No Stone Unthrown and Son of No Stone Unthrown (1977)
“There’s only one thing in the world more pompous than a SF writer who takes himself too seriously.” “Whazzat?” “A SF writer who takes herself too seriously.” —Letter to Sheryl Smith, January 2, 1976
I have heard another Lafferty reader express some unease at the way Lafferty sometimes spoke about other science fiction writers. He certainly was no flatterer. We see this side of him in No Stone Unthrown, a series of short satirical squibs aimed at writers, editors, and reviewers. It is a terrific title, with its belligerent twist on “no stone unturned.” There is also material to make some readers squirm, including jokes that poke at homosexuals and Jews.
The first thrown stone alludes to Sheryl Smith. Lafferty’s letters to her in 1976 and 1977 describe the writing, revisions, and publication delays, along with his hope that the targets would take enough offense to answer back.
On June 22, 1976, he wrote to Smith about a revised selection for Riverside Quarterly. He had added verses on Barry Malzberg, L. Sprague de Camp, and Thomas Monteleone, revised the piece on Arthur C. Clarke, and restored a stanza on Ursula K. Le Guin and Robert Heinlein with one word changed. He had pulled weaker stanzas and some attacks on reviewers and editors, lest readers take him for a “sore-head.” “Those guys did put some big bumps on my head,” he wrote, “but they’re not so sore as they were.” This restraint had its limits. He wanted the poems available for the Kansas City convention: “If the Riverside Quarterly isn’t out with them by K.C. convention time, then how am I going to get all those people mad at me?”
The delays gave him further occasions to joke about his intentions. In February 1977, he reassured Smith that the poems “shouldn’t get me killed.” His targets might reply in doggerel in the same magazine, helping it regain acceptance. In June, he asked, “When will people finally see the real me, the valid side of me?” He followed this with another question: “How much longer can I live this nice-guy deception?”
By September 9, 1977, he was disappointed. The delay had blunted the verses, and he had come to think better of several targets. He still wanted them published “just for orneriness.” They finally appeared in the December 1977 issue of Riverside Quarterly and were later collected in Strange Skies (1988).
The only writer I have found commenting on the verses is Robert Bloch, whom Lafferty enjoyed. Bloch suggested that Lafferty might be canonized or caponized.
What follows are the poems, with notes on each.
“Smitty” = Sheryl Smith, poetry editor of Riverside Quarterly.
“The woman tempted me” = Adam blaming Eve after the Fall, Genesis 3:12.
“When comes the time to rue it” = anticipated retaliation from the victims; possibly a mock reckoning at Judgment.
“Warped and witty” = the qualities Lafferty himself displays.
“Code name” = an ordinary nickname treated as secret identification; sets up the parade of transparent initials.
Sturgeon = Theodore Sturgeon. Trout = Kilgore Trout, Kurt Vonnegut’s fictional science-fiction writer/plays on Sturgeon’s.
Farmer published Venus on the Half-Shell (1975) as Kilgore Trout.
“Ditchy water” = pornography.
“What kind of fish he” = unfinished “what kind of fish he is”; also sounds like fishy.
“Slippery dick” is my best guess:
“Counting dog heads” = The Fifth Head of Cerberus (1972).
“Dog heads” / “runs with” = play on Wolfe: wolf running with a pack.
“Ran him out of Texas” = Wolfe’s real Texas connections: Texas A&M and the University of Houston.
“Jive” = glib talk or nonsense; also music. “Juke” = jukebox or noisy entertainment. “Jive or juke bird” = noisy, showy literary performer. Jew pun.
“New Jersey” = Malzberg’s residence.
The original Riverside Quarterly printing adds: “Moral: he’s not all that big; he’s mostly feathers.”
“Ancient worlds and wonders” = de Camp’s historical fiction, fantasy, and antiquarian interests
“Colonel Saunders” = Colonel Harland Sanders, Kentucky Fried Chicken.
“Vandyke” = moustache and pointed beard; named after Anthony van Dyck.
“Adult juvenilers” = writers or readers of juvenile fiction; adult pretensions; Le Guin’s Earthsea books and Heinlein’s juveniles.
“While-a-time’s ... whilers” = people whiling away time. “Uptightly” = solemn, inhibited, or excessively self-conscious.
“More mannish-writing Heinlein” / “less mannish-writing Ursula” = reciprocal insult: Le Guin supposedly more masculine than Heinlein.
“Two-O-O-One” = 2001: A Space Odyssey, developed with Stanley Kubrick.
“Echo bouncer” = radar; Clarke served as an RAF radar instructor. “Heart” = its inner workings.
“Dinkum-chart” = Clarke’s “Chart of the Future” in Profiles of the Future (1962). Dinkum = genuine or authentic.
“The Devil whoops” / “It’s clever, but is it Art?” = Rudyard Kipling’s “The Conundrum of the Workshops.” “Art” = artistic achievement and Arthur.
Utley’s nude centerfold in Nickelodeon 1 (1975), edited by Tom Reamy and Ken Keller.
“Hung” = penis size. “Texas elephant” = extravagant boast, deflated into “mouse”; reversal of everything being bigger in Texas.
“Neos” = newcomers in fandom or the profession. “Pride of neos” = supposed champion.
“Ninth preliminee event” = boxing announcement; low on the bill, far from the main attraction.
“Preliminee” = preliminary. “Elefent” = elephant. “A propowse” = apropos
Alexander = Alexander the Great, weeping because no worlds remained to conquer.
Atropos = the Fate who cuts life’s thread. Refusing her the cut = mock immortality.
“Thirty-nine forever” = Jack Benny’s permanent comic age; immortality reduced to vanity or arrested maturity. Ellison turned thirty-nine in 1973.
Mike and Ike = Rube Goldberg’s comic-strip pair, Mike and Ike: They Look Alike.
I assume P.D.D. is P.K.D.
“C.” = Chip, his nickname.
“Sev’nty-nine and eight-C pages” = 879 pages, length of the 1975 Bantam Dhalgren. Roman C = 100.
“Sweet sucker of divergent blossoms” = oral-sex innuendo
“Magnetic less” = less charismatic. “Lower level” / “fame so high” = literary rank.
First novel, Seeds of Change (1975).
“Tinny drum” = noisy, thin; beating one’s own drum = self-promotion.
“Bang and boff” = strike; also have sex.
“andy offutt” = Andrew Jefferson Offutt, SF and fantasy writer who was also a pornographer; John Cleve among his pseudonyms
“Aim high!” = mock encouragement
“come / To fill the shoes” = sexual pun
“Noble nose and noble profile” = mock praise of Bova’s appearance; Italian but looks Jewish
“Glim” = see.
“Profile/off-ile” and “gimmick/patronymic” = forced rhymes.
Off-ile/Offal = Kosher joke.
“Ben’s part of his patronymic” = Hebrew ben, “son”
“Cribs” = copies or borrows. “Cobbles” = assembles from available pieces. “Invents” = creates. Hacky.
Gott Selbst = German, God Himself. Joke alluding to Asimov's The Gods Themselves (1972).
Andy Gump = chinless, self-important protagonist of Sidney Smith’s The Gumps, begun in 1917; ambitions exceeding judgment.
“Fishy” = dubious. “Swishy” = effeminate, carrying the period’s anti-gay insult. “Nothing-there” = alleged lack of substance.
“Deprav-ed” = depraved given an extra syllable to rhyme with “David.” Maybe at the sexual experimentation of The Man Who Folded Himself (1973).
“But girls say” = possibly a jab at Gerrold’s comic public persona. His 1969 “The Awful Offal” presented him as handsome, virile, and pursued by women at convention
“Danegeld” = tribute paid to Danish or Viking forces. Anderson’s Danish ancestry turns his repeated awards into tribute paid to a formidable Dane. Like RAL, a conservative. Kipling’s “Dane-geld.”
Award background = Hugos for “The Queen of Air and Darkness” (1972) and “Goat Song” (1973). Lafferty won for “Eurema’s Dam” in another category in 1973.
“We’ll never catch the Danes” = mock envy of a successful rival.
“Naturally curly hair” = possibly Frieda’s refrain in Charles M. Schulz’s Peanuts.
