"Once on Aranea" (1961/1972)

Jon Nelson
3 hours ago
5 min read

Lafferty finished the original draft of “Once on Aranea” in October 1961 and rewrote it in January 1965. It first appeared in his short story collection Strange Doings (1972). Originally a story that focused on personal horror, in the rewrite it became a piece of cosmic horror and one of my favorite Lafferty stories.

It begins with a survey team exploring the asteroids of the Cercyon Belt. They have an odd and funny procedure of leaving one man behind to test for latent threats. On Aranea, the Spider Asteroid, the crew discovers that the dominant emotion of the native dodecapods is an overwhelming "mother-love, lately reoriented by an intrusion and intensified many-fold." The intensifying intrusion? It’s them. The men adopt a new byword for the aliens—"Oh, those mother-loving spiders!"—before leaving the wiry, spider-like Scarble behind to conduct the solitary test with only his dog, Cyon, for company.

At first, Scarble thinks it will all be a picnic. He notes the Spiders' complex life cycle, where they capture their wild, bipedal young and cocoon them with a putrefying "scutter," another alien life form on Aranea, for food to fuel their metamorphosis. The idyllic experience ends when the Spiders give him drugged water. He awakens to a warm snow of gossamer and silk, finding himself completely bound and helpless. In the original version of the story, Lafferty alludes to Gulliver’s Travels (“He swore at them and muttered something about ‘Gulliver’ come to judgment”), but Lafferty wisely removed this when darkening the piece on revision. As Scarble struggles in the final version, he calls out, "Here, here! You're covering me too deep with that damned sand. Fun's fun, but that's enough."

Scarble’s horror gets amped up in one of the most memorably grotesque scenes in Lafferty, a scene right up there with the grinding up of an entire family in Not to Mention Camels (1976): the Spiders bring Scarble the cocooned and putrescent, nearly liquefied body of his dog, sealing the stenchy carcass against his face. He knows what is happening; the spiders believe he is an unfinished larva, and Cyon is the food for his transformation into their prophesied Emperor Spider. After days of torment from hunger and thirst, with the spiders' "Resurrection Song" rising around him, he shouts, "You think I'm going to eat Cyon and then turn into a spider. You're wrong, I tell you!"

But he is driven past madness, and he succumbs. He eats the remains of his dog and begins to undergo his transformation, growing eight new limbs which he uses to saw his way out of the cocoon. When rescued, he is deemed insane (“Cyon was a good dog, but only after he had become very bad”). He is institutionalized back on Earth, the stramge four growths on each side of his body hidden under his glowing garment. He begs his doctor not to remove them. "They saved my life. I couldn't have gotten out of my cocoon without them."

In the final scene, Scarble sits calmly in his doctor's office. He is surrounded by floating silkstuff and explaining that he is the Emperor of the Dodecapod Spiders of Aranea and that their invasion of Earth is imminent. Doctor Mosca dismisses this, but Scarble says, "The time is at hand. I give the word now!” Suddenly, spiders appear and bite the doctor, who cries out, "Great thumping thunder! I'm bitten badly!" The paralyzing narcotic takes hold. Doctor Mosca is covered in silk. He knows too late that Scarble told the truth.

“Once on Aranea” became much more powerful after the rewrite. The original had ended with Scarble breaking down and beginning to eat the putrefied mass of Cyon and to change. But because he had gone mad, it is unclear whether he is really changing, though we are told that “the Hallelujah Chorus of the Spider Song now came alive and rose in a vast symphony to the morning sky of Aranea.” Is the change just his madness? A comparison between the draft and the rewrite shows Lafferty, fully grown into his powers, trimming and adding, improving the prose, dialogue, and pacing.

For example, in the draft, Scarble’s opening monologue is longer and his dialogue is different, while the survey team’s discussion about the spiders’ emotions is presented as a lengthy, hesitant conversation. What Lafferty cut was pretty limp stuff. The draft also included several extended sections that are absent from the final version. There was a longer philosophical passage on the nature of courage that dilated on “pseudo-Squids of Okeanos Mikros”; the theme of laughter on Aranea was more diffuse; and there were additional stanzas of Scarble’s obscene song, which deflated the bio-horror.

Throughout the first half of the story, Lafferty’s final version smartly removes or shortens narrative asides, tightens dialogue exchanges, condenses internal monologues, and brings out what is so terrible about all that happens.

The most substantial change is the story’s conclusion. Instead of ending with Scarble breaking down and eating Cyon, the published version continues beyond this point by adding a final act that mirrors the structure of the first part of the story. This new section gives the reader Scarble’s rescue, his return to Earth, and his institutionalization. We meet new characters in the form of his doctors. We witness his physical transformation continuing with the growth of new limbs. What had been a story about a man going insane in order to survive becomes a story about a man being rewritten, and the pathogen of a global invasion.

A final point may be worth mentioning. Lafferty uses the word anastasis in the original version, but in the revised version he elevates it from a passing mention to one of the story’s central ideas, realizing its Catholic theological implications as a transformative resurrection. In other words, when the draft refers to “the Anastasis, the Resurrection Song,” it signals only Scarble’s personal change. In the published version, the theological parallel is completed: we see Scarble’s rebirth into a new, glorified state, at least from the perspective of the spiders of Aranea, and its entailment. Scarble undergoes a death, a descent in the cocoon, and emerges not just alive but as the messianic Emperor of the Dodecapod Spiders. While anastasis also picks out the harrowing of Hell, Scarble’s actions on Earth, where he brings about the metanoia of humanity through metamorphosis, form a darkly ironic take on Christ’s role after the Resurrection, the last lines of the story perhaps echoing Acts 17:30. He remakes mankind in his own new, alien image.