{"id":1151,"date":"2021-05-14T12:56:23","date_gmt":"2021-05-14T12:56:23","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/sfshortstories.com\/?p=1151"},"modified":"2021-05-20T14:02:48","modified_gmt":"2021-05-20T14:02:48","slug":"thus-we-frustrate-charlemagne-by-r-a-lafferty","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/sfshortstories.com\/?p=1151","title":{"rendered":"Thus We Frustrate Charlemagne by R. A. Lafferty"},"content":{"rendered":"\n<p><strong><em>Thus We Frustrate Charlemagne<\/em><\/strong> by R. A. Lafferty (<em>Galaxy<\/em>, September-October 1967) is one of his \u2018Institute for Impure Science\u2019 series. This one sees Epiktistes the Ktistec machine (an AI or computer) and a group of eight people attempt to alter history at the time of Charlemagne (778CE) in the hope of eradicating the four hundred years of darkness that occurred after a brief period of enlightenment. To achieve this they send an avatar (\u201cpartly of mechanical and partly of ghostly construction\u201d) to intercept a man called Gano, whose ambush of Charlemagne\u2019s rear-guard led him to close the borders to the East and initiate a period of cultural isolation.<br>After their intervention the timeline changes, but the group don\u2019t realise it (and there are also three computers now, and ten people). So they have another go, this time by preventing John Lutterell\u2019s denunciation of Ockham\u2019s Commentary on the Sentences.<br>The next iteration leaves them once more oblivious to the changes they have wrought, and their world is now much more backward (they are down to three people and a computer made out of sticks and weed). When they make another change, things go back to the way they are (I think\u2014the last short section isn\u2019t that clear).<br>This is all told in Lafferty\u2019s quirky and digressive style, and with the odd touch of humour, such as when they initially discuss the use of the avatar:<\/p>\n\n\n\n<blockquote class=\"wp-block-quote is-style-default is-layout-flow wp-block-quote-is-layout-flow\"><p>\u201cI hope the Avatar isn\u2019t expensive,\u201d Willy McGilly said. \u201cWhen I was a boy we got by with a dart whittled out of slippery elm wood.\u201d<br>\u201cThis is no place for humor,\u201d Glasser protested. \u201cWho did you, as a boy, ever kill in time, Willy?\u201d<br>\u201cLots of them. King Wu of the Manchu, Pope Adrian VII, President Hardy of our own country, King Marcel of Auvergne, the philosopher Gabriel Toeplitz. It\u2019s a good thing we got them. They were a bad lot.\u201d<br>\u201cBut I never heard of any of them, Willy,\u201d Glasser insisted.<br>\u201cOf course not. We killed them when they were kids.\u201d<br>\u201cEnough of your fooling, Willy,\u201d Gregory cut it off.<br>\u201cWilly\u2019s not fooling,\u201d the machine Epikt said. \u201cWhere do you think I got the idea?\u201d&nbsp; p. 259<\/p><\/blockquote>\n\n\n\n<p>This is an entertaining read for the most part, but the ending is weak.<br>** (Average). 4,200 words.<br><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>Thus We Frustrate Charlemagne by R. A. Lafferty (Galaxy, September-October 1967) is one of his \u2018Institute for Impure Science\u2019 series. This one sees Epiktistes the Ktistec machine (an AI or computer) and a group of eight people attempt to alter history at the time of Charlemagne (778CE) in the hope of eradicating the four hundred [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"nf_dc_page":"","_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false},"categories":[272],"tags":[10,17,203,273,12],"class_list":["post-1151","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-r-a-lafferty","tag-10","tag-17","tag-galaxy","tag-r-a-lafferty","tag-short-story"],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_likes_enabled":true,"jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/sfshortstories.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1151","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/sfshortstories.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/sfshortstories.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/sfshortstories.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/sfshortstories.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=1151"}],"version-history":[{"count":6,"href":"https:\/\/sfshortstories.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1151\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":1236,"href":"https:\/\/sfshortstories.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1151\/revisions\/1236"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/sfshortstories.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=1151"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/sfshortstories.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=1151"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/sfshortstories.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=1151"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}