The Solar System in "The Forty-Seventh Island"

“The forty-seven island-planets of Selkirk Sun bear the august names of persons and concepts that have brought the Secular Liberal Covenant to its present wonderful position,” Frederik said. “The names, the names! Nietzsche Planet, Hegel, Mordecai, Darwin, Huxley, Freud, Luther, Calvin, Cromwell, Voltaire, Rousseau, Franklin, Hendeus, Joyce, Gide, Wilde, Mann, Russell, William B. Ziff, Malthus, Roosevelt, Free Choice, Stamp the Rooster, Relativity, Situation Ethics, Mao, Truman, Kent State, Yellow Dog, Dialectical Materialism, Whitehead, Nader, Pauling, Teilhard, Kennedy, Bella Abzug, Punk Rock, Horse Robber, Sam Erwin, Mailer, Take Care of Number One, Tip O’Neil, Carter, Controlled Despair, Rolling Stone, and Robinsonnade on which we stand. These are the great persons and the great ideas, the pinnacles of human achievement.” — “The Forty-Seventh Island”

Someone on East of Laughter once said “The Forty-Seventh Island” isn’t one of Lafferty’s best stories. His catalogue of planets, however, is one of the most memorably grumpy things he ever cooked up. It is a succinct object lesson in what he hated, as if Flatland had been turned into a solar system, an obvious satirical canon of the Secular Liberal Covenant. Luther and Calvin stand beside Nietzsche, Freud, Mao, Teilhard, Bella Abzug, and Punk Rock. Many of these commitments would go at each other with hammer and tongs, but they all get absorbed into a single triumphal history of progress, what Lafferty took to be the unmusical cacophony of late modernity. Anyway, I thought it would be fun to fly through Lafferty’s catalogue, so I put this together for myself.