“Charles,” Gorgonius Pantera said, “you wrote some of the easiest-to-ignore works in all the history of disreputable literature. Did you really have anything to go on at all? You created a whole universe of your own, but did you use anything at all that was material in that creation?” “No, Gorgolanza, I didn’t create a universe, I discovered one. I named it the Fortean Universe when I found that it was unnamed. I don’t know why many persons didn’t discover it before I did. Th

And there is a sort of unreality-compounded in it, and that simply will not do in a mystery story, and every story at the heart of it is a mystery story. Real things and persons can do things in a real world, and real things and persons can do things in an unreal world: but unreal things and persons can't do things in an unreal world. There is no way that an illusion (and every story is an illusion) can be maintained without clarity in either its setting or its movement. Some

I've mentioned this before on the blog, but in my day job I'm not an Americanist, much less a specialist in science fiction. My background is in eighteenth-century British literature, and Lafferty ended up being just a hobby interest. One of the first things that caught my attention when I started rereading him was how he sometimes uses heroic couplets to generate ideas. It may seem an odd thing to fasten on, but the eighteenth-century mind loved the couplet, with its sharp a