Antisemitism | The Reefs of Earth

"In his novella ‘The Three Armageddons of Enniscorthy Sweeny’ (1977), R. A. Lafferty uses speculative fiction to remove not only the Holocaust but all of the major traumas of the twentieth century including both world wars and the Great Depression. However, in typically elusive fashion, Lafferty finds a way to avoid these traumas yet still experience them."
Glyn Morgan, Imagining the Unimaginable (2020)

“People are easily fooled. But there are tests for reality. If a thing is burned up, then there will be a residue of ashes and gasses. But if there is not such a residue, and the things appears to be unchanged, then it is not acting as if it were burned up.”

The Three Armageddons of Enniscorthy Sweeny, p. 257

"SWEENY is carefully wrought, and even has diagrams and chronologies. What other work carries a total history of the century with it?"

Lafferty, Letter to Sheryl Smith, December 21, 1977

"Any writer who has any reputation at all owes it partly to being saved from some of the horrible and abominable things he wrote . . . A reputation is very fragile . . ."
Lafferty, Letter to Dan Knight, May 15, 1990

Updated 9/1/25

R. A. Lafferty (1914–2002) was a devout Catholic and a writer of remarkable and unusual artistic genius. Beloved by his fans and admired by some of the most important voices in science fiction, he brought brilliance, moral clarity, and imaginative depth to specific subjects. Among his works is Okla Hannali (1972), a neglected masterpiece of American literature. It recounts the history of the Choctaw people through the life of a fictional patriarch, blending humor, tragedy, and moral witness.

Those who praise Lafferty's very real accomplishments and seek to understand them must also confront a serious problem in his life and work, one that cannot be treated as a minor detail. This is especially important for scholars who research and publish on him, given the obscurity of his archives. Archival materials reveal that Lafferty never accepted the reality of the Jewish Holocaust; by the late 1960s, he had embraced Holocaust denial literature and an antisemitic interpretation of Western history, one extending from antiquity through the Dreyfus Affair to modern times. In the early 1980s, Lafferty encountered The Journal for Historical Review, was surprised by its existence, and later endorsed its ideas and cause.

I began reading Lafferty closely in October 2024. Several months into writing this blog, I grew increasingly aware of the antisemitic inflections in what he said in correspondence and wrote in his fiction. That awareness immediately raised difficult questions: Is knowledge a private possession or a public trust? I chose to withhold public comment until I had examined all the relevant materials in the McFarlin Library’s Special Collections at the University of Tulsa, knowing the subject required deliberate and careful handling—here in the case of a writer I deeply admire (in carefully qualified ways) and whose work continues to give me immense pleasure. The first stage of that research took place in July 2025.

The Tulsa archive makes clear that Lafferty’s antisemitic views became more articulated and deepened over time. He came to believe the arguments he discovered in the Holocaust denial literature he read. But he said he rejected its historical reality from the start. This is a crucial point. To this degree, one cannot say he merely became embittered. This aspect of his thought intensified alongside his disillusionment with youth culture, Catholic dissent from Humanae Vitae (July 25, 1968), and his frustration with theological and pastoral Modernism, both in his home parish of Christ the King in Tulsa and in the wider post-Conciliar Catholic Church. These developments coincided with his declining presence in mainstream publishing.

These were also years of physical decline. Yet through the 1970s his mind stayed quick and incisive, and into the early 1980s he produced, in private, some of his best work, much of it still unseen by his core readership. His opinions surface mainly in letters, though a reader who looks closely at the fiction will find traces there too. They were not always the familiar kind of antisemitism. He admired Jewish intellectual achievement, and he argued that the Holocaust was irrational because Europe would not deliberately destroy so much of its own intellectual capital.

This and other views make it hard to trace the contours of antisemitism in Lafferty’s thought, and scholars will no doubt reach different conclusions. The record shows two figures: the notoriously quiet eccentric storyteller and the lifelong contrarian, taking a stand on a question of immense historical and moral weight.

In published commentary on Lafferty, I have not encountered any discussion of this aspect of his thought. The omission is evident among editors, critics, science fiction writers, and other influential voices, whether writing in big media or in smaller press venues. Commentators may focus on other aspects of Lafferty's work, be unfamiliar with the archival record, or avoid the subject for reasons not stated in their work. Whatever the cause, the result is an incomplete public portrayal that leaves this dimension of Lafferty’s intellectual life largely unexplored in a decade when Holocaust denial has grown, especially among younger Americans.

Recognizing the flaws of major talents is essential to understanding their creative and intellectual lives, preserving the historical record, and dealing honestly with the complexity of the human person. It also shapes how one reads the art itself.

An example in Lafferty’s work is The Three Armageddons of Enniscorthy Sweeny, his deepest fictional exploration of 20th-century history and a novel explicitly concerned with the violence and terror of that era. Its central theme is consensus reality. It tells the story of a man who can alter history through his artistic gifts. Without awareness of Lafferty’s own Holocaust denial, a reader is far less likely to notice—and far less able to grasp—the significance of the Jewish Holocaust’s absence from such a work. The alternative, recognizing the strange absence of the Holocaust in the work but not knowing about Lafferty’s Holocaust skepticism and Holocaust denial, can be just as intellectually damaging.

Imagine you are an early-career academic who notices the absence of the Jewish Holocaust in The Three Armageddons of Enniscorthy Sweeny. You care deeply about how the Holocaust is represented in literature and want to address the significance of its absence in a work of speculative fiction. Perhaps you want to understand its place in the American literary imagination, and you want to contribute to your academic discipline and the larger intellectual community. You are deeply puzzled by why it is not mentioned in Lafferty’s book.

In September 2016, Glyn Morgan submitted a PhD dissertation at the University of Liverpool. It was titled Mapping Planet Auschwitz: Non-Memetic Writing and the Holocaust in Anglo-American Fiction. In 2.2 of Chapter Two, “Misremembered Traumas by the Forgotten American Fantastist: R. A. Lafferty’s 'The Three Armageddons of Enniscorthy Sweeny,'” Morgan quotes Andrew Ferguson, researcher and biographer of Lafferty, who has published on the author's work. (Ferguson himself studied at the University of Liverpool in the years after completing his MA at the University of Tulsa, where he had conducted research in the McFarlin Library’s Special Collections on Lafferty’s correspondence.)

A passage from Morgan’s dissertation, a copy of which can be found through doing a Google search:

“The problem is amplified with regards to Apocalypses in particular as the book itself occupies a mysterious portion of Lafferty’s life, as Andrew Ferguson, Lafferty’s biographer, tells me:

'"Even in Lafferty’s correspondence there’s a gap: no record of him talking directly to the press

at all, which meant his agent Virginia Kidd would have handled all of those discussions. But

Lafferty wrote the book between January 22 and February 8, 1976 […], and then the

Apocalypses volume was published in 1977, and there’s a gap in Lafferty’s correspondence with

Kidd that covers the years 1976 and ’77.”

At the University of Tulsa archive, within the Dan Knight correspondence, one will find a Lafferty letter dated January 24, 1990, in which Lafferty writes that he "never did accept the idea" of the Jewish Holocaust:

“I myself never did accept the idea of the Holocaust in the context of The Six Million. As a prophecy it’s been in the Talmudic literature for a couple of thousand years, but it has always been a sort of allegory until the time of WWII. But if indeed six million Jews were killed (between a third and a half of the Jews in the World, and more Jews than were in the maximum area ever controlled by the Germans) then they should have left a big hole in the total Jewish World Population, but they didn’t. By the end of the War (within five years of the end), North America had received more than a million Jews from Europe, so had South America, so had Israel, and the total World Jewish population was up considerably from where it had stood at the beginning [. . .] And when Germany was losing the war for shortage of man-power in the factories, there was no sense in them killing six million of the most intelligent workers in Europe. There were work camps, yes, and likely a lot of cruelty in spots in them, but there weren't extermination camps."

I have not found any public discussion addressing whether anyone cited in existing scholarship on Lafferty has encountered this letter or other Holocaust denial material in the Tulsa archive. I have read Ferguson’s publicly available work on Lafferty, including his blog Continued on Next Rock, his MA thesis, his scholarly apparatus for Past Master, his academic article on Lafferty and mimesis, his Gaiman essay, his unrelated dissertation, and his piece on “Unpublished Lafferty” that presents a comprehensive list of the unpublished fiction at Tulsa.

In a YouTube conversation with Daniel Otto Jack Petersen, who wrote a dissertation on Lafferty and Cormac McCarthy that draws on Andrew Ferguson's ideas, Ferguson discusses his research on Lafferty's biography, including how he first came to the subject and his desire to read everything the author ever wrote. Ferguson says he had most of what he needed for a biography. The interview does not specify whether he read every item in the Tulsa archive.

Over the years, Ferguson says that he has continued to add little bits here and there to the biography manuscript, and he reflects on the many places his Lafferty research has taken him. Over a decade ago, he wrote a comment on a blog about Lafferty's letters, saying, “One of my medium-term projects will be to get a volume of selected correspondence, at least between him and his agent Virginia Kidd.” [1] And there is a YouTube clip titled "A conversation with Andrew Ferguson at Laffcon1."

Separately, the University of Tulsa archive holds an extensive collection of Lafferty’s correspondence with Dan Knight and many others. I read through much of this material over the course of a week because most of the boxes are not overstuffed, having become aware of Lafferty’s antisemitism and wanting to understand its depth and nature. Among these letters is the one dated January 24 in which Lafferty explicitly denied the Holocaust.

In their PhD dissertations, both Petersen and Morgan reference Ferguson, identifying him as Lafferty’s biographer. Morgan, in particular, draws on Ferguson’s authority regarding Lafferty’s archives and publishing history.

One reason for thinking there might be something like the Holocaust denial letter in the archives is a big clue: the presence of another box at McFarlin. It contains Lafferty's copies of IHR Holocaust denial journals, as well as Lafferty's handwritten timeline of Holocaust denial books (Box 4, folder 12). Propaganda pieces are there, with titles such as “The ‘Problem of Gas Chambers’” and “A Prominent False Witness: Elie Wiesel.” Ironically, it is the same box where one will find the Neil Gaiman letters. They are in Box 4, Folder 1.

Many people who visit Tulsa to study Lafferty will want to read the Gaiman letters, because, as Morgan points out in his dissertation, Gaiman has been Lafferty's advocate for many years. Gaiman wrote a pastiche of Lafferty that Ferguson published on. And it can be argued that Gaiman is probably Lafferty's best known fan. Gaiman's name is on Lafferty books, and it has even drawn attention to the Centipede Press edition of Lafferty's short stories. Ironically, copies of the letters from the young Jewish aspiring writer and publications from the Institute for Historical Review have been box companions. Gaiman, whose cousin Helen was a Holocaust survivor, once visited Tulsa and was shown around. Ferguson writes about this on his blog, but it is not documented whether Gaiman saw Box 4 during his visit. I have written to Neil Gaiman about this topic in the hope that he can help get the Holocaust denial materials relabeled at McFarlin's Special Collections, and I have requested that Ferguson join me in this.

Here, a question of archival expertise arises. If thorough familiarity with the Lafferty archive at McFarlin entails sustained engagement with the primary materials, it is difficult to see how this letter would escape notice or go unrecognized for its overwhelming importance in understanding Lafferty. If, however, “familiarity” is being used in a looser sense—referring, for example, to a focus on specific categories of documents, particular timeframes, or materials most relevant to publishing history, then the absence of this letter from public commentary becomes easier to understand, though the Holocaust denial letter was written to one of Lafferty's small-press publishers. The distinction matters because the scope of one’s engagement with the archive determines how claims of completeness should be interpreted.

It is crucial to maintain a record of this material, as failing to do so risks the omission of evidence of Lafferty’s Holocaust denial—documented in his archived papers—from academically relevant works, such as Glyn Morgan’s dissertation. This is especially salient in that dissertation because Lafferty based the character Enniscorthy partly on himself; the Enniscorthy character is the subject of a fictional biography; The Three Armageddons of Enniscorthy Sweeny contains no depiction of the Jewish Holocaust; and archival documents show Lafferty explicitly denying that the Jewish Holocaust occurred.

Taken together, these facts provide an essential context for scholarship on Lafferty, particularly in Holocaust-related areas and for understanding how Lafferty reasons about human suffering, as in Past Master's nightmarish Cathead. And I have tried to point out elsewhere on this blog some of the ways his fiction codes antisemitic tropes.

At present, a university search for “Lafferty” and “Holocaust” brings up Mapping Planet Auschwitz: Non-Memetic Writing and the Holocaust in Anglo-American Fiction, where one will find Morgan’s conclusion that “Lafferty relativises the Holocaust as one of a series of holocaustic events, a chain of human madness which can be linked from the First World War, to the Second, and to the Third, which results in fiery nuclear Armageddon: a literal holocaust”

and

"Lafferty imagines an Adolf Hitler who pursues art over politics, as referenced by his ‘Brown Danube’ oil painting above. However, unlike Spinrad, Lafferty deemphasises Hitler’s significance in the twentieth-century. He avoids the Second World War and the Holocaust not by making Hitler a better artist, or an emigrant, but by defusing the circumstances that led to his politicisation, rise to power, and the climate in Germany which allowed him to assume the supreme role within the nation. He does this by affecting a greater series of changes stretching back to before the First World War, linking the major conflicts of the twentieth-century into a single timeline of warfare and struggle. In doing so, Lafferty aligns ‘The Three Armageddons’ far more powerfully with a structuralist view of history than Spinrad’s novel is able to, thus reassigning blame for the Holocaust from a single man (Hitler) and onto a wider failing of society which encompasses not just Germany but all of Europe, and indeed the world [emphasis added]" (134).

This reading may appear convincing and moving, but it conflicts with the archival evidence. For Lafferty, there was nothing there to relativise. No six million deaths. As he wrote: "if indeed six million Jews were killed (between a third and a half of the Jews in the World, and more Jews than in the maximum area ever controlled by the Germans), then they should have left a big hole in the total Jewish World Population; but they didn't."

One—albeit purely academic—reason the Holocaust denial issue matters is that it can rubbish the scholarship.

Without access to, or awareness of, the archival evidence, an academic may quite reasonably produce interpretations that, in hindsight, take on an unintended and jarring quality. For example, Morgan’s observation that “R. A. Lafferty finds a way to avoid all of the major global traumas of the twentieth century, yet still experience them” (127) reads very differently once Lafferty’s Holocaust denial is known—so differently that it can seem unintentionally grotesque.

The same applies to the subsection on Lafferty in his dissertation, “Misremembered Traumas by the Forgotten American Fantasist.” This is not a criticism of Morgan’s diligence or intentions, but an illustration of how new information can shift the meaning of earlier interpretations. The reason should be apparent: archival evidence can overturn the footing of earlier interpretations, whatever the intentions or diligence of the people who produced them. Few would knowingly set out to write a dissertation on Holocaust trauma in literature, only to later learn that their subject had expressed Holocaust denial.

If you hold a PhD in the humanities, you probably look back on your graduate work with mixed feelings—that is part of the normal growth process. But this situation is different. All academics share one constant: reliance on the scholarship of others. None of us can visit every archive, read every letter, or unearth every document ourselves. We depend on those with the deepest access and expertise to convey the essential facts, and it is reasonable—even necessary—to trust the person with the strongest reputation for knowledge of a particular archive.

Researchers should be aware of the antisemitism in Lafferty’s letters; the Holocaust denial propaganda materials in Box 4 of the Lafferty collection; his handwritten timeline of denialist literature; how he refers to Jews when the subject arises; and, in particular, the January 24, 1990 letter in which he explicitly rejects the Holocaust, explains why he never accepted it, and outlines his decades-long interest in denialism. This letter appears to have been prompted by a story he read titled “The Bigot,” and he seems to have intended it as a statement that he was not one. I have therefore asked the University of Tulsa to label these archival materials so that Lafferty’s Holocaust denial is unmistakable and easy to verify.

Ferguson's own commentary shows why such labeling matters. In discussing the character Dotty on his blog, he treats her repeated use of “the Old Jew” and “a debt-caller” as expressions of personal anguish rooted in a specific historical Catholic setting, and he distinguishes them from the author’s views. He writes, "I would balance this carefully against the other treatments of Jewish individuals in his works, and remind again that these are not the words of the author, but of the character he created . . . ." Read on its own, this interpretation is plausible. However, in the absence of archival context—particularly the denialist material—it can have the effect of insulating Lafferty from the implications of his text. Notably, Dotty was published by the same correspondent who received the January 24, 1990 letter. In this respect, the interpretation risks obscuring rather than illuminating the author’s ideology. Awareness of the denialist material is therefore not a peripheral supplement, but a necessary condition for analysis of these themes in Lafferty’s fiction and role in his biography.

This is an instance where new evidence significantly reframes earlier work; I’ve reached out to share the information with Morgan, and I have contacted the Science Fiction Encyclopedia regarding the entry cited by Morgan's dissertation, which I understand was written in part by Neil Gaiman. While I now have to rewrite parts of this blog, that is a small matter compared to the difficulty of having a dissertation on the record forever.

I do not know whether Ferguson and others overlooked the Holocaust denial material, read past it without recognizing its weight, judged it beyond their academic scope, postponed addressing it as too complex for open discussion, or saw only part of it because of limits on time or focus. Whatever the reason, it is an important aspect of Lafferty’s intellectual history that should be noted, as are other things he said that might be difficult to hear.

For example, in a letter to his correspondent Al Doty, Lafferty wrote, "there is a pretty good bunch of Blacks who are competent or better as writers and do not need any reverse discrimination to help them out. Steven Barnes is probably the best of them, or I may think so because I know him the best, but there's a dozen or so who are adequate, and people don't especially think of them as Black." One of the inadequate Blacks for Lafferty was Octavia E. Butler, now in the Library of America, which also issued the edition of Lafferty's Past Master edited by Andrew Ferguson. Lafferty wrote, "But Blacks in Science Fiction and Fantasy are favored with a sort of reverse discrimination. Octavia Butler has received accolades far beyond what is deserved by her unimpressive work."

From my perspective as an outsider to the Lafferty discourse community, the absence of any discussion of Lafferty’s antisemitism across the full continuum of his reception over the last ten years—from fan gatherings such as LaffCon to all published scholarship—leaves a gap in the public understanding of his work, regardless of whether that absence was intentional.

Lafferty’s work deserves close study. He was an unrepeatable literary genius—brilliantly original in genre fiction and formidable as a Catholic thinker. Yet this was also a Catholic mind that denied the Jewish Holocaust in the years after Nostra Aetate (October 28, 1965), when the Catholic Church formally repudiated the charge of collective Jewish guilt, but before We Remember: A Reflection on the Shoah (March 16, 1998). In the latter, the Catholic Church acknowledged its failures during the Holocaust, and it called for repentance. By this time, as I understand it, Lafferty was incapacitated in a nursing home in Broken Arrow, Oklahoma. Had he been able to read We Remember, his reply would almost certainly have been revealing and decisive for his legacy on the Holocaust issue.

For those now approaching Lafferty academically, I anticipate two main families of readings emerging in response to the newly public-facing problem of his antisemitism, each likely to develop along different lines:

Approach 1) Secular Quarantine A strategically secular reading says Lafferty’s views soured over time: late positions diverge sharply from the earlier self. It posits a break between the Catholic-intellectual strain of “traditional” antisemitism and the virulence of Holocaust Revisionism, emphasizing: (a) no antisemitic content in early correspondence; (b) the year he repeatedly gave as when he stopped writing; (c) the fact that his most troubling statements appear only after that date. By downplaying continuity, this approach lets the “never did accept” the Six Million line that Lafferty wrote in the Holocaust-denying letter to Dan Knight be absorbed gradually. Nasty Lafferty is Late Lafferty. Quarantine the problem for Lafferty Studies.

Approach 2) Theological/Continuity Integration A confessional reading rejects the rupture thesis and asserts continuity: the late statements extend long-standing commitments rather than contradict them. It situates Lafferty’s remarks within Catholic traditionalism—supersessionist motifs if not full supersessionism, anti-modern polemic, typological portrayals of Jews—reads irony and satire as technique rather than disavowal, and treats scattered early cues as seeds that later surface. On this view, Lafferty’s absolute Holocaust denial—preceding his embrace of IHR-style revisionism—expresses a historical skepticism consistent with his later IHR phase. The upshot is to absorb the offense into the unity of the oeuvre and the religion. Lafferty is Always Lafferty: Holocaust denial persists; only the intensity shifts. This sees the REALLY BIG critical problem as Holocaust denial itself, because that is what shapes something like the absence of the Holocaust in his literary work—not the revisionist IHR talk Lafferty learned to articulate from the late 1960s to the 1990s, which is a biographical issue relevant primarily to understanding how he came to express his ideas about Jews in personal letters. Reject quarantine and integrate the problem for Lafferty Studies.

This section will serve as a repository for posts on the subject, a directory of responses from others who choose to address the issue, and an overview of the evidence where relevant. I will do my best to document every instance of antisemitism I come across in Lafferty's archive, as well as share what I take to be the most significant passages, so that his readers have transparency and can better understand who he was on this issue.

[1] An earlier version of this post misstated a detail of Andrew Ferguson’s research process due to a word-processing error. In the linked interview, Ferguson says he has most of what he needs for a biography; the earlier version mistakenly rendered this as a statement that he had photographs of Tulsa archive materials and had not read them. That was incorrect. I have linked to the interview so Ferguson can speak for himself about his research process and how he came to work on Lafferty. I do not know whether he has photographs or has read every item in the Tulsa archive, and I have tried to make this clear throughout. I have always found Ferguson’s bibliographic work, both on his blog and in his publications, to be meticulous and invaluable. Because he is such a good and thorough researcher, I do not want to imply that he knew about the January 24, 1990, letter, that he deliberately withheld information, or that he is a sloppy researcher. My goal is to draw attention to Lafferty’s Holocaust denial materials and comments so that it can be known, identified, and accessible for future research, which I believe is in the good-faith interest of all Lafferty scholars and essential to understanding Lafferty’s Catholic fiction.

I. The Myth of the Six Million

II. The Three Armageddons of Enniscorthy Sweeny

III. Reading Lafferty Through Rosenfeld and Marcus

William Blake and R. A. Lafferty

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05/19/1989. To Paul de Vinny. "Yes, I am mystified and disgusted by the disproportionate number of "science fiction people" who are atheist, and I don't know how to counteract the tendency. Part of the explanation sounds anti-semitic, but I don't believe it is. Jews do make up a disproportionate number of science fiction people" and "when Jews lose their religion, they commonly become atheists. Catholics, for instance, when they lose their religion, usually become agnostic or indifferentists. Protestants usually become the milder sort of humanists."

01/24/90. To Dan Knight. Holocaust denial. Says he never accepted that the Jews had been murdered en masse. His Holocaust denial predates his encounter with Holocaust revisionism. Gives personal history. Says his hobby has always been history.

02/26/92. To Stephen Minch. Thoughts on the Dreyfus Affair and antisemitism. Writes, "The fear of being called an anti-Semite was then stronger in both France and England than it is now, if that were possible. And Dreyfus was more puzzled than anybody about the whole thing. He couldn't understand why people considered him Jewish when he hadn't been Jewish for four generations, and was in fact only one-sixteenth Jewish. But he had a smart Jewish lawyer to defend him."

02/26/1992. To Eastern Oklahoma Catholic Editor. "In recent months several articles and essays have appeared which argue that the Moslems and Jews should be able to live together in peace because they did it once before: in peace, in a golden era, a magic era of high attainment in every field of science and art and intellectuality and understanding. They lived in this golden age for about eight-hundred years in Iberia (Spain and Portugal and a few islands and scraps. This golden age began around the year 711 and faded away about 1470. But there was an unmentioned missing element in this joyous twosome of Moslems and Jews. With these two it was a two-legged stool. There had to be a third element. And in fact there had to be the Christian populace to be considered. These Christians lived in almost total slavery for eight hundred years," After body, concludes: "In the February 22 issue of the Eastern Oklahoma Catholic, there is a write-up titled 'Reconciliation to Set Right 500-Year Wrong.' The strange argument was that the eight hundred years of slavery had been right, and that the well-handled ending of it was a wrong. And there is a picture of sixteen persons, Catholics, Jews, and miscellaneous who all seem to be under the same delusion. / But all sixteen of them are wrong, some of them innocently wrong, some of them maliciously wrong. Pray for them."

04/09/1992. To David Jones, Eastern Oklahoma Catholic. Further interpretation of the history of Spain. Concludes: "And the Jew now has the right to quote the old verse of Alexander Pope: 'Yes I am proud. I should be proud to see / Men not afraid of God afraid of me."

09/09/93. To Dan Knight. "I'm even of the belief that a fair amount of racial prejudice is healthy."

03/24/1993. To Al Doty. "But blacks in Science Fiction and Fantasy are favored with a sort of reverse discrimination. Octavia Butler has received accolades far beyond what is deserved by her unimpressive work. If she were White she might not have been published at all. Samuel Ray (Chip) Delany on the top of the heap for several years a combination of fancy titles," etc. Lafferty also writes, "On the other hand, there is a pretty good bunch of Blacks who are competent or better as writers and do not need any reverse discrimination to help them out. Steven Barnes is probably the best of them, or I may think so because I know him the best, but there's a dozen or so who are adequate, and people don't especially think of them as Black."