Peggy Marie Tyrone had long since taken it upon herself to keep Loretta Sheen in good repair. Loretta Sheen, the daughter of Barnaby and Monica MacLish Sheen, had died three and a half years before this, in 1959. — In a Green Tree, Lafferty's synopsis Some Barnaby thoughts. During the fall of 1978, Lafferty was looking for someone (anyone) to publish a completed masterpiece, the quasi-autobiographical tetralogy, In a Green Tree. To help the effort along, his agent, Virginia K

“Say, this is not quite the speech I intended to give. Nobody is throwing fruit or vegetables or eggs at me. But in the Indo-China War things are not muddy. There is no possibility of American gain or advantage. There are just not any lootable assets for us in Indo-China. We do not need their rice crop, we do not need their fish crop. Times were good when we intervened in accord with our treaty promise, and it was our involvement that turned times bad for us. The enemy does n

SF has never been very forward-looking. It is likely the least innovative of literatures. It has certainly never been daring, though several of its practitioners wear the ‘I am Daring’ badge hypocritically. It is a field compounded largely of patsies who can be led by nose-rings anywhere at all. — "The Case of the Moss Eaten Magician" I want to think a little about Lafferty's support for Joseph McCarthy and his refusal ever to believe that McCarthy had been wrong about commun

“I fear I did not fully understand all that the club comprised. I had not expected a live girl.” “I am a live one all right. Sign here and we’ll get rid of the business and then get down to the business. In a few days you’ll get an invoice for me and you can mail the remittance. And any gratuity (which I am sure you will be delighted to give) I will take in cash in the morning.” “Yes, this is an interesting club. It is very piquant for them to send a live girl to talk to.” “T

"This is power politics," Julius Brass explained it to James Tyrone. (They still talked together sometimes.) "I don't look like a Jew. I'm tow-haired and light-skinned and pug-nosed and freckle-faced. I'm an Anglo if there ever was one. And since my father changed the name from Messing to Brass we don't even sound Jewish. The kids don't recognize hardly any of us as Jews. But they know the niggers when they see them. And they know the Catholics because they go to the Catholic

“I'm going to invent a cogitational meter later today,” Mary Mystic said, “to demonstrate that people are thinking more and deeper and straighter and with more invention, now that the several ‘Flatland Decades’ are over with and the mountains are generating again.” — In a Green Tree, Part 5 God promised neither the Golden Apes nor the Whales to be successors to Man, nor did He promise Man that he would have no successor. Inneall’s Ocean is only about ten thousand square mil

Lafferty’s In a Green Tree contains the titles of many works and makes allusions to others. Here is a partial Green Tree reading list:...