“History is the peopled worlds. History is ourselves in our clearest aspect. Only in history do we find the substance that is our justification. History is the account that we will give to God when, on the last morning, He will ask us to give an account of ourselves in species and persons. Only in history do we find the clarity that is our purpose of being.” Today I want to sort out the events preceding Long John Tong Tyrone's planetfall in Annals of Klepsis. Readers will kno

Sometimes one caught sight, upon a bell tower, of an enormous head and a bundle of disordered limbs swinging furiously at the end of a rope; it was Quasimodo ringing vespers or the Angelus. Often at night a hideous form was seen wandering along the frail balustrade of carved lacework, which crowns the towers and borders the circumference of the apse; again it was the hunchback of Notre-Dame. Then, said the women of the neighborhood, the whole church took on something fantasti

James Gurney prelim for the cover of Annals of Klepsis "I suppose that I believe in another sort of a surreality or super-reality, but it would have to be on a wider basis than the encounters of Myself and me." Lafferty was notorious for not caring much about how he dressed, a detail frequently noted in convention reports and personal memories. I’ve often wondered if his general lack of interest in his book covers and illustrations was connected to this. In an interview, he s

In Germany, Remarque’s All Quiet on the Western Front, published in 1929, was plainly a post-novel in a postfictional form. But the structured world did not end everywhere at quite the same time. In the United States there was a brilliant “last hurrah” of novels for several decades after the fictional form had disappeared in Europe, and Cozzen’s By Love Possessed, published in 1957, might still be considered as a valid fictional work. That special form of fiction, the Short S