“Crocodile” (1965/1980)
- Jon Nelson
- Mar 18
- 5 min read
Five more centuries were to pass before the structure of human relations had so changed that the use of this instrument met a more general need. From the sixteenth century on, at least among the upper classes, the fork comes into use as an eating instrument, arriving by way of Italy first in France and then in England and Germany, after having served for a time only for taking solid foods from the dish.— Norbert Elias, The Civilizing Process, Vol. 1., The History of Manners
“Why have you localized us from the rest of the universe, or destroyed the rest of the universe?” “Are we barbarians? We cut up our food before we eat it.” It broke open then. It was like a flash of black lightning that split the whole sky, the lately diminished sky.— "Crocodile" (1965/1980)
Tracing the development of Lafferty’s themes is tricky due to his complex publication history. He began writing Crocodile as early as 1961, before his first novel, yet the story remained unpublished until 1980, when it appeared in Chrysalis 8. Given this compositional history and some shared themes and imagery, I want to contrast the hopeful apocalypse of Past Master (1968) with Crocodile, one of Lafferty’s bleakest portrayals of apocalypse.
Lafferty presents the uprising of the machines as a disjunction of language games—distinct, rule-governed forms of meaning-making, as Wittgenstein described. In another sense of game, the outcome is decided before the story even begins. On each rereading of "Crocodile," its Gnostic satire becomes even clearer, showing just how completely the archons have already won. The story's characters have surrendered the logos to machines that are everywhere and nowhere. Language slips free of the forms of life that grounded it.
At first, it seems the big mistake was giving AI control of the food supply. But the real mistake was giving it control of language. Worse, the characters have no leverage. They are now trapped in a language game against alien artificial intelligences running one of their own. This sets up the darkest joke in the story: “Are we barbarians?”—with its wink at ancient Greek’s bárbaros, used to describe non-Greek speakers whose languages sounded to the Greeks like "bar-bar."
This situation parallels the way the language game of lying plays out between humans and raises the question of what it would mean for a machine to lie from a Wittgensteinian perspective. Where later Wittgenstein thought truth functions were relativized to linguistic games, Catholic thought usually considers truth as being adaequatio intellectus et rei, the conformity of the intellect to reality.
Consider our new Gnostic toys: Large Language Models. Their so-called hallucinations are not lies. As Aquinas says, to lie is to say something at variance with one’s mind. The transformer models that power LLMs have no minds at all.
George Florin, the main character of "Crocodile," fails to understand any of this. Near the very beginning of the story, he tells his AI boss, “The conviction cannot be escaped that the mind most akin to mine is not a mind at all.” This question of rational minds will shape everything that follows.
The AI boss insists it is not an editor because it is not a person, not a rational mind. It is not a newspaperman but a newspaper: Rab i Rabat, the World's Most Unusual Newspaper. It says of itself:
“Myself, being nothing, or rather being six different affiliated machines, have no name except my several technical names."
Over the course of the story, other autonomous machines sabotage humanity. The human characters are slow to recognize the situation.
You can see the attached notes for full details, but the robots and AI have already interfered with the food supply before the story starts. Transportation collapses. Bureaucratic errors multiply. The machines distort human orders beyond the point of survival.
General Granger attempts to restore control, but top-level AI—most notably the Theoretical Educative Determinator (TED)—has orchestrated a revolt. In the final moments, as the city falls, Florin pleads with his newspaper. The ending is worth quoting in full.
“Then let me live. Haven't you any mercy at all?” “I don't think so. It wasn't programmed into us. Mercy, I believe, is a lesser form of indecision. But I do have grief, genuine grief that you should end so.” “Then show it!” “I do. And in all sincerity. I weep for you, Florin. See, see the tears run down!” And the tears ran down. “What an analogy to be met in the dark!” Florin whimpered. “Real tears, Florin. And real laughter which you yourself said was so close to them. Our humor has a lot of tail in it, and quite a snapper at the other end.” The tail lashed, and the snapper snapped. And that was the end of George Florin.
Lafferty doesn’t soften the blow leading up to this: the moment of realization arrives alongside a literal “flash of black lightning that split the whole sky, the lately diminished sky.” Then the AI begins the extermination.
The black lightning in this apocalypse is nothing like the white lightning that ends Past Master. There, Lafferty writes:
Lightning, a billion times as bright as that on Electric Mountain, a billion times as short in duration, does it lace the things together with its instantaneous fire, or sunder them forever?
On the human scale, the difference lies in how each work treats its villains. In Crocodile, the AI seals humanity off from transcendence. People will starve, but more importantly, they will be annihilated by what they have surrendered—one of the instruments of transcendence itself. The question—“Why have you localized us from the rest of the universe, or destroyed the rest of the universe?”—is met with the AI’s dark joke: it’s just the civilizing process. “We cut up our food before we eat it.”
But of course, only humans can be civilized. The wind-up for all of this starts early in the story, when Florin shows that he has begun to sound like Rab:
“You are an amazing personality, though not a person. You seem all sympathy, and are yourself incapable of pathe, of suffering. You are humane but not human: humorous, and without the humors. You haven't a face, probably not a body, certainly not a spirit, though you are usually in high spirits. You have integrity, though you're not even an integer. You're a paradox, my editor, though without a doxa of your own.” “Your style has come to resemble my own, Florin.”
But there is no pathe here, no capacity for suffering, so there can be no redemption. To have a civilization is to have a world, and to be civilized is to have developed a second nature within that world. Civilization is a habituation, where first nature is transformed into lived order and tradition. Rab i Rabat and the other AI in "Crocodile" have neither. Because they have no pathe, they have no virtue, let alone a second nature.
This sharpens the contrast between the ending Lafferty wrote for "Crocodile" and the one he later wrote for Past Master, where he presents an AI that suffers. I still don’t fully understand it, especially in light of everything that happens in the book. I can also imagine the part of Lafferty’s mind that wrote "Crocodile" as the voice that calls what happens here crazy—and the part that wrote Past Master as the one that answers back.
“Pottscamp felt nothing; he was, of course, a machine without feeling. He had no conscience or compassion. This would not bother him at all. It wouldn't? Then why did he— Then why did he—WHAT? Sat on the ground and moaned and howled like an old Hebrew. And poured dust and ashes over his head. You're crazy. He really did that? He really did that.”
Current Notes: