"Quiz Ship Loose" (1978)
- Jon Nelson
- Jun 21
- 6 min read
Updated: Jun 21
In his review of The Man Who Never Was, Paul Di Filippo compared “Quiz Ship Loose” to a classic episode of Star Trek: The Original Series and called the “instant chute” genius. That’s a great catch. "Quiz Ship Loose" is a very Treky planetfall story, and the crew’s encounter with the Pelederians will feel familiar to anyone who enjoys Kirk, Spock, and McCoy. The aliens’ advanced technology and arrogance recall characters like Trelane or the Metrons. And then there are the children, which Star Trek loved to trot out—think of the super kids in episodes like “And the Children Shall Lead.”
If anything, I would go a step further than Di Filippo, because the story does more than play with Star Trek. It goes after its utopian pretensions. Lafferty would not see a group like the Organians in “Errand of Mercy” as moral exemplars, but as signs of how technological achievement can mask a deeper loss of meaning. That seems to be the real center of "Quiz Ship Loose."
In it, five interplanetary adventurers arrive on Paleder World in their Quiz Ship, hoping to uncover the planet’s mystery, which seems to be tied to its advanced technology. But instead of finding answers, they encounter hallucinatory threats and “post-conscious” inhabitants. The ship’s “instant chute” drops them into what appears to be a nightmarish swamp filled with monsters, later revealed as illusions shaped by Pelederian children. The adult Palederians claim to exist beyond consciousness, offloading the chaos of the unconscious to their offspring. In the end, the crew escapes with a group of the children, and with their help, which gives the story headline-style title: think Quiz Ship Loose!
In considering the story, I’d point out how the Palederians’ embrace of post-consciousness contributes to a recurring theme in Lafferty’s work. Collectively, the Palederians recall the Programmed Persons in Past Master, who see the extinction of consciousness as the final goal of life and technology. In this sense, "Quiz Ship Loose" extends some of Past Master’s central concerns. Where it goes further is in exploring the implications of its technological critique, namely the Palederian claim that one can’t have the technology without having the psychology. That is elegantly put, and it fits well with a vast amount of writing in the philosophy of technology, where thinkers often stress the link between technical systems and human interiority. So while "Quiz Ship Loose" is light Lafferty, it hits on one of his heaviest themes.
Whether it's the Quiz Ship’s “instant chute” or Paleder’s weather control system, Lafferty draws the reader’s attention to a problem that resembles Albert Borgmann’s concept of the device paradigm.
Borgmann argued that modern devices alter our relationship with the world by separating means from ends, obscuring the rich engagement once found in what he called “focal things and practices.” A device, in this view, is not just a tool. It is a pairing of commodity and machinery, engineered to deliver results while minimizing the user’s effort or awareness. Lafferty makes this point directly in his description of Paleder technology: “Most of the consummate technology of Paleder was invisible. And, according to the Paleder persons, this general invisibility or unnoticeability was the sure sign of perfection. It is only imperfect things that draw attention to themselves.” This condition of unnoticeably is important: it’s what destroys cultural meaning.
Lafferty seems to want us to ask what the Palederians have lost. It is nothing less than a connection to a meaningful lifeworld, something most evident in the severed bond between adults and children on Paleder. Borgmann describes this kind of loss in terms of “focal things,” the objects and practices that give life depth and purpose. These are not merely functional items; they are sites of significance, rooted in care, tradition, and presence. His well-known example is winemaking. In its traditional form, winemaking involves skill, patience, and a relationship with the land and the seasons. But when reduced to commodity output, producing standardized flavors through automated systems, it ceases to be a focal practice. It becomes a device.
In "Quiz Ship Loose," Lafferty shows this same shift. Palederian technology, by striving for invisibility and effortlessness, removes the user from any meaningful engagement. The result is a society that has perfected its tools but lost its meaning.
In real life, it’s never so clear-cut. It is usually less a matter of solutions than of tradeoffs. As devices proliferate and make commodities more accessible, they also diminish the social and personal practices that once gave life significance. Along with the disappearance of the milk door went the relationship with the milkman. The convenience comes at a hidden cost: the erosion of community and care. Here, Borgmann owes a lot to Martin Heidegger’s concept of sorge, or care, to suggest that a meaningful life requires intentional, authentic engagement. One lesson we should have learned by now is that without conscious effort to sustain what Borgmann called focal practices, technology risks turning large portions of life into something passive and disengaged.
I doubt Lafferty ever read Borgmann, but there’s no reason he would have needed to. His generation lived through it, and it’s a large part of what Lafferty means by the world that ended.
My favorite poet of the twentieth century, the Catholic poet and painter David Jones, was born twenty years before Lafferty. He had his own way of thinking about these questions. To get at this, let’s bring back Star Trek. Not TOS, but Star Trek in its most self-consciously neoliberal version, The Next Generation, which tends to equate technological advancement with civilizational progress: Star Trek as the Hilton in space, as people have called it.
Jones rejected the idea that civilization advances in lockstep with culture. For him, the two categories often stand in opposition, making competing claims. Where Star Trek places technological attainment at the center of cultural value, Jones sees deeper conflicts between the material and the symbolic, the utilitarian and the sacramental. Where Borgmann offers a way of thinking through these tensions in the language of the philosophy of technology, Jones provides an anthropological picture. His work suggests that when a society privileges function over form, or innovation over inheritance, it risks losing the very signs by which it understands itself.
I think this is what happens when the adult and child Palederians lose all real connection with each other. "Quiz Ship Loose" is about a civilization coming loose from its culture, the only reason its civilization should have existed in the first place.
Jones thinks this can happen because the concept of civilization is always bound up with utility, efficiency, and pragmatic action. It values order, functionality, and control, much like the adult Palederians, who prize function over meaning. Culture, by contrast, is rooted in symbolism, gratuitousness, and intrinsic worth. It consists of gestures, objects, and creations not needed for survival but essential for expressing identity, belief, and meaning. This distinction mirrors the divide between the adults and children on Paleder.
The children still care about culture. As the child Glic puts it: “Look at the bright side—us. I am here, and with me are seven companions more witty than myself. We know a lot of that technology, but we don’t lock ourselves inside it. That’s why we wanted loose from Paleder, so we wouldn’t become post-people too. They had become post-space-flight, and where would that leave an adventurous person like me? We know the gadgets and technologies, though. Eight brainfuls of technologies you’re getting with us.” Glic speaks for a worldview that values engagement, wit, and wonder, qualities that civilization alone, without culture, cannot sustain.
Jones once remarked, roughly, that the windmill grinding flour for dough belongs to civilization, while the birthday cake and the party itself belong to culture. Civilization is concerned with function and necessity. Culture, by contrast, is where we find gifts, rites, and symbolic objects—things that serve no practical purpose but carry deep meaning.
In seeing it this way, Jones draws a line between the instrumental and the expressive. That hard line is right at the center of Lafferty’s meditation on post-consciousness. In the story, the expressive is figured as the dragon. The Palederian kids have it; the adults don’t. The technology of the Paleder adults has become invisible, meaning it is non-expressive.
This is also why the adults exist in a post-conscious state, and why Paleder itself becomes a civilization without culture, a place where means have been severed from meaning. In Lafferty’s terms, this renders it devilish: all the tools remain, but nothing endures to make life worth the using of them.
I’ll end by returning to Past Master because I think “Quiz Ship Loose” shows just how nasty Pottscamp’s lie really is about the nature of men, machines, and meaning:
"You are not conscious?" Thomas gasped. "That is the most amazing thing I have ever heard. You walk and talk and argue and kill and subvert and lay out plans over the centuries, and you say that you are not conscious?" "Of course we aren't, Thomas. We are machines. How would we be conscious? But we believe that men are not conscious either, that there is no such thing as consciousness. It is an illusion in counting, a feeling that one is two. It is a word without real meaning."
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