Hiroshi Inoue recently completed a Japanese translation of More Than Melchisedech (unpublished) and published this truly excellent commentary in a Japanese fanzine. The English translation below restores Lafferty’s original wording wherever Inoue quotes the novel. I agree with most of his argument, including his account of how the novels relate to the short stories. He lays it out with exceptional clarity.

Bix Beiderbecke, one of Smith's great interests I began to write late in life when I realized suddenly one day that I was leaving nothing at all in the world. All old bachelors come to this feeling sooner or later. Don't let it ever happen to you . . . — Lafferty, letter to Sheryl Smith, October 1, 1971 This will be of interest to about three people. Sheryl Smith, Lafferty’s first strong critic and his clever correspondent, ran a computer consulting business in the years befo

I wish to argue here that the recurring pattern of descent and ascent, expressed mythically as katabasis and anabasis, and metaphysically in Neoplatonism as proodos and epistrophe, is not only a formal analogy to Christian theology. Rather, it is decisively reconfigured and fulfilled in the doctrines of kenosis and theosis. In Christianity, this pattern ceases to be merely narrative or purely metaphysical. It becomes Christological and participatory, thereby deepening and ful

Three special treats of this ‘Little Golden Age’ were Cordwainer Smith, J.G. Ballard, and Arthur C. Clarke. Well, Smith died and Ballard lost a bit of his fine hand after a bit, but these were still the great treats. There was a sort of magic winking and blinking in half-a-dozen places. It would be hard to extinguish all those new and elegant sources, though it would be attempted. — “The Case of the Moth-Eaten Magician” J.G. BALLARD A beach without an ocean yet, A cartless h

A late-night thought. The readers I think of most often when working on Lafferty are Andrew Ferguson, Daniel Otto Jack Petersen, and Gregorio Montejo. Ferguson’s archival work is essential. His chief readerly contribution, so far, is to ask how fiction makes worlds. I think his main philosophical argument cuts off Lafferty from Catholic ontology. A subsidiary question, important to SF scholars and fans, concerns genre history; that is often where Ferguson’s readings come to r

Advanced Lafferty. What comes next won’t depend on it. Not much has been written about Aurelia, but of the handful of things said about it, by far the most interesting and intellectually strongest is Gregorio Montejo’s essay “Eudaimonism in R. A. Lafferty’s Aurelia,” which appeared in Feast of Laughter in 2015. Anyone who wants to read Aurelia seriously should understand its argument. As a teacher of mine used to say, firstest with the mostist criticism. Today I want to walk

"How about Plutarch’s Lives for the one book. No, it isn’t affectation to reach that far back. It is my belief that Plutarch invented the Novel as well as the biography in this. There were fifty short or medium-length novels here (the degree of fiction in them can’t be determined now) and they are good. He invented narration as distinguished from rhetoric and a few other things. He was the world’s best novelist (Balzac comes in second) and nineteen hundred years haven’t done

“People think I am being droll when I answer to the question ‘Who do you think is the best short story writer in the world’ — ‘I am.’ Yes, I'm partly being droll, but partly serious.”— Letter to Joye Swain, 1987 I’ve been putting together notes for a Lafferty syllabus, which means sequencing texts and sketching a few lectures, wondering whether a Lafferty course is feasible. My one rule on the blog is don’t waste a reader’s time, but I’m not sure how to say what follows quick

But thou, Bethlehem Ephratah, though thou be little among the thousands of Judah, yet out of thee shall he come forth unto me that is to be ruler in Israel; whose goings forth have been from of old, from everlasting. — Micah 5:2 But thou, Bethlehem Ephratah, though thou be little among the thousands of Judah, yet out of thee shall he come forth unto me that is to be ruler in Israel; whose goings forth have been from of old, from everlasting. — Micah 5:2 "Certainly we have hea

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

Short post. Quickly sketched thoughts. Gregorio Montejo (I assume) has posted an essay on Fourth Mansions. It is worth reading. Vastly stronger than his first one. I’m unconvinced that the Alumbrados serve as direct source material for the novel, though I wish they did; even so, the direction he points to by using them is sound. I may well change my mind if I find any evidence that convinces me. Part of the reluctance is that the Pythons need to be integrated into the Fourth

Following my request for a review of the materials, the University of Tulsa’s McFarlin Special Collections has updated its archival record: https://utulsa.as.atlas-sys.com/subjects/3870 https://utulsa.as.atlas-sys.com/subjects/4411 A word about this. The photograph of the Holocaust denial letter in the Antisemitism section was not reproduced from the University of Tulsa Special Collections, but comes from another source. Lafferty’s carbon of the letter is archived at Tulsa. S

“In conceiving a story or inaugurating a plot which involves threads weaving with threads, if the thread A, or viewpoint character, should figure with the thread B in an opening incident of numerical order n (with respect to the incidents in the conditions precedent) there must be invented a following incident n + 1 involving threads A and C; an incident n + 2 involving threads A and D; an incident n + 3 involving threads A and E; and so on up to perhaps at least n + 4 or n +

He welcomed them as one of the rarest and heartiest foods ever. They entered into him. Ah, the salt and the sulphur of them would stand him well in his crux hour when it came. By eating its brains, he would always have a certain mastery over this enemy. Advanced Lafferty today. Reading The Oxford Handbook of Biblical Monsters (2025) has me thinking again about Petersen’s idea of the ecomonstrous, which Petersen writes about in his dissertation. Lafferty fans who want to think

This post is a first attempt to chart Melchisedech Duffey’s peculiar sexual life and aspects of antisemitism in More Than Melchisedech, situating them within the blog’s broader exploration of neglected sides of Lafferty's fiction. It confines itself to presenting textual evidence, without advancing interpretation beyond highlighting the link between Melchisedech Duffey’s sexuality and antisemitic tropes in the Argo legend. In the novel, Duffey is blackmailed for pedophilia by

“People are easily fooled. But there are tests for reality." — The Three Armageddons of Enniscorthy Sweeny This will be the last I have to say about Lafferty’s Holocaust denial for a while, unless it becomes directly relevant to an argument about a specific story. I have thought a great deal about what an intellectually serious counterargument to my work on Lafferty and Holocaust denial would require, as any responsible person would. The first and most significant obstacle is

A Lafferty story is almost always told-not-shown. His characters are ridiculous larger-than-life personalities who say exactly what they are doing and why, stumbling through other-wheres and never-weres in prose that is abuzz with puns and paradoxes and enough said-bookisms to… but that is the point. He’s telling you a story minus the sly, aiming to please something deeper than the unconscious, deeper even than story-sense, trying to tickle something so fundamental you don’t

Sheryl Smith did not write much about Lafferty, but everything she wrote is worth looking at closely. Here is her most groundbreaking essay on him, along with diagrams illustrating how she views myth in his fiction.

"Rita, did you know that the Jews believe that the Jews are a handsome people," Cecelia Ching Brass jibed. "Really. And how odd it is. I found it out, quite by accident from a chance remark of Julius here. The implications of it open up an entirely new fantasy world, a world in which the Jews really are handsome, and everything likewise is upside-down." "I'm not sure what the Chinese think about the Chinese," Julius said, "but I have heard that the Irish really do believe tha

"The principal difference is that Lafferty plays them for laughs and sheer absurdity—his mode is the tall tale. If Paul Bunyan had not come first, Lafferty would have made him up." So here's a late-night Saturday rant after a nightcap or two. Once again, someone explained Lafferty to everyone in the Facebook Lafferty group, and it was what one would expect. Lafferty, teller of tall tales. Over there, that's Paul Bunyan. It puts me in mind of a savage moment from Douglas Nash