Oh hang the cliffs with corpses nailed, For revel and for banger. Our enemies are here impaled In Cliff-and-Mountain-Hanger "Song of the Traitors of Tarshish" “We here are seven moral buzzards, yes. And we are up against an evil so enormous that only we evils can even see it.” Haunter of Moons and The Giant Ratchet of Sumatra were round-robin collaborations in which members of Oklahoma Science Fiction Writers (OkSFW) took turns continuing a story. OkSFW began in 1977, when C.

I have total freedom to do whatever I want to do, but at this point in time I am enjailed in a pokey or slammer in Boondocks New Jersey. — “The Wheel and the Shoosh” (unfinished draft) Lafferty was extremely good at getting the most out of his drafted material and ideas. Almost everything gets used, as if he were dealing with a buffalo. Over the twenty-plus years of his writing life, as he turned out the huge corpus, he seems to have made most of it work. There are the unwrit

“As to the ‘Square Hills of Quintana Roo’ (dammit [. . .] you’ve got my typewriter upset again), I loved that title but I DON’T believe I ever actually wrote the piece. The square hills were the strange pyramids in Yucatan, believed by some archeologists to be older than the pyramids of Egypt.” — Letter, 1993 MAYA - YUCATAN setting novel. The HUITMANNA, bearded QUOTZO, still lives, and the civilization is still thriving under jungle shades. — Notes The Square Hills of Quinta

When the Abebaios Block (the Hesitation Block) had been removed from most human minds (usually by simple childhood metasurgery), people began to make decisions faster, and often better. The "Block" had been a mental stutter. When it was understood what it was, and that it had no useful function, it was done away with. And individuals sharpened up as if they had been gone over by a honing stone. Future readers are lucky that so much of Lafferty’s writing process survives, thou

This is a very miscellaneous post about a text I have wanted to write about for a few months: To Aurelia With Horns. It can hardly be called a version of Aurelia, but it is a kind of drafting out of ideas that were later repurposed for it, even if 90 percent of those ideas were drained away. There is zero St. Thomas Aquinas here, which will be surprising for anyone who has read Aurelia. Altogether, it is one of the strangest Lafferty documents that I have read. Enough of it s

Casey's verses are all doggerel . . . His musical compositions hide a greatness, but they hide it well. His drawings are all comic, but only a few of them are meant to be. Let us consider the drawings on the opposite page: (For technical reasons, there is no drawing on the opposite page, but Schrade's description will suffice.) This supposed itself to be a drawing of Hell, but it is a second-hand drawing of a second-hand Hell. We believe that, in most respects, it is authenti

“Yes, basisphaira as you call it, baseball has been played at least seven hundred years,” old Josh told them, and he began to put a story together about old bingles and bunts and bases on balls. “The first regular team was a barnstorming team named The House of David. That was before a regular league was established. The House of David boys were bearded and they had a lot of hokus to them; but they could play baseball. They beat every town team up and down every valley and co

The first of a series of posts. For about a month, I have been typing up a Lafferty compendium, which is full of fascinating material: a partially written Camiroi story about a rhino fair, clues to the “Men Who Knew Everything” story sequence, an abandoned sequel to “Slow Tuesday Night,” reasonably worked out stories such as "The Wheel and the Shoosh" about the invention of time/being and space, abandoned poetry, where Lafferty derived titles (“And Mad Undancing Bears”), how

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 (

Lafferty’s ontological distinction between characters and persons is underappreciated in part because modern ideas of personhood have been shaped by mass-mediated character and by the categories of modern psychology. The modern person thinks nothing of bumping into the Narcissist or the Borderline, but would be taken aback by bumping into Vice. Daniel Otto Jack Petersen has pointed out that an interesting parallel to Lafferty’s work is the medieval dream vision. This strikes

Voltaire They had been having a hard time waking Voltaire up and keeping him awake. But, once he understood that it was one of his highest desires really being presented for him, he was able to stay awake pretty well; and he cackled and carried on like a person a hundred and fifty years younger than himself. But it takes a long time to strangle a man with entrails as slick as those were. Fourteen choruses of Grave-Stone Rock were done while it was going on, and one of those

Where is Eden PHISON qui circuit omnem terram Hevilath ubi nascitur aurum[which circles all the land of Havilah where gold is born] . . . Layout Cappadocian Highlands and toward Ararat. The east fork of the big bend of the Euphrates was once stolen from the Tigris. — Lafferty, note on the back of Sommerville Map — Island — Treasure: Map Gives 16 S 118° 35' 18" E which is antipodal to 16° N 61° 24' 42" W. Map location would show about 700 miles south of East end of Java and no

Andrew Ferguson’s view of how L.H. fits in Lafferty’s early career development as a writer seems right to me on all the key points. This kind of bibliographic work is Ferguson’s strength. Lafferty also made it easy for us because he often wrote on his MS his submission histories with dates, and he kept note cards. By 1961, he had written Dotty and Archipelago, though Archipelago had not taken final form. He was starting to think about how to bring characters scattered across

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

Paul Saka’s article on “Been a Long, Long Time” (1966/1970) argues that Lafferty’s target in that story is evolution. I touched on this in an earlier post, but since then, I have had Lafferty and evolution on my mind. Today I want to turn to his unpublished “Claudius and Charles.” The story doesn’t exist in the finished form that Lafferty usually achieved at the end of his writing process. Still, it is an intriguing story—arguably the most savage fictional statement he ever m