"There's a piece here on Pete Teilhard putting him into context as a talented science fiction writer with a talent for outré burlesque. The Brainworld Motif was overworked when he tackled it, but what a shaggy comic extravaganza he did make of it! And there's Muldoom, Zielinski, Popper, Gander, Aichinger, Whitecrow, Hornwhanger—we owe so much to the juice of the cultists! In the main line there are whole congeries and continents of great novels and novelists." — "Thus We Frus

“It is your business to know everything!” she exploded at me. “We have rigged you for that. You cannot hide anything in you. I can steal it all out of you. And you have no censor.” “Oh yes. I have set one up for myself in myself.” “Then I will demolish it! I have never found anyone that I cannot invade. I will invade you as the devil is sometimes able to invade even the virtuous. I will invade you, machine! I will eat your barriers and drink your brains. And there is another

This second Why Epiktistes? post shares analytical tools for thinking about memory’s role in the Institute story cycle. The guiding idea is that Epiktistes should be conceived first and foremost as an anti-amnesia machine. He is built to combat forgetting. That is what makes him, in the deepest sense, Epi-Ktistec. I also want to comment on how the Institute materials relate to the Ghost Story. Lafferty began what became the Institute cycle during the prenucleation phase of th

“Let some sick world be brought,” said Easterwine, as though to heal it with his shaping hands. He disappeared then. In 2018, Kevin Cheek started a thread on Facebook's East of Laughter asking whether Epiktistes was related to Epictetus, the Greek philosopher of the 1st and early 2nd centuries. First: does Epiktistes have anything to do with Epictetus? The novel gives us a more direct explanation of the name. Epiktistes calls himself “the shaping one, the creative one.” That