"Panic Flight" (1958)

"Panic Flight" is an early, unpublished Lafferty story that satirizes science fiction before Lafferty cast his lot in with it. The only comments on the story speculate that it failed to sell because the market was unwilling to be twitted by an unknown upstart. More likely, the story did not sell because it is oddly unbalanced and not very good. It wants to do too much with too little. On the one hand, there is the lampooning of science fiction language. This sits at the front of the story and is what most readers will remember. On the other hand, there is what seems to be Lafferty’s real point: to say something more serious about utopianism, mortality, and clichés. The whole thing centers on clichés. And clichés are a problem not merely because they are tired, but because of how they convey what is unbearably dead about the past as it persists in the present.

One should probably distinguish between an aesthetic and a moral gag reflex. The aesthetic offense is what the story conveys most obviously: science fiction language can be dumb because it sometimes reupholsters the mundane. Not always, but often. There is also a moral reaction to cliché, which responds to something genuinely sinister about the way it distances one from the ground of meaning. Of course, the two are bound up with each other, but there remains a difference between being annoyed by a hackneyed formulation and being disturbed by the way a thought-form, or a kind of language virus, obscures matters of great importance and masks the fact that one is surrounded by the living dead.

Lafferty hangs too much of his story on repulsion at the surface features of language, when it is clearly the latter that troubles him. Think of Ouden saying, “Every dull thing you do, every cliché you utter, you come closer to me,” and of the Astrobe state as a utopian cliché. This is cliché as privation—that is to say, cliché as evil.

Both the story setup and the story form are simple. We have a dialogue set in the future between two friends, John and Peter, at the exclusive Earth Club. Humanity has achieved effective immortality and interstellar travel. With that comes the psychological pressure of a lifespan measured in centuries. People cope by relying on medical modifications. They pop Contentment Pills. They take Variety Boosters. Like people at a methadone clinic, they need to shoot up Cliché-Toleration. Most citizens have also received an artificial “Interplanetation Impulse” to encourage space exploration. Lafferty writes,

“No man can have everything, Peter,” said John, “and we have had more than most: Health, Contentment (Do you still use those old Acme Contentment Pills, Peter? Most of the fellows have switched to B7), Long Life (interminable I should say: we are well rid of the prospect of what they used to call the Last Great Adventure), Relief from Worry. We have an endless enjoyment of endless variety. I have to get a Variety Booster in the morning. I had nearly forgotten.”

Peter is an exception to all this, an ironic one. He is always on the move between star systems because he can’t stand the repetition of clichés in human language. He has a pathological sensitivity to them. Over hundreds of years, they wear one down. Much of the dialogue describes Peter’s history of abandoning planets after a cliché makes staying intolerable. At one point, he left an orbital near Procyon, and at another, a farm on Rigel. The moment someone uses a cliché or an ancestral idiom, Peter bolts.

In "Hog-Belly Honey," Lafferty plays with clichés in a way that is somewhat related to what is going on here. There, he does not use Ameliorated Translation as the vehicle for disguising clichés, but instead twists clichés, as dead metaphors, into mixed metaphors. I’ve written elsewhere about why I dislike that move in the story, and my response to the idea of Ameliorated Translation here is essentially the same. Peter has zero tolerance for clichés, whether in their original or ameliorated form. Long ago, he maxed out the safe dosage of his Cliché-Toleration shots and other psychological stabilizers. His mind can no longer filter out the “crawling horrors” of dead language:

"So I had, John, till one of my co-workers dropped the phrase ‘Sklero-cephalic hippikos discernment’ which was in the Ancestral, before the Ameliorating Translation, 'Hardheaded horse sense.'"

"'Now is the time to differentiate the Meganthropoi from the Micanthropoi’ he said. Which is to say, before the Ameliorating, ‘to separate the men from the boys.'"

The story's ending is predictable. As Peter prepares to leave for a new property on planet BQ965Y, John reassures him about the move. Then he says it, the ameliorated translation: “It’s a nice place for a sabbatical, but I wouldn’t want to live there.” Peter becomes physically ill and leaves the club in a state of panic. He doesn’t even wait for his scheduled morning departure. Instead, he takes his panic flight on a midnight transport.

“I was there once myself, Peter,” said John. “It's a nice place for a Sabbatical, but I wouldn't want to live there.” Peter rose retching and left the Earth Club in panic. He did not go to BQ965Y in the morning. He left that very night on the midnight express.

As I said, this is a light, unsuccessful story. What makes it interesting to me is its background, which shows that it is not just a satire of science-fiction language, despite its surface play. There is also a satire of society here, with the argument that a culture reliant on extreme self-modification to attain immortality inevitably flees reality. The superficiality of that existence is revealed not only by Peter’s panic flight but also by the universal dependence on augmentations to cope with endless longevity. Peter’s reaction shows the story’s main point: everyone, not just Peter, is taking flight, trading reality, with all its discomfort and death, for a meretricious comfort. That will become the logic of Cosmopolis.

That makes the story about spiritual impoverishment right under its jokey Ameliorated Translation surface. In “The Poor Man’s Guide to Hell,” Lafferty makes his clearest statement about spiritual poverty and its relation to the real poverty of Cathead. He writes, “the new poverty was manufactured by the new Utopians,” and that “poverty is not Hell. But poverty without saving grace and humor is Hell. The supreme cruelty of our own time has been the imposition by the rich of their own humorlessness upon the poor.” There is no old poverty in “Panic Flight.” Everything is affluent and manufactured, yet the poverty of spirit is everywhere in "Panic Flight." The characters show no wit. It is all the author's.

They sat on the pavilion of Earth Club, one of the thousand-odd exclusive country clubs of that simple but elegant suburb of Megapolis. It was in the conversational cool of the evening, that magic hundred hours of companionship and charm that precedes the soft coming of the night . . . They watched the younger swimmers, and drank Dragons' Blood as they talked.

“Panic Flight” is an odd story. Even at the point where we first see Lafferty writing his own recognizably science fiction, the major ideas are already in place. What he lacks, at this stage, is a clear sense of where to put them, and so they surface on the scenic flat. Because they are handled so lightly, almost as throwaways, the story can read as little more than a satire of the science-fiction genre, rather than also as an early installment in Lafferty’s ongoing critique of a culture in which much of culture is locked into the trashed-life principle.

There are few Lafferty stories I would call genuine apprentice pieces. This is one of them. What he is doing here runs counter to the instincts that would later define his work, and the result is best described as a mismatch. Ferguson has argued that science fiction was not yet prepared for the kind of upstart critique of its own language that Lafferty was attempting. I would add that Lafferty himself was not yet prepared to mount the frontal assault he would later grow into. When Past Master appeared in 1968, it brought a previously backgrounded idea to the fore by lodging it in Ouden’s maw.

Panic Flight Notes.pdf

Download PDF • 352KB