“The Forty-Seventh Island” is one of Lafferty’s weaker stories. It isn’t short on invention; what it lacks is the theotropic dissonance that gives his best work a prophetic intensity. That dissonance, where a sense of the divine and a refusal to collapse spiritual meaning into continuous allegory, is what I call theotropic. When it works, it keeps satire and mystery coiled together.
But here, as in the “Horns on Their Heads,” Lafferty stays too close to his own ideological commitments. The satire is too narrow. The story buckles as satire and mystery decouple, dissociating meaning and leaving an aesthetic blemish. What should have been prophecy slips into polemic.
“The Forty-Seventh Island” wants to tell a parody of the Robinsonnade that runs from Eden to Judgment. Its aesthetic failure is really cinched with the names of the forty-seven colonized mini-planets orbiting Selkirk Sun. Their names (Nietzsche Planet, Hegel, Mordecai, Darwin, Huxley, Freud, Luther, Calvin, Cromwell, Voltaire, Rousseau, Situation Ethics, Punk Rock, Horse Robber, Rolling Stone, etc.) are a sneeringly parodic inventory of secular modernity: rationalist, materialist, and progressive.
Some names here, like Darwin, Freud, Marx, are tokens of disenchantment. They are the kinds of suspicion Lafferty sees as stripping the cosmos of sacrament. It is of a piece with what Lafferty had written decades before in Dotty:
The implications were staggering. Augustine was wrong, Petronius was right. Aquinas was wrong, Voltaire was right. Christ was wrong, Calvin was right. Francis was wrong, Marx was right. Hegel, Nietzsche were right, theirs was the only world. One must learn to live in it without retching. More was wrong, Roosevelt was right. Freud was right, Lenin, Karl Zaleski, Kitty Kark — all the little mice were right, all the toads and night crawlers, all the mwenchers and liars and thieves and politicians. All others were hypocrites and fools, bubble chasers.
Other planetary names, like “Kent State,” “Stamp the Rooster,” and “Controlled Despair,” work a little differently, but this is Lafferty at his crankiest (“Stamp the Rooster,” for example, is from Oklahoma ballots, where the Democrats are Roosters). Whether justified or not, it comes across as too raw a denunciation of a worldview Lafferty sees as synthetic, self-congratulatory, smug. The theotropic arc flattens into caricature because of how it is handled.
So what is this worldview in Lafferty’s mind? It’s the Weltanschauung of American modernity that, for him, is less than a world. It is also unfit to replace the World he believed had collapsed in his lifetime. It looks upon the world as the liberal order sees: self-assured, secular, organized around systems of social coherence but intellectually incoherent. It thinks it is the only contender.
The sharpest edge of the satire falls on the post-1960s progressive American: urban, college-educated, rhetorically egalitarian—quietly smug when technocratic, and not so quietly smug when rocking out. This figure believes in rational ascent: history as the self-elevation of humankind through psychology, science, bureaucracy, and possessive-expressive individualism. Even unknowingly, this caricature reveres Freud, Darwin, Marx, Situation Ethics, and Rolling Stone, blind to how cheaply they sit beside each other.
Lafferty’s complaint, as usual, is that such things displace transcendence. They constitute pseudo-dulia. What binds them is not reason but reverence. There’s no coherence, only curation. The nominal cluster becomes a single satirical unit. Lafferty swings it like a sledgehammer: synthetic faith is blind to its own liturgies. This is the world Hugo Katz claims to purify, but really, what he cares about is the trash. His modernity fears mystery and sterilizes what it can’t explain. If that sounds too simple, you’re right. It’s why the story doesn’t work.
In the story, Hugo Katz, commander of the colony and guardian of rationalist purity, embodies Lafferty’s satire of exaggerated liberal secular humanism. He is also its shadow side, a parody of liberal epistemic paranoia, obsessed with “leaks,” “illicit meadows,” and “unauthorized imagination.” His goal is purification, biological and ideological. The colonists must be made fit for the next stage of secular evolution. The snakes (kaleidoscopic, musically inept) become the supernatural remainder he cannot eliminate. They refuse taxonomic clarity. They are biologically impossible, unreal, alien, symbols. Lafferty writes:
They were persons with their diamond-bright personeyes shining out in ever-new recognitions. They were aromas, evocative and prescient, allegorical and impossibly foreign. They could give out any odor imaginable, and they themselves had overreaching imagination in this. They could give odors on command or suggestion. They were companionable, and yet they weren't pushy.
For Hugo, this ambiguity is a social pathology and social contagion. For the Phelans, especially Antoinette Phelan, there is a full awareness that their strangeness is the strangeness of the zoon anthropikon, these snakes with “personeyes.” Hugo’s hatred (and the joke of the story lies in this point) is odium theologicum, pure and simple. This aspect of the story works but gets lost.
So does its other weird moment of zoon anthropikon:
“What was the unguent that you kneaded into those deep gashes that you tore in Frederik, Antoinette?” Steven Huckleby asked as the group of them, along with the Shadow-Man, who was made out of paper-thin slate stone, went down to the white rock in front of Shadrack's Cave.
“Snake eggs,” Antoinette said. “Culebra caleidoscopia snake eggs. They are so small, and they survive and hatch so well! Snake eggs in incubation jelly, with ‘Run-Away Fertility Inducer’ added. There will be snakes aplenty wherever they go. And they'll be cared for and not allowed to perish; there is a forever promise on that. They really will remind them of us.”
Lafferty often flips the profane into the sacred. “Horns on Their Heads” fails better: devil’s horns become the horns of Moses, carrying the full imagery of horns in biblical symbolism. “The Forty-Seventh Island” attempts a similar act of countersignification with snakes. Both stories fail for the same reason, I think: the satire and the countersignification are so polarized that they exist on different registers and never settle into the open theotropic dissonance that makes Lafferty’s best work so compelling.
In other words, when it works, Lafferty's theotropic dissonance dissolves his genius for satire and mystery in the same solution. When either is overexposed, the other precipitates out: "They were companionable, and yet they weren't pushy.”
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