Torcon II, the 31st World Science Fiction Convention, was held in Toronto over the Labor Day weekend of 1973, opening, as it happens, fifty-three years ago today. It was there that Lafferty won his only Hugo Award for "Eurema's Dam," in a tie with Frederik Pohl and C. M. Kornbluth's posthumous collaboration "The Meeting." It was the first tie in that category's history. Lafferty always expressed embarrassment over winning the Hugo for a story that he didn’t consider to be one

Monster movies, philosophy, religion, classical art, puns, horror stories, linguistics, science fiction—how does he account for this quirky range of interests? Lafferty said, “I’m kind of a quirky guy.” And here we are . . . at the lake. Swan Lake is so beloved by the City of Tulsa, the water was drained out of it. The old lake was extensively renovated—dug deeper, reshaped, landscaped. When the land was refilled, the lake’s caretakers anchored wooden duck decoys in the water

Spring Break here in Houston, so I'm off to Tulsa to do some more work on Lafferty. The blog will be quiet for a few days.

Following my request for a review of the materials, the University of Tulsa’s McFarlin Special Collections has updated its archival record: https://utulsa.as.atlas-sys.com/subjects/3870 https://utulsa.as.atlas-sys.com/subjects/4411 A word about this. The photograph of the Holocaust denial letter in the Antisemitism section was not reproduced from the University of Tulsa Special Collections, but comes from another source. Lafferty’s carbon of the letter is archived at Tulsa. S

A short note today. This is a fun purchase: an edition of the Grolier books that Hugh Lafferty bought for his son. It had a profound influence on RAL’s imagination—he said he remembered almost every word of it—and it’s still a delight to flip through. If you’re interested, you can look it up online here. Fascinating for those interested in ethno-essentialism as Lafferty learned it. It is a window onto the world that ended.

“People are easily fooled. But there are tests for reality." — The Three Armageddons of Enniscorthy Sweeny This will be the last I have to say about Lafferty’s Holocaust denial for a while, unless it becomes directly relevant to an argument about a specific story. I have thought a great deal about what an intellectually serious counterargument to my work on Lafferty and Holocaust denial would require, as any responsible person would. The first and most significant obstacle is

In thinking about Lafferty's denial of the Jewish Holocaust, one of the more curious items in the Tulsa archive is a letter sent to Lafferty by a founding member of the Remnant of Israel. At the time Lafferty received the letter, the small Jewish group was based in central Kentucky. It opens a window onto an interesting corner of religious life: the world of Jewish converts to Catholicism. The Catholic Church has long described itself as Israel or the Israel of God. Yet it’s