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

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

“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subtle—work that pretends to be simple but usually isn't. That he cared deeply about poetry is clear from a folder of unpublished translations.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. D

" . . . 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

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

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...

“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...