"Land of the Great Horses" (1967)

R.A. Lafferty's story has an intriguing though maybe not particularly dangerous concept, a sort of explanation for the Romani (aka "Gypsy") diaspora from northern India some 1,500 years ago. In the story, aliens from outer space carved out a large region like a section of skin and took it away for study, leaving behind a mirage as a placeholder. This is where the story most feels like it's busy making up shit. Presumably, you can't live on a mirage, and so the worldwide scattering started. Eventually, the Romani territory is returned, the mirage deactivated, and somehow all Romani know it's time to go home again. Then the aliens go steal Los Angeles, which no one notices is missing. It's hard to see a point here. The strange life of Gypsies? The great power of aliens? Um—Los Angeles is vacuous? The latter is a live possibility. Lafferty is at great pains on the alien operation, emphasizing its shallowness: "the sliver taken [was] about ten thousand square miles ... and no more than a mile thick at its greatest." In a way, it's similar to what Kurt Vonnegut does in The Sirens of Titan, explaining monumental aspects of human history such as the Great Wall of China as absurd incidentals in larger alien projects. I dig the freeform riffing but wish it added up to something. In this collection, it should make me worried about something. Aliens chopping out giant pancakes of Earth terrain is only weird. Lafferty's afterword doesn't help much: "We are all Romanies, as in the parable here, and we have a built-in homing to and remembrance of a woollier and more excellent place, a reality that masquerades as a mirage. Whether the most excellent place is here or heretofore or hereafter, I don't know, or whether it will be our immediate world when it is sufficiently animated; but there is an intuition about it which sometimes passes through the whole community." Fair enough, but I still don't know where the Gypsy stuff comes from. Lafferty was strictly an American Midwest guy, born in Iowa, living most of his life in Oklahoma. Maybe something was singing in his blood, except you don't catch much of that here. Odd duck of a story.

Dangerous Visions, ed. Harlan Ellison