A while back, I shared some thoughts on East of Laughter in response to a discussion about certain obiter dicta on pornography in an...

While thinking about Past Master (1968), I returned to Lafferty’s short story "Condillac’s Statue or Wrens in His Head." It offers another take on how to construct a Programmed Person. In the story, the philosopher Étienne Bonnot de Condillac (1714–1780) creates a statue out of frog-colored travertine granite on his estate near Beaugency. The occult doctor Jouhandeau helps him enliven this statue—“Old Rock” or “Rock-Head”—with sensory abilities one by one: smell, hearing, si

Rock Candy Patent Drawing, 1881 There are quite a few reasons for thinking about Lafferty not as a science fiction writer but as a writer who wrote science fiction, from the way he got started in the field to the ideas that interested him and how he approached them. But one of the strongest is exposition. He was ingenious with it. He also seemed frustrated by how it typically plays out in the genre with the dreaded infodump, which is why he writes dialogue that is so often co

Lafferty’s description and visual imagery are as idiosyncratic as every other aspect of the man's work. Today, I want to consider a trick he uses in nearly every piece of his fiction. It works somewhat like metonymy and somewhat like iconicity. Metonymy is a rhetorical figure in which one thing stands in for another with which it is closely associated (as in "the kitchen is working overtime," where "kitchen" represents the staff who work in it). Iconicity, on the other hand,

Wallpaper Design by William Morris (1834-1896) “So long as a man was graceful in every circumstance, so long as he had the inspiring consciousness that the chestnut color of his hair was relieved against the blue forest a mile behind, he would be serenely happy. So he would be, no doubt, if he were really fitted for a decorative existence; if he were a piece of exquisitely colored cardboard." —G. K. Chesterton, “William Morris and His School,” Twelve Types: A Book of Essays

Critics sometimes distinguish two types of authorial distance: emotional detachment from characters and the gap between the implied author and the actual writer. These distinctions help clarify how unreliable narrators work. One reason Lafferty appeals to me is his premodern approach to authorial distance. He keeps considerable emotional detachment from his characters, which lets him get away with narrative hijinks that few other writers could pull off. At the same time, ther

"And they threw her down, and the wall was sprinkled with her blood, and the horses trod upon her." 2 Kings 9:33 "But one of the soldiers with a spear opened his side, and immediately there came out blood and water." John 19:34 "The bloodsmell is wrong, and it's too clotted." "Or Little Ducks Each Day" (1975) Last week, one of my favorite actors, Gene Hackman, died. One of his finest performances was as Little Bill Daggett in Clint Eastwood’s Unforgiven (1992), which culmin

G.K. Chesterton once wrote: “It is the partisans of divorce, not the defenders of marriage, who attach a stiff and senseless sanctity to...

Completed in September 1977 and first published in 1995, "Happening in Chosky Bottoms" is an intriguing Lafferty story. On one hand, we have the inexplicable nature of the Slew-Foot (Quick-Lout) people. On the other hand, we see the over-rationalization of the central murder plot involving Malcom. In a nutshell, the story follows a towering Slew-Foot youth nicknamed Chalky, who joins Lost Haven Consolidated High School’s football team and turns it into an unstoppable force. H

Lafferty’s short sentences fascinate me. For several weeks, I've tried to understand how they work, especially those sentences that carry...

Lafferty completed "Horns on Their Heads" in June 1971, though even that date feels late. The writing belongs to the late 1960s, when he likely began working on it. There is much to admire here: Lafferty’s verbal brilliance is in full force, and the story offers an intense configuration of favorite themes: supernatural children, incantation, demonology, nature and machine, allusiveness, and apocalyptic stakes. This time, Lafferty gives us the Free Monitored World. Society is

“Oddly, it is only the maladjusted who are able to stand the passages.” “Man, what a reversal in polarity!” A discussion point in Past Master is why only the maladjusted can withstand Hopp-Equation travel, which enables instantaneous space travel, but with extreme psychological and physical consequences. Most readers recognize the link between Hopp-Equation space and Jung’s concept of the collective unconscious, which Lafferty externalizes by turning it inside out. But other

When I started reading Lafferty’s novels carefully, I relied heavily on whatever overviews and blog posts I could find. Reflecting on...

Paolo Uccello's St. George and the Dragon (c. 1470) Then the great thing swooped and struck upward: a thousand kilograms of center bulk...

"I am a very disordered and very often a very bad man, but I know that there is this clarity and order and certainty: the Procession of the Creatures, the Distinction and Adornment of the World, the Final Things are all a part of it." Lafferty makes an exceptionally strong claim here. He doesn’t say he believes in the procession of the creatures or the distinction and adornment of the world. He asserts that he knows there is this clarity, order, and certainty. This is the str

Skulls from Hallstatt "The skulls made an impressive show in their niches on the rude wall." “It is only that definitions have lost their precision on Astrobe; and one duty of the Salic Emperor is to clarify and enforce them. – Charles the Six Hundred and Twelfth, Past Master Today I’ve been thinking about what Lafferty is doing with Goslar and the Salic Emperors. On planet Astrobe, Goslar is a defiant outpost in the Feral Lands outside the gilded mediocrity of Cosmopolis

"I've put in so many enigmas and puzzles that it will keep the professors busy for centuries arguing over what I meant, and that is the only way of insuring one's immortality." — James Joyce Joyce’s remark on puzzles, interpretation, and immortality raises a key question: can readers see literary works as both limitless play and intricate structures without losing what makes each compelling? And how does this relate to the experience of being overwhelmed by a difficult book—s

Michelangelo Merisi da Caravaggio, 1571 – 1610, The Supper at Emmaus, 1601. "The light from the sky turned ordinary light black, and there were big, empty, grinning faces in the sky, like high cliffs that had always been there. Big faces that had always been present but never seen, except in the most intense flash of the insane lightning." Past Master, Chapter 7 I continue to work through another pass at Past Master . As I have said elsewhere, in my reading, Ouden is not a be

In the rough diamond between them was a country so harsh as to make even the feral strips look tame. This was deeply muscled country that...

"But it isn't imagination that the Christ gold is of universal, though uneven, distribution. It is found forwards and backwards in time, it is found in macro and in micro space. It's on every level of geography and cognition, and in every medium. Homer is gold-speckled with the coming of Christ. Virgil knows everything except the name . . . . The Redemption is inextricably in all myth fabric since its happening and in most before." Someday, we will have a complete English edi