Lafferty's Door The things that the people were doing right now were a little bit extreme. Granted that they all loved one another. Granted that they were all present and were not doing these things behind each others’ backs. But the quick loving was going on a bit too hotly. And there shouldn’t have been that sort of mixing of generations. Well, everybody loved the several young girls who were there for the ‘evening’ (Mary Jill O’Trassy and Chiara and Teresa Benedict and

Some modern scientists feel a powerful affinity with their ancient intellectual forebears. While Anaximander’s understanding of the apeiron may be hard to grasp, some 20th-century physicists found it a helpful concept. In the 1930s and 1940s, physicists worked to turn quantum mechanics (a theory of particles and their interactions) into a theory of particles and fields (i.e. quantum field theory). But they encountered difficulties, as attempts to do so often led to the appear

“The footfalls are those of Panther and his panthers. And who is Panther? Panther is Pan-Therion or Pan-Therium, the All-Animal, the prototypical animal. He is the cool-fever-flesh from which all others diverge. He is the composite (‘you should have seen some of the things and pieces of things that went into him’) and the generating force. He is the red-clay which is clay-flesh. He is also the Dream-Master.” — The Three Armageddons of Enniscorthy Sweeny “The Panther or Pan-Th

And he said unto him, If they hear not Moses and the prophets, neither will they be persuaded, though one rose from the dead. “We won't be taken in by that, Mr. Sheen,” Hector O'Day said. “We're too smart for that.” “So was the little boy who got pulled all the way down to Hell nine years ago,” Anselm Sheen said. “He was a really smart boy. He reminds me of you, Hector.” Jack of diamonds, Jack of Diamonds, I’ve known you of old / You’ve robbed my poor pockets of silver

I have a theory though that a person constantly edits and updates his memories, and that the updated memories are at least as valid as the original memories. As to the original facts, they have no being except in the cloud of memories that shows approximately where they once were. — Letter What did he mean by 'really'? We had been up into reality, up into blue-sky reality almost all day long. Why the grubby question? Following a recent post, I have been thinking about memory

The psychoanalyst C. G. Jung (mostly in the essay Aion) argued that the human person was made up of the Ego, the Self, the Shadow, and those opposing twins the Anima and the Animus. That’s five persons in us, and he hints at quite a few more. But can these different persons in the PERSON be physically separate and visible? They can be, but not as a usual thing. But in certain hysterias and raptures and hilarities and exuberances and plain High Spirits (when the Ghost hangs hi

“The last story is always true until it is superseded.”— "Cabrito" (1957) “Gees, his eyes were bugged out when they cut him down. He wasscared to death by the ghost all right. That ghost made about a dozenmore hang themselves up there too.” “That many?” “Ghost in the Corn Crib” is an exciting piece of prenucleation period Lafferty, showing, in a nascent form, how his later preoccupation with consensus reality can be created, revised, and forked over a short period. It is

HILOBROW is an internet treasure, with its smart group of contributors and good taste. Two of my favorite features on the site are the lists of adventure fiction and adventures for young readers. The latter are adventures that preceded the YA marketing category's transformation of the publishing space into what it is now, impoverished. Of course, Lafferty didn’t write straight adventure fiction, and he didn’t write juveniles, but among his fragments and unfinished stories is

“Who’s playing? This is for real.” First published in If in March 1962, “Seven-Day Terror” is one of Lafferty’s better-known stories. It belongs to an unpublished cycle he set aside in the late 1950s. As a group, these stories show him hovering between slick fiction and genre writing. The pieces all center on a family named the Willoughbys—light entertainments and some of my personal favorites—satirical fables about a Catholic household both eccentric and happy, chaotic and f

Skeleton of the Tyrannosaurus Rex, in the American Museum of Natural History, from The Outline of History by H.G. Wells, Volume I, published in 1920 My heart leaps up when I behold A rainbow in the sky: So was it when my life began; So is it now I am a man; So be it when I shall grow old, Or let me die! — William Wordsworth, “My Heart Leaps Up” “After him! After him!” Bernard Sheen cried out. — My Heart Leaps Up, Chapter 1 “What Big Tears the Dinosaur’s” is one of the quietes

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, the ideas that 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 frustrated by its usual operation in the genre, especially the dreaded infodump. This helps explain why his