There is an old canard that twins are less fertile than singletons. This probably has its source from the fertility difficulty that the heifer co-twin of a bull calf is likely to encounter. —Alan F. Guttmacher, Pregnancy and Birth, 270. canard, n. “A false or unfounded report or story,” especially “a fabricated report”; from the French, literally “duck.” And still there were the flaming ducks, all of them capons, stenchy and outrageous, thudding, thudding, thudding to earth d

You make one comment though that is as totally backwards as anything can be in this world: “There is very little real tragedy in life because so few people have the emotional capacity to live them . . .” But the fellahin people who make up ninety-seven percent of mankind do have almost total emotional capacity for real tragedy, and that is the ambient they live in. It is only the effete semi-literates (there are no true literates) who have become innoculated against tragedy (

“Well, I had been wondering about a thing in me, but I hadn’t thought of him as a bookworm. I hadn’t connected him at all with my new love of reading. ‘Are you a bookworm?’ I asked him. ‘Do I look like a bookworm?’ he asked. ‘Brainless oaf!’ As with the workman Pyoter, I had no précis type for this thing either. He was the other, the stranger. He was the outsider inside me. ‘What are you then?’ I asked him. (If someone is inside me I have theright to know who he is.) ‘I’m a s

This isn’t a question of turning you upside down or inside out. You have all been turned inside out for a very long time. The approximate dates of the turning are in my databanks; the reasons and circumstances of it are not. That is not your right surfaces that you have been seeing for this long time. Those are your blooming entrails on the outside of you, draped about you, looped over your pseudo-ears. Even more than on the physical do these analogies apply on the psychic pl

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

“Let some sick world be brought,” said Easterwine, as though to heal it with his shaping hands. He disappeared then. In 2018, Kevin Cheek started a thread on Facebook's East of Laughter asking whether Epiktistes was related to Epictetus, the Greek philosopher of the 1st and early 2nd centuries. I’ll address that first: does Epiktistes have anything to do with Epictetus? No. That’s silly. I’ll try again. What Epiktistes has to do with Epictetus is that both names might look at

Today, something brief on doggerel, memory, and “What’s the Name of That Town?”—one of Lafferty’s best Institute stories. It’s a farce, yes, but also a meditation on what happens when cultural memory breaks down. Lafferty’s poetry deserves more attention than it gets. Often dismissed as doggerel, it’s something more subtle—work that pretends to be simple but usually isn't. That he cared deeply about poetry is clear from a folder of unpublished translations. He took on these w

It seemed, until I thought of it a bit, that I had written quite a few novels, and many shorter works, and also verses and scraps. Now I understood by some sort of intuition that what I had been writing was a never-ending story and that the name of it was “A Ghost Story.” The name comes from the only thing that I have learned about all people: that they are ghostly, and that they are sometimes split-off. But no one can ever know for sure which part of the split is himself. Da

" . . . just as Atrox devised one hundred and one tests by which one might know whether one was in a dream or in reality." In an interview, Michael Swanwick says something really interesting about Lafferty's novels. They are obscure not because of what they are, but because readers don’t yet have the reading protocols to decode them. The novels he has in mind often feature numerous characters (books like Arrive at Easterwine, The Elliptical Grave, and East of Laughter). As a

Rock Candy Patent Drawing, 1881 There are many reasons to think of Lafferty not as a science-fiction writer but as a writer who wrote science fiction. These include how he entered the field, which ideas interested him, and how he used them. One of the strongest reasons, however, is his handling of exposition. Lafferty was ingenious with exposition, but he also seems to have been frustrated by its usual operation in the genre, especially the dreaded infodump. This helps explai

I recently saw someone online say, “There is always a snake in a Lafferty book,” and that is pretty much right. I like the snakes in Lafferty. For example, I really like the first line of "The Forty-Seventh Island": “Quincy, we will have to do something about the snakes in the girls' room,” Europa Phelan said. No one can doubt that Lafferty gets a lot of mileage out of his snakes. Sometimes they’re cartoons, like Sammy and Horace the Snake in Space Chantey. Sometimes they’re

“It was like an old Puca comedy: one person falls into the quicksand, drags another in after him, then a third, then a fourth—until they all vanish to their deaths. Who could help laughing at a thing like that, especially when the actors were not Puca themselves but had been given parts in a play that was real?” The Reefs of Earth (1968) Reading large chunks of Lafferty is anything but straightforward. It’s not just that his thinking is wildly inventive, sharp, and lateral—i

As a kid who couldn’t get enough sword and sorcery, I read every Offutt paperback I could find. Here’s Lafferty putting him on blast. From Arrive at Easterwine: “Those three guys with whiskers on their faces I don’t trust” (they were Nourse, Offutt, and de Camp), the Epiktistes extension said. “That middle one especially don’t trust. Is he not sometimes known as Randy Andy?” Lafferty loves to do this, sometimes far more subtly. Today, I noticed him taking a pretty funny kill