31 Misc Laff: Oklahoma Librarian
Technology is a queer thing. It brings you gifts with one hand, and stabs you in the back with the other. —C. P. Snow, The Two Cultures
These were sometimes criticized, but mostly by persons of standards derived from an earlier age, from the pre-postliterate age. — Serpent’s Egg
Lafferty sent this little piece off on February 2, 1975, for the “Oklahoma Authors” series in Oklahoma Librarian. It appeared eight months later in the October issue, alongside a great Lafferty photograph and a bibliography. Lafferty dutifully begins with a brief account of his life and work, then turns to a question that really interests him: could science fiction help repair the division between scientific and literary culture?
The essay takes up C. P. Snow’s account of the “two cultures.” In his famous 1959 lecture, Snow described the estrangement of scientists and literary intellectuals, arguing that each was largely ignorant of the other’s work. Lafferty thinks the category arts can help bring them together, with science fiction the likeliest to succeed. His evidence is the people he meets through science fiction: readers and writers who move easily among science, languages, literature, and fantasy. He says, “They whip it in their own lives, and they believe that it can be whipped generally.”
What I like most is how unapologetic Lafferty is, how willing to spike the librarians’ punch. Whip the gap between the two cultures. He unabashedly calls himself a “category writer,” then subtly challenges the designation by trashing the kind of literary judgment that keeps writers in their marketing categories. He seems to want readers who almost certainly think very little of science fiction and fantasy to notice an intellectual life already flourishing around books they overlook. The librarians have “keys and locks.” They can let more readers through.
Written science fiction, however, lost its central place within the genre. Film, television, and games came to shape the public’s understanding of it. People could get their science fiction without reading it, a condition Lafferty himself called post-literate. Today Michael Swanwick posted something that made me think of all this: “Amazon Prime offers the January-February issue of Asimov’s for $18.00 plus $4.99 shipping. Or issue 3 for $24.99 with free shipping. Kinda depressing, really.” Indeed.
