Wherefore by their Fruits, Episode 01 The Rustics
Wherefore by their Fruits, Episode 01 The Rustics, is now posted.
In which Piter Princox, scalawag, but acting as a proctor of the Perfection of Man, seeking scofflaws, has departed the warrens for rustic zones. He is without his snaphance but toting his ferule. It is reveille, and the terminator sweeps from deiseil to widdershins. There are older words for these things, mostly forgotten.
Something more weighty has been forgotten as well.
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A word of background and warning:
Today we begin a new weekly work. This is a novella of twenty episodes, and each episode will be a thousand words or less, roughly three pages. My warning is that each episode will be more brief than what long-time readers of this feature may have come to expect.
The background explaination is not brief. This story was commissioned to be written, but not published, by a patron. He paid handsomely for it, but he did not publish it. It is published here for the first time.
My patron asked me to read ‘Ishmael into the Barrens’ a novella by the wild, lunatic genius science fiction author R.A. Lafferty. This story first appeared in an anthology called FOUR FUTURES Edited by Robert Silverberg, which had an interesting conceit: four top authors would be given a speculative theme on the topic of a world where the issue of Malthusian overpopulation catastrophe had been avoided by strict population control.
Isaac Asimov asked each author to envision the society facing issues we do not face, such as how to maintain the population plateau, that is, to balance out the death number with the birth licenses, or what to do about sex when sex was no longer tied to reproduction. Asimov, in an introduction to the anthology, outlined the speculative issue, and each writer penned a tale based thereon.
The other three authors, I will not embarrass by repeating their names, ranged from mediocre to lousy, but were as best as might be expected, considering the absurdity of the premise.
Only Laffery had the wisdom and the stones to take the bit in his teeth and really run with the absurd premise, to rush off the cliffside of the population plateau, up and away from the realm of the expected into the cloudy blue wilderness of imagination.
He, as a faithful Catholic, of course knew the idea of contraception and abortion were gravely immoral, and the reducing the ecstasy of the honeymoon bower to an unchaste idle pastime is a blasphemy. But as a brilliant writer, he never utters a word of criticism directly, he merely paints in extravagant brush strokes, in a language of giddy playfulness, the grinding and inhuman horror of the dystopia poor Asimov did not realize he was describing.
The first line is: “It was early in the morning, which was illegal.”
Brilliant.
Of course ‘Ishmael in the Barrens’ by R.A. Lafferty is a masterwork which I recommend with anyone whose eyes are strong enough to read such fiery words as his. Like the shivering pageboy in the old song about good King Wenceslas, the ‘prentice merely follows in the footsteps the master trods.
My patron posed me a fascinating challenge. He asked me to write a story as if I were the fifth writer of the four, to read the the thought experiment by Asimov, and to pen a tale on this theme.
What follows is my answer to this challenge.
Enjoy.
About John C Wright
John C. Wright is a practicing philosopher, a retired attorney, newspaperman, and newspaper editor, and a published author of science fiction. Once a Houyhnhnm, he was expelled from the august ranks of purely rational beings when he fell in love; but retains an honorary title.
