Not long ago, someone I respect asked how to use the blog: what to read, where to begin. Look, I don’t know. This hobby thing now has more than 500 posts, plus other resources, totaling about 700,000 words. It took me a while to learn how to write about Lafferty. Part of that meant dropping academic cant and giving up the urge to write pretty, two habits that annoyed me in other people’s writing. To cover all the territory, the prose would need to be piston-like because Laffe

“It is your business to know everything!” she exploded at me. “We have rigged you for that. You cannot hide anything in you. I can steal it all out of you. And you have no censor.” “Oh yes. I have set one up for myself in myself.” “Then I will demolish it! I have never found anyone that I cannot invade. I will invade you as the devil is sometimes able to invade even the virtuous. I will invade you, machine! I will eat your barriers and drink your brains. And there is another

“Mad Man” could stand as an emblem of Lafferty’s work in the minds of many readers, even if it is not the story they first think of when they think of him. It is classic, quirky, light-seeming 1960s science fantasy, full of Lafferty’s humor and style. Read by itself, it is really fun. Read against the whole of his work, however, it becomes a fascinating story, especially for anyone interested in Lafferty’s developing thoughts about the relation between machines and human pers

“Monitors were set up, and their capacity calculated. It was very wide, but not infinite. All credible impressions, projections, motifs, sensories, theories, and cogitations were catalogued. They were revised over a long period, added to as early randoms appeared, and put into final clarified form. Then the door was closed and nothing else could be added.” Lafferty wrote the unpublished dystopian short story “Vestige” in 1963, between two of his strong stories, “Pani Planet”

[17] But because from some words following on these the Averroists wish to take Aristotle’s intention to be that the intellect is not the soul which is the act of the body, or a part of such a soul, we must even more carefully consider what he goes on to say. Immediately after he raised the question about the difference between intellect and sense, he asked in what intellect is like sense and how the two differ. Earlier he established two things about sense, namely that sense

" . . . whether persistent and inveterate wickedness might be changed, by habit, into a kind of nature, you, reader, must judge, that is, if in any way, both in these seen and temporal ages and in those unseen and eternal ages, that portion will be wholly discordant from that final unity and harmony. In the meantime, however, both in these seen and temporal ages and in those that are unseen and eternal, all those beings are arranged in order, by reason, according to the measu

This is because, in another sense, who [Origen] was and what he achieved have been hidden for the better part of the Christian era behind a false mythology and an even falser historical record. Though, as I say, he towers over the landscape of Christian thought, he has done so invisibly ever since his putative "condemnation" in 553 at the Fifth Ecumenical Council. — David Bentley Hart, Journal of Orthodox Christian Studies (2020) Advanced Lafferty. I have a theory about why t

There was the Asteroid Midas, a big-beaked bird of a gambler who could do things with card and dice and markers in his long talons that seemed unlawful. — Space Chantey (1968) They plucked that Asteroid Bird, the two of them, man and machine. He had been one of the richest and most extended of all creatures, with a pinion on every planet. They left the great Midas with scarcely a tail feather. When Tell and Gahn did business with a fellow now, they really did business. And th

“A book must be the axe for the frozen sea within us. That is my belief.” — Franz Kafka, in a letter to Oskar Pollak (January 27, 1904) I'm under the weather, taking a sick day, and thinking about The Three Armageddons of Enniscorthy Sweeny. This will be a response to a great Thomas Flight video I watched on YouTube. In my professional life, I push for colleagues to embrace new technologies, a stance that can be quite polarizing. Many of my colleagues take a “burn-it-with-fir

This second Why Epiktistes? post shares analytical tools for thinking about memory’s role in the Institute story cycle. The guiding idea is that Epiktistes should be conceived first and foremost as an anti-amnesia machine. He is built to combat forgetting. That is what makes him, in the deepest sense, Epi-Ktistec. I also want to comment on how the Institute materials relate to the Ghost Story. Lafferty began what became the Institute cycle during the prenucleation phase of th

SEVEN, FIVE, THREE, ONE, SIX, FOUR, TWO: “We can always leave.” Escapement. An odd word in watchmaking. I thought about it last year when my son Henry broke my trusty Hamilton, and I had to have the movement repaired. It wasn’t cheap, so I’ve learned to keep the watch well out of his reach. Imagine blowing up a balloon, then pinching its neck to let the air out in small, precise bursts, timed to the exact moment. That’s escapement. Swiss watchmakers use it to design the part

A brief update today. My preliminary map of the sources Lafferty mined for Okla Hannali is now live under Resources. Exploring Choctaw history has proved fascinating and humbling. I've also expanded the Serpent's Egg glossary and will continue refining it. With that housekeeping done, back to Past Master within the context of our AlphaFold era, a moment when, according to recent analyses, AI capability doubles roughly every five months. Past Master touches many themes, but it

Clone of RAL's Voice

Five more centuries were to pass before the structure of human relations had so changed that the use of this instrument met a more general need. From the sixteenth century on, at least among the upper classes, the fork comes into use as an eating instrument, arriving by way of Italy first in France and then in England and Germany, after having served for a time only for taking solid foods from the dish. — Norbert Elias, The Civilizing Process, Vol. 1, The History of Manners “