"Condition Quick: A Dialog for Two Dia-Persons" (1982)

A short post today on the unpublished “Condition Quick: A Dia-log Between Two Dia-Persons.” It's a squib, what we now call flash fiction. It is one of the many pieces where Lafferty vents his frustration with the cultural and literary shifts of the 1970s and 1980s, but here the satire is compressed into two pages. We find Lafferty's ongoing exasperation with America's distorted media ecology and his sense of how rotten the state of science fiction is. The punning title is our lived reality: condition quickly, ye lords of TikTok.

The piece also satirizes the informational overload Alvin Toffler made famous in Future Shock (1970); the acceleration of media analyzed by Marshall McLuhan; the cultural nightmare of content explosions that are deserts of quality; and the ways media systems stupefy through the violence of speed and volume.

SS and VW are dia-persons. They have a task. They need to document the creative torrent flowing from their network, "CONDITION QUICK." This media system gives them "instant reception of all the millions of SFish thoughts" from the world's most “creative” minds. VW describes the overwhelming nature of this influx by comparing it to trying to capture the entire ocean, quoting a hypothetical observer who says, “‘I’ve got to get it all down right now . . . The way it’s carrying on, it sure isn’t going to last very long.’” VW notes both of the dia-persons are tuned into "roughly nine million creative minds" and have witnessed "five genuine Golden Ages in the last fifteen minutes," leaving him to wonder, "How would we go about getting it down?"

SS has an idea. They ought to begin with one of the many "magic, evocative, mind-opening words," words like "Al-Ka-Zam, Ma-Ga-Zine, Mummy-Whammy, Zauberei-Stoff, Galli-Mauferie, Razz-Ma-Tazz." VW latches onto "Mega-Zine," but SS corrects him, clarifying the word is "Maga-Zine, the place where you store explosives." One needs an advertising gimmick. "All CONDITION QUICK data are explosive so let’s get them down in a magazine." To capture the content (it’s all content, content, content in “Condition Quick”), SS argues that speed is the only thing that matters: "I say that the answer to the explosive CONDITION QUICK depends on how fast we write it down," SS insists.

This focus on media speed and consumption leads to a harebrained brainstorming session on how media mediates, with Lafferty mocking the mania for novelty. SS says they could "write [CONTENT] on almost anything, on elephants, or on alligators (not everyone has an elephant), or on the sides of cross-country balloons." Then there is the sky itself. VW says they "could write it on sticks of dynamite since we'll probably have them in the magazine already," adding they "use a cold-etcher rather than a hot-etcher." He also proposes writing on "the insides of duck eggs or petrel eggs or snake eggs," prompting SS to worry about their potential audience, which he dubs "a funny readership: For-the-Birds, For-the-Snakes, and a Little-Bit-Immature?" In other words, the “science fiction person” who has all four hooves in the trough of heroic tedium.

Then VW has an idea. "Hey, maybe we could write it down on paper." SS recognizes it as a radical and archaic choice. "Paper? As in ‘He couldn't punch his way out of a paper sack'?" he asks. "Well, I've heard that the lower classes still use paper for some things. It would be different anyhow." Now they can feel special and different. VW knows just what to call their magazine: CONDITION QUICK, The Dare-To-Be-Different Magazine For Explosive People.

This is good sour fun, a late addition to Lafferty’s 1970s reflections on media. It must have been cathartic. He even shivs John Maynard Keynes. SS says that Keynes’s answer to an addition problem is how fast you add it up, an allusion to Keynes's focus on aggregate demand and government-managed spending rather than the old quantity-theory fixation on totals, such as money supply and velocity. No surprise here. One would expect Lafferty to view Keynesianism as leading to long-term inflation and government bloat, and the inefficiency and debt that follow.

Condition Quick Notes.pdf

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