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

Telez: Obviously, you know men, how evil they are. Only God is good. Cambreau: But the good in man is God, Telez. Telez: Only God is good. Only God can forgive. They stole my crucifix, Cambreau. Without it, I’m lost. I’m afraid. Cambreau: A crucifix is a piece of wood, Telez. Only a piece of wood. The miracle is not in the wood, but in the heart. — Strange Cargo (1940) Time after time mankind is driven against the rocks of the horrid reality of a fallen creation. And time af

But the extended Group of Twelve did begin to get a grasp on reality that afternoon and night. They learned, from sources not completely suspect, that the world is indeed built on a substratum of reality, that there is a genuine and ringing reality beneath all things, that there are favored places and circumstances where everything is endowed with detailed reality, even the interiors of atoms. They also learned that they themselves were outside of reality, that they had never

“Monitors were set up, and their capacity calculated. It was very wide, but not infinite. All credible impressions, projections, motifs, sensories, theories, and cogitations were catalogued. They were revised over a long period, added to as early randoms appeared, and put into final clarified form. Then the door was closed and nothing else could be added.” Lafferty wrote the unpublished dystopian short story “Vestige” in 1963, between two of his strong stories, “Pani Planet”

“The children, Austro and Loretta and Mary (none of them is more than a child or at most an adolescent), are close kindred, closer to each other, perhaps, than to us. It is common, perhaps universal, that children are of a slightly different race (I mean it literally) than they will later become. But it is all right with them.” “When were the several decades left out of United States history, Barnaby?” Cris Benedetti asked him. “Early, and recent, and present, for I rather su

"What do you do when you have just hanged a man? Why, the man himself had showed us what to do. Besides, a future kind of man doesn't leave much of a hole in the present." I've also sent you three other endings to it, designed so you can use any of the four page 16's here and throw the others away. Or, if none of these endings will do it any good, and if any of your sharpies can design an ending to make it sell, I'll split the proceeds with him. — Letter to A. L. Fierst, June

“Looking at the Japanese from the outside (as I must) it seems that one of your finest literary entertainments and pleasures is the ‘Ghost Story’. And the essence of the Ghost Story is the juxtaposition of horror and fun, or reality and dream state, of the familiar suddenly gone strange and weird, of the loved and cherished suddenly turned frightening, and of the comic standing up like a giant among the various realities and rationalities.” “I seldom write ‘ghost stories’ pe

I’ve been thinking about the dynamics of Gnosticism/eschatology and R. A. Lafferty lately, so here’s a quick sketch, more a prompt than a full argument, with a way in. Philip K. Dick and Lafferty share an obsession: the twentieth-century recovery of Gnosticism as the problem of modernity. Hans Jonas is the obvious touchstone; both writers almost certainly knew his work. What interests me is where they split once you ask what “Gnosticism” means under modern conditions. How muc

Though more than half of mankind does not believe in the ultimates and basics, surely less than five percent of the Science Fiction People have any belief at all in what is real. Science Fiction is, for ninety-five percent of the people who indulge in it, a surrogate “True Belief,” in things from which the truth has been carefully removed. It is a “True Belief” in a false religion, one without dimension. — “True Belivers” (Prose Statement) The city is built To music, therefor

“But we haven’t any wings, father,” Job Salto protested. “You have feathers, and feathers are certainly an intimation of wings. Some of you even have a few elbow-feathers. I will call them pinion-feathers, and perhaps your elbows will have turned into wing-pinions by tomorrow.” But Darwinism and all the denials that make it up does give silly and evil answers; and it is guilty of Mistakes of Interpretation against dozens of sciences as well as against the Word of God. — unpub

In the case of the Effigy History of Music and its author, there is a correspondence and mutual clarification between creation and creator that is not to be found in the Effigy History of Mountains, for instance. With almost any musical instrument, Karl Effigy can play out the clarifications of the statements in his History of Music. But Karl Effigy can not, to the same extent, clarify the obscurities of his History of Oceans or his History of Continental Upthrusts. And yet h

Philosophy today. Lafferty pretty clearly distrusted attempts to draw a hard line between science and everything else. In the philosophy of science, the question of where and how to draw that line is called the demarcation problem. Today’s story gives it a suitably shaggy form: the line between sheep and goats, kids and lambs. People want such a line for all kinds of reasons. A major one is rhetorical. Scientists themselves may go on quite merrily doing their disciplinary wor

“No one has ever really slaked his thirst in the bogus waters of reality. But almost everyone has imagined that he has. And the imagining is just as good. It was once said that subjectivity and objectivity were opposite sides of the same coin. Now we know that they are the same reverse side of the same coin, and the face of the coin is blank.” The Unique Media Imagination of Lafferty It would be a fun project to curate a chrestomathy of R. A. Lafferty’s thoughts on media, dra

“A book must be the axe for the frozen sea within us. That is my belief.” — Franz Kafka, in a letter to Oskar Pollak (January 27, 1904) I'm under the weather, taking a sick day, and thinking about The Three Armageddons of Enniscorthy Sweeny. This will be a response to a great Thomas Flight video I watched on YouTube. In my professional life, I push for colleagues to embrace new technologies, a stance that can be quite polarizing. Many of my colleagues take a “burn-it-with-fir

Teresa was an attractive girl. She had a cute trick of popping the smallest rat out of her mouth so it could see what was coming into her stomach. She was bulbous and beautiful. “Like a sackful of skunk cabbage," Bascomb murmured admiringly in his head, and then flushed green at his forwardness of phrase. Teresa had protuberances upon protuberances and warts on warts, and hair all over her where she wasn't warts and bumps. “Like a latrine mop!" sighed Bascomb with true admira

“There is Cavour. He has hardly begun in the world, but look how well-developed his web is. There is Lord Acton in England. There is Montalambert. There is poor Lamennais who will officially go to Hell. There is Mordecai or Marx who has been spinning a web in Paris and other places. Notice the exceptionally long anchor lines of his web, though the body of his web will always be paltry.” — The Flame Is Green (1971) “There is a secret society of eleven persons that is behind al

Who was Arpad Arutinov? We may never know, but he left us with a puzzlingly heterodox work, The Back Door of History, the definitive version of which is the magisterial Second Revised Edition. Arutinov effected an epistemological break with conventional historiography and the natural sciences, his thesis being that consensus reality is almost invariably a lie and that the front door of empirical evidence and rational analysis will always be insufficient for comprehending phen

Some advanced Lafferty. I find Not to Mention Camels a hard book. Its components are easy enough to understand, but understanding what Lafferty is doing and how it fits together is challenging. One way to model the main conflict is to map it as being directly about good versus evil. Another is to step back and see it as a clash between fundamentally different and incompatible power systems, each vying for dominance within the derivative media bubbles of non-Prime realities. T

“One would, however, like to say: existence cannot be attributed to an element, for if it did not exist, one could not even name it and so one could say nothing at all of it.—But let us consider an analogous case. There is one thing of which one can say neither that it is one meter long, nor that it is not one metre long, and that is the standard metre in Paris.—But this is, of course, not to ascribe any extraordinary property to it, but only to mark its peculiar role in the

Some years ago, being with a camping party in the mountains, I returned from a solitary ramble to find everyone engaged in a ferocious metaphysical dispute. The corpus of the dispute was a squirrel—a live squirrel supposed to be clinging to one side of a tree-trunk; while over against the tree's opposite side a human being was imagined to stand. This human witness tries to get sight of the squirrel by moving rapidly round the tree, but no matter how fast he goes, the squirrel