering it a child’s toy. So much for that.” As for the other gifts, however, she makes good use of them—indeed better use than her parents had expected. When she wears the red cap she can turn the rubber ball inside out without tearing it and is able to solve the wire puzzle—the problem being that both of these things should be physically impossible. While most of the gifts are from her parents and friends of the family, nobody knows who got Carnadine the red cap, which should tell you immediately that something malicious is brewing. Carnadine is only nominally the protagonist of the story: for one she’s a sociopath (as is typical of young children), but also much of the story doesn’t focus on her. Lafferty breaks a few rules when it comes to writing short stories, just on a regular basis, but here he does it especially effectively. The third-person narrator strays from Carnadine’s story to give us a kind of bird’s-eye view of strange things happening around the world, including speculation on a new “Power” that could make or break humanity. Lafferty gives this otherwise absurd narrative a sense of genuine speculation by interspersing Carnadine’s story with passages from fictional academic journals and news sources, almost like what John Brunner would do in Stand on Zanzibar, only on a micro scale. We do eventually get an explanation for the red cap, but by then it’ll be too late—for the characters.

Meanwhile, Carnadine has taken to “sharing the wealth” a bit and has decided to found a club, the Bengal Tigers, a club so exclusive that at first she’s the only member. “It had only one full member, herself, and three contingent or defective members, her little brother Eustace, Fatty Frost, and Peewee Horn. Children all three of them, the oldest not within three months of her age.” Nobody knows about the Bengal Tigers, but pretty soon people are gonna feel the effects of the kids sharing their red cap. This strange red cap apparently grants one ESP, along with heightened intelligence, which in the case of Carnadine turns her from someone who was already a brat into a super-brat. Even in 1964 “The Transcendent Tigers” would’ve been another in a long line of stories about kids with ESP, although typically these kids would discover a sense of heroism along with their psychic powers. Carnadine does not. On paper this is a very dark story, but it’s lightened by Lafferty’s sense of humor and especially how quippy the narrator is. Humor usually benefits from brevity, so it helps that Lafferty packs a fair amount into a short space it’s still that: a short space. Scenes go by quickly, we jump back and forth between Carnadine and the aforementioned bird’s-eye view, and while in the past I’ve found Lafferty’s prose a bit too labyrinthine that’s not an issue here, his style here being much punchier and to the point than what I would say is the norm for him. Despite “The Transcendent Tigers” only being ten pages long I chuckled several times during it, which I have to admit is unusual in my experiences with Lafferty; but also that goes to show its effectiveness as a comedy, albeit a pretty morbid one. By the end you’ll wish Carnadine would fall off a cliff.

This is also an example of liking a work of art while at the same time disagreeing with the artist’s politics as expressed in their art, something I wish more people were capable of doing! I said before that Lafferty was an old-fashioned Catholic, even for the time, and while Christianity never comes up in the story I do think Lafferty is making an argument that falls in line with his conservatism. I have a bit of a hypothesis about what separates right-wing Christianity from left-wing Christianity, and it has to do with who can be saved: right-wing Christians believe that maybe individuals can see the gates of Heaven, but not groups, whereas left-wing Christians believe humanity as a cluster of groups deserves to be saved. It basically has to do with optimism vs. pessimism, and I do think Lafferty was a pessimist—only that his sense of humor tended to soften what I think was a pretty dim view of humanity. Throughout “The Transcendent Tigers” there’s speculation from intellectuals about an as-yet-undiscovered power which could blow even nuclear power out of the water, sheerly from its capacity to allow man to change his very environment without the use of industry. A single man could literally move mountains with this hypothetical power, and these intellectuals wonder if humanity would be ready for such a thing, should it come along. Lafferty argues we’re not, and that if we were to encounter such a power we either wouldn’t know what to do with it or use it for bad ends as soon as possible. The Bengal Tigers have such a power, and it doesn’t take them long to start using it for very bad ends.

There Be Spoilers Here

On a planet “very far out,” a race of energy beings (Is it just me or was this beyond-matter kind of alien race really popular around the time of the original Star Trek series?) discusses having found a valid candidate on Earth for a way to manifest immense power in the form of a red cap. One of the aliens says he managed to find only one candidate on the whole planet, one who had perfect assurance, “one impervious to doubt of any kind and totally impervious to self-doubt.” That person was Carnadine. As the other alien in the conversation point out, however, the candidate didn’t need only perfect assurance, but other qualities, although we’re not really told what those other qualities are. Carnadine is perfectly self-assured because there’s nothing more egotistical than a child, but she also totally lacks empathy and self-restraint, which are important qualities if one wants to be a functional human being in our society! Or at least those should be important qualities; turns out the most financially success tend to lack empathy at the very least. So the test with the red cap looks to be a loss on Earth, but as one of the aliens points out, worst case scenario humanity destroys itself and the virus of the red cap will have quarantined itself.

And it does.

In the course of ten pages we go from a young girl getting a strange gift to her literally destroying cities with said gift. The body count is immeasurable. To say a lot of people get killed would be an understatement. Carnadine and the other members of the “club” use a map of the US to stick needles on cities, like voodoo on a mass scale, New Orleans, Baltimore, San Antonio (“There were some of us who liked that place and wished that it could have been spared.”), and so on down the line. The situation escalates so much in such a short space that it becomes funny in a fucked-up way, having just the right cadence for a dark joke. Had Lafferty written this as a serious story (although I do think he’s trying to make a serious point with it, which is not the same thing) it would surely be one of the bleakest SF short stories of the ’60s. But thankfully it’s not serious.

A Step Farther Out

Sorry for another short review (by my standards), but then this is a concise story, and a very nicely constructed one at that. Lafferty has surprised me a couple times and this is one of them. When to authors I’m not personally fond of I’m always (maybe not “always,” I do have limits, but you know what I mean) up for giving them another chance. I mean for fuck’s sake I’ve read more than one Piers Anthony novel and I’m looking to read another one soon. Lafferty is a much better writer than Anthony, even if he can be too much for me, so we’ll be seeing him here again eventually—so in like, a year, maybe two years depending.

See you next time.