From a reproduction of the wonderful Hereford Mappa Mundi (ca. 1300 AD). The inscription on Sardinia: Sardinia Grece Sandaliotes dicta a similitudine pedis humani Corsica, ab oriente patet CLXXXVIII passuum, ab occidente CLXXXV , a meridie LXXVII, a septentrione CXX . [Sardinia is called Sandaliotis by the Greeks due to its resemblance to a human foot. It lies 188 miles from the east, 185 miles from the west, 77 miles from the south, and 120 miles from the north.] This room

A while back, I shared some thoughts on East of Laughter in response to a discussion about certain obiter dicta on pornography in an...

While thinking about Past Master (1968), I returned to Lafferty’s short story "Condillac’s Statue or Wrens in His Head." It offers another take on how to construct a Programmed Person. In the story, the philosopher Étienne Bonnot de Condillac (1714–1780) creates a statue out of frog-colored travertine granite on his estate near Beaugency. The occult doctor Jouhandeau helps him enliven this statue—“Old Rock” or “Rock-Head”—with sensory abilities one by one: smell, hearing, si

Rock Candy Patent Drawing, 1881 There are quite a few reasons for thinking about Lafferty not as a science fiction writer but as a writer who wrote science fiction, from the way he got started in the field to the ideas that interested him and how he approached them. But one of the strongest is exposition. He was ingenious with it. He also seemed frustrated by how it typically plays out in the genre with the dreaded infodump, which is why he writes dialogue that is so often co

Lafferty’s description and visual imagery are as idiosyncratic as every other aspect of the man's work. Today, I want to consider a trick he uses in nearly every piece of his fiction. It works somewhat like metonymy and somewhat like iconicity. Metonymy is a rhetorical figure in which one thing stands in for another with which it is closely associated (as in "the kitchen is working overtime," where "kitchen" represents the staff who work in it). Iconicity, on the other hand,

Wallpaper Design by William Morris (1834-1896) “So long as a man was graceful in every circumstance, so long as he had the inspiring consciousness that the chestnut color of his hair was relieved against the blue forest a mile behind, he would be serenely happy. So he would be, no doubt, if he were really fitted for a decorative existence; if he were a piece of exquisitely colored cardboard." —G. K. Chesterton, “William Morris and His School,” Twelve Types: A Book of Essays

"And they threw her down, and the wall was sprinkled with her blood, and the horses trod upon her." 2 Kings 9:33 "But one of the soldiers with a spear opened his side, and immediately there came out blood and water." John 19:34 "The bloodsmell is wrong, and it's too clotted." "Or Little Ducks Each Day" (1975) Last week, one of my favorite actors, Gene Hackman, died. One of his finest performances was as Little Bill Daggett in Clint Eastwood’s Unforgiven (1992), which culmin

G.K. Chesterton once wrote: “It is the partisans of divorce, not the defenders of marriage, who attach a stiff and senseless sanctity to...

Completed in September 1977 and first published in 1995, "Happening in Chosky Bottoms" is an intriguing Lafferty story. On one hand, we have the inexplicable nature of the Slew-Foot (Quick-Lout) people. On the other hand, we see the over-rationalization of the central murder plot involving Malcom. In a nutshell, the story follows a towering Slew-Foot youth nicknamed Chalky, who joins Lost Haven Consolidated High School’s football team and turns it into an unstoppable force. H

Lafferty completed "Horns on Their Heads" in June 1971, though even that date feels late. The writing belongs to the late 1960s, when he likely began working on it. There is much to admire here: Lafferty’s verbal brilliance is in full force, and the story offers an intense configuration of favorite themes: supernatural children, incantation, demonology, nature and machine, allusiveness, and apocalyptic stakes. This time, Lafferty gives us the Free Monitored World. Society is

Paolo Uccello's St. George and the Dragon (c. 1470) Then the great thing swooped and struck upward: a thousand kilograms of center bulk...

"I am a very disordered and very often a very bad man, but I know that there is this clarity and order and certainty: the Procession of the Creatures, the Distinction and Adornment of the World, the Final Things are all a part of it." Lafferty makes an exceptionally strong claim here. He doesn’t say he believes in the procession of the creatures or the distinction and adornment of the world. He asserts that he knows there is this clarity, order, and certainty. This is the str

Skulls from Hallstatt "The skulls made an impressive show in their niches on the rude wall." “It is only that definitions have lost their precision on Astrobe; and one duty of the Salic Emperor is to clarify and enforce them. – Charles the Six Hundred and Twelfth, Past Master Today I’ve been thinking about what Lafferty is doing with Goslar and the Salic Emperors. On planet Astrobe, Goslar is a defiant outpost in the Feral Lands outside the gilded mediocrity of Cosmopolis

Michelangelo Merisi da Caravaggio, 1571 – 1610, The Supper at Emmaus, 1601. "The light from the sky turned ordinary light black, and there were big, empty, grinning faces in the sky, like high cliffs that had always been there. Big faces that had always been present but never seen, except in the most intense flash of the insane lightning." Past Master, Chapter 7 I continue to work through another pass at Past Master . As I have said elsewhere, in my reading, Ouden is not a be

In the rough diamond between them was a country so harsh as to make even the feral strips look tame. This was deeply muscled country that...

"It was probably in 1309, in anticipation of the emperor’s coming to Italy, that Dante wrote his famous work on the monarchy, De Monarchia , in three books. Fearing lest he “should one day be convicted of the charge of the buried talent” and desirous of “keeping vigil for the good of the world,” he proceeds successively to show that a single supreme temporal monarchy—the empire—is necessary for the well-being of the world, that the Roman people acquired universal sovereign sw

I recently saw someone online say, “There is always a snake in a Lafferty book,” and that is pretty much right. I like the snakes in...

I admire Lafferty’s verse. It's often the reactor core of his imagination, where he puts so much pressure on the carbon of his...

One of my favorite directors is John Ford, and like many Ford fans, I have a special place in my heart for The Man Who Shot Liberty...

The Execution of Thomas More in 1535 by Antoine Caron (1521-1599) I’m working through Past Master to create an annotated outline, and a...