Serpent's Egg

By R.A. Lafferty

Book Overview

No Synopsis Available.

• Format: Paperback
• Language: English
• ISBN: 0809532441
• ISBN13: 9780809532445
• Release Date: January 2003
• Publisher: Wildside Pr
• Length: 176 Pages
• Weight: 0.60 lbs.
• Dimensions: 8.8" x 0.5" x 6.0"

Customer Reviews

Stay Same; Don't Buy This Book

Serpent's Egg Wait! Any book that has an epilog written by a sea louse is worth fifteen bucks. But watch closely the innocent shinny plain brown cover of Serpent's Egg...it thumps...it moves. Inside is a yoke (get it, you know, like a joke but more) that will change your scheme of things forevermore. And when in 2035 the sea lice take over the job of recording the World's history (of course, little sea lice can't think, they will only write down the thoughts of the whales who are great thinkers but can neither read nor write) and they will drop the custom of good and evil and instead divide mankind into two distinct categories - those who read Lafferty and those who don't. So don't be left out. Here is an example of Lafferty's writting style that will happen in ten years or so... "The Ambulatory Computers themselves had no real sex, of course, but it had become their custom to declare themselves for one sex or the other. And ninty percent of them had declared themselves male. The ten percent who had declared themselves to be female were thus outnumbered nine to one, so they made themselves nine times more intense on the sex issue. They insisted that fifty percent of all computers should declare themselves to be female. Then they amended the fifty percent to fifty-seven percent to atone for past inequities. They used the slogan 'There can be no freedom until there is equality; be it compelled that all Amblulatory Computers shall conform to the fair fifty-seven percent in their declarations.' It wasn't a good slogan, even though it was put to music and sung in all sorts of places. A good slogan, whether a human or a computer slogan, should be capable of being spoken in a single breath."

Laffertarian Bedtime Reading

The best take I've read on Lafferty is from John Clute's Encyclopaedia of Fantasy. He echoes the view that R.A. Lafferty is his own man, and you've got to read all of him to even start to know what he's about. Someone new to Lafferty would be better off starting with Fourth Mansions or Past Master or Reefs of Earth or the many volumes of short stories. Those books make some concessions to the general reader, while this one decidedly does not. Thanks to Wildside Press for making this novel available. I had looked for a long time for a "new" Lafferty novel and could only find more short stories. Nothing against those; I read his stories avidly before ever cracking the cover of a novel, but I enjoy it when Lafferty stretches out in a full-length work and invites us into his universe. Serpent's Egg takes place in the indeterminate future of 2035 when all sorts of experiments are taking place between animals, humans and humanoid computers, resulting in various hybrid offspring. These mega-persons all reach maturity at ten years old, but should they prove to be a serpent's egg, a threat to the "floating world", assassins are sent after them by the Kangaroo Court, seen as a portent in the sky of a kangaroo. The offspring of four experiments join up to form a magic twelve, including in their number a psychic python, an unborn elephant, a wolverine, a bear, a computer, and a few humans. It's all very Laffertarian and it probably doesn't give anything away to say that the epilog (written by a whale) claims that half the book is lies. I had a copy of Wildside Press' collection of Lafferty stories, Iron Tears, which had a lot of typos in it. It may have since been edited, however, since my edition doesn't have the introduction by Michael Swanwick included in the newer edition. Regardless, this book has few typos and is well-produced. It's also as much reading as a whole book of short stories, just right for Laffertarian bedtime reading.