"Day of the Glacier" (1958/1960)

But something, almost from the beginning, has been seeping in to diminish the good-humor of the stories of our Earth. I do not know whether the tales of the friendly nine hundred and ninety-nine monstrous and alien species are subject to the same spoiling as are the tales of our own world. Everything in the world, in every world, is either good-humored or bad-humored. So all the bad-humored things were once locked up in an iron cavern and the iron doors made firm with bolts and locks. But some of the bad-humored things seep out and ooze out under the iron doors, and they do their damage to us. What if we are the only species whose good-humor is being rusted and rotted away? What if, on the Day of Reunion, the other nine hundred and ninety-nine species will reject us because of our insufficient or tainted humor— "Tell it Funny, Og" (1980)

On Sunday, April 1, 1962, a sudden and catastrophic global ice age begins. It gets triggered when a delicate atmospheric balance is upset by the destruction of thirty-three United States and Canadian ICBM launching bases. With the global population caught off guard and political factions playing out secret subversions and assassinations, Doctor Ergodic Eimer is one of the people who is prepared. He could not have known about the military event, but he was aware of the impending glaciation, so Eimer and his colleagues were able to escape in chartered planes to the equatorial Padiwire Valley. Behind them, snowfall buries the Eastern Seaboard, Europe, Asia, and the southern continents. It freezes millions to death and destroys modern civilization. We read that

"Radio and TV news flashes tried to give a warning and fragmentary details, but on every channel and frequency the same cool voice would always cut in: ‘This is an April Fools Day simulated news broadcast. Do not be alarmed. This program is fictional.’"

Upon landing in the Padiwire Valley, Eimer’s group discovers that Nauchnii-Komandir Andreyev and his rival military forces have already arrived. Andreyev is a martinet, and he takes Eimer’s group into custody. He anoints himself supreme commander of the surviving world. It helps that the Andreyev group outnumbers Eimer's team by 300 to 50. The American scientists will be enslaved, the way Neanderthals enslaved the Grimaldi, according to Andreyev. He outlines his ideological vision of the new world:

"We are the new Neanderthalan and you are the new Grimaldi. We had thought to use a few jungle Indian remnants for that, but now we will use you . . . . You are dogs. Learn that. We have studied the Eskimo, and one rule they have: the dogs do not sleep in the house or the tent . . . You are the dogs and you will sleep in the snow and learn your place."

The goal will be to repopulate the earth. Eimer and his colleagues stay unfazed and use their scientific knowledge to prepare for the harsh temperatures.

Then, abruptly, the power dynamics shift. Radio broadcasts reveal that the glaciation is dropping snow on Moscow at twice the rate it is falling on North America. Andreyev is told to surrender to Eimer because they believe the glaciation is the result of a weather weapon, a payback for the missile strikes. The geopolitical posturing devolves rapidly into panic:

"Government being completely redesigned on more amenable lines. Request patience and understanding. Urgent snow be stopped . . . Abject surrender. Request for the love of God you stop snow . . . Milocerd!"

And that is where the story ends, with abject surrender from a state that has already ceased to exist, the Russians incapable of seeing that an act of nature is not an American weather weapon.

“Day of the Glacier” was Lafferty’s first published science fiction story.

How appropriate that it introduces so many ideas that will become permanent parts of Lafferty’s project: apocalypse, conspiracy, bureaucratic satire, and even Neanderthals. I have mentioned Bernard Baruch on the blog several times, but he is also present here in a way. He coined the term "Cold War" on April 16, 1947. At the unveiling of a portrait in the South Carolina House of Representatives, Baruch said, “Let us not be deceived: we are today in the midst of a cold war." Lafferty’s “Day of the Glacier” obviously takes that term and literalizes the indirect conflict in Cold War policy by turning it into a black comedy about sudden climate change and a new ice age. Throughout, there are many small Easter Eggs about ice ages, a topic that fascinated Lafferty.

At the same time, I would argue that "Day of the Glacier" is not just a Cold War allegory that happens to involve an ice age, nor an ecological parable that just happens to involve the Cold War. We also have Lafferty the moralist here in this first science fiction story because it is a comedy about pride, more specifically about pretension that human political arrangements matter against the scale of Creation. In this first science fiction story in print by Lafferty, we have something that is not quite satire and not quite parody, but something Lafferty would refine over the next decade: people being helplessly, irrepressibly alive inside the conditions of catastrophe. Violet's courtship of Gilluly ("Which would you rather have, me or the sadist group?") is funny, but it is also the story’s argument. Against Andreyev's ideology, Violet is the Lafferty voice speaking up for the ordinary: cut wood, pair off, survive the night. Her reaction to the end of a world is telling:

"I had a date tonight for the opening of Pink Snow. Now I don't believe there will be any opening, and my boyfriend has probably frozen to death."

This deprioritization of death’s seriousness is, of course, one of Lafferty’s signatures, as is Eimer’s encapsulation of his philosophy:

"Yes," said Doctor Eimer, "the world is dying and that is serious. But we will save ourselves, and part of the luggage we take with us is a little good humor. If we are too serious, we will die also. The serious always die first."

But why? A deadening seriousness is part of the delusion that one can finally master what is happening. It betrays a lack of faith in definalization. One antidote, as Lafferty keeps saying throughout his work, is good-natured humor. He never gives this kind of humor a name, and there are certainly varieties of humor that he detests. But there is a name for the deep, sane humor he praises most, and he would have known it: eutrapelia. It was one of Aristotle’s virtues, and it plays an important role in Aquinas’s thought.

In the Summa (II-II, q. 168, a. 2), Aquinas argues that playfulness is a virtue. He makes the argument from the nature of human finitude: the soul, like the body, has a fixed capacity for work, and when it is pushed beyond that capacity by sustained rational effort, it grows weary. Play is rest for the soul, just as sleep is rest for the body. Just as important, Aquinas treats the lack of mirth as a vice. The implication is that humor and lightness belong to the rational ordering of human life. The man who is too serious has disordered his soul no less surely than the man who is never serious.

Eutrapelia has been on my mind because of Aurelia, and this time, as I was going through “Day of the Glacier,” Eimer struck me as one of Lafferty’s many portraits of it. It just so happens that he was the first to reach print. His humor is equipment for living, as we now say. He is cheerful without being frivolous. He jokes while remaining right about the science. His light humor saves his team. He seems right that, in his world, “The serious always die first,” and that is practically a vernacular restatement of Thomas’s point that the mind breaks without relaxation. Set against him is Andreyev, whose seriousness is a vice, here the rigidity of the ideologue, a man so committed to mastery that, when his contingent world ends, he has no Prime.

Day of the Glacier Notes.pdf

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