The Real Ships of Klepsis

James Gurney prelim for the cover of Annals of Klepsis

"I suppose that I believe in another sort of a surreality or super-reality, but it would have to be on a wider basis than the encounters of Myself and me."

Lafferty was notorious for not caring much about how he dressed, a detail frequently noted in convention reports and personal memories. I’ve often wondered if his general lack of interest in his book covers and illustrations was connected to this. In an interview, he said he hated only two: Arrive at Easterwine and East of Laughter, both of which have been the subject of Reddit mockery. One would have to try to create something so ugly as this:

The cover I really hate is Annals of Klepsis:

Even before I read the book, I hated it for being pseudo-wondrous and un-imaginative. It was done by James Gurney of Dinotopia fame, whose real brilliance as an illustrator and artist is at a far remove from Lafferty. Gurney’s signature is imaginative realism. Contrast this with Lafferty, who once said he wouldn’t mind being called a surrealist, so long as one saw that his version of surrealism rejected classical Freudian surrealism for a Jungian "remembrance of things within." It could not be limited to encounters of Myself and me.

What does he mean by this? Simply that the subconscious (the capitalized "Myself") is closer to the foundational source of logic and order. However, he is skeptical of bounding it with psychologism. He believes that the purely internal dialogue between the inner self and his everyday conscious ego (the lowercase "me") is too narrow to constitute a true "super-reality." (We are trapped in the archetypes, screaming to get out/Christ is the Lord of the Archetypes, we must integrate the externally archetypal, etc.)

Instead, his surrealism draws on a broader base that upends the traditional formula. As he puts it: it is the synthesis of the deeply rational (logos) subconscious encountering an exterior world that presents itself as bizarre, chaotic dream material.

Gurney’s flying pirate boat is about as far from that as one can get. It is what an Imagineer takes fantasy to be. It would be at home as the Peter Pan ride at Disney World. This isn't entirely Gurney's fault, but the publisher's, and probably the brief Gurney was given. Still, it is hackneyed. I prefer even the ugly of East of Laughter's cover to hackneyed. Gurney's talent is there, but he is jobbing out a cover. Frankly, his prelim is superior because the realism of imaginative realism doesn't entirely crowd out Lafferty.

Which brings me to the real ships of Klepsis, which is the second reason I hate the Annals of Klepsis cover. You see, Klepsis has no wood of any variety that would support shipbuilding. Lafferty writes, "This pirate-planet Klepsis had never gone through the era of wooden ships. There were no trees on Klepsis for ship's timber." As such, the ships of Klepsis look nothing like Gurney’s retro-futurist, multi-decked galleon, with its square-rigged sails, raised sterncastle, and Jolly Roger. Leave that for Treasure Planet.

Because Klepsis has so many long, tentacled islands without natural trees or established towns, almost all transportation occurs across a wine-like freshwater ocean—a visual distinction Lafferty makes because "only freshwater bodies are ever genuinely wine-colored." To navigate this sea, the planet's founder, Christopher Brannagan, built the first vessels from a magnesium-steel alloy forged with local ores and an additive known as "sulphur-and-secret," whose composition was tightly guarded and had also "been introduced by Brannagan into the sperm of Klepsis men of the heroic class." Seaman and semen, for those in the back of the class.

Klepsis's real ships use a combination of "sail and propeller and underwater jet," exploiting an ocean "everywhere populated with winds and crosswinds" that serve as a "basic fuel." One will find all sorts of specialized utility craft, such as the mobile printing press The Ink-Stained Wretch Printery (which operates "on a little boat that travels constantly"), The Polled Unicorn (which had expected to host the local "Shipboard Theatre"), and Brannagan's seven "bottle-nosed Brannagan's Folly Ships." The latter were built "at very great expense" to transport right whales from Gaea-Earth to unclog the freshwater oceans of their overgrowing vegetation.

The most notable vessels on Klepsis were the Eleven Tall Pirate Ships. I almost wrote historically notable, but of course, Klepsis did not have history. That fleet included The Dina O'Grogan (originally The Beloved Harpy). It has a wheelhouse, captain's quarters, and reputedly a mast of beaten gold and crimson sails—or as Brannagan's ghost sings it in a booming ballad: "The mast is beaten pirate gold, / The sails are cramoisie."

Here, one makes some contact with Gurney’s cover through the interplanetary motif, but only a little. The real ships of Klepsis don't fly through space like a trashy night of Spelljammer. Lafferty establishes two very distinct methods of interplanetary travel, and Gurney's cover misses the interesting one.

First, there are "regular spaceships." These do travel through the starry void of space, such as the vessels Brannagan built to transport the whales. But they don't look like wooden pirate ships; they are built from magnesium lattices and are explicitly described as bottle-nosed, a bit like the hornets of Space Chantey:

Second, there are the Eleven Tall Pirate Ships. These ocean-bound vessels can travel between planets, but they do not fly through the vacuum of space. Instead, they execute an instantaneous, biological planetary jump from ocean to ocean by using a "short-tailed human" from Tarshish as a catalyst. Because this jump (referred to by the pirates as the "hiatus road" or "Sailing Through the Bushes") bypasses normal space, it passes, for some reason, through a biotic medium. As one character explains, "Jump space is fantastically populated—with botany. My God, what botany! The interstellar dust that some astronomers write about is interstellar botany."

Upon completing a jump, up to a meter of green leaves and fronds encases the ship, rendering the hull "bosky, bushy, green-leafed and green-fronded." Green leaves and mosses literally sprout from the crew's bellies, a tie to Lafferty’s 13th Voyage of Sindbad. As one character notes, distinguishing the two modes of travel: "regular spaceships don't pick up green goop. Maybe it's because they go too slow, or don't go through a biotic medium."

Ironically, by depicting a wooden galleon adrift in a starry vacuum instead of Lafferty's bottle-nosed ships, the cover defaults to a generic fantasy cliché. It misses the weird, bifurcated reality Lafferty actually imagined: one that splits science fiction and pirate romance into parallel tracks of shipwrighting.

I picture the book art as N. C. Wyeth crossed with Henry Darger, with a few Ed Emshwiller nuts in the frosting for the interplanetary ships.