But I hide hammers. I have several hammers hidden. A hammer is an advantage that you can use when you are driven into the next-to-final corner. A hammer is a sort of insurance. I make fictions as I am assigned to do, and many others also are carrying out collateral and equally weird fictions. But the others do not seem to play as many tricks as I play, they do not seem to hide as many hammers in their hurdles. I try to insure that the fictions that I am assigned to shall rema

Two opposite points on the rim of a rolling wheel cannot both be on the top at once: this is taken as an almost reasonable postulate. But they could both be on top at once if one of them were suppressed by Amnesia. —Matthew Woodbine Junior, in The Three Armageddons of Enniscorthy Sweeny The Three Armageddons of Enniscorthy Sweeny is difficult to discuss, even for those of us who know how magical it is. The difficulty lies in how much Lafferty packs into it. That informational

“I came ashore, swimming and wading through turbulent water. It was early morning. The shore was muddy with engendering mud, and full of promise. It was the year 1923, and I was a young man of no more than a quarter of a century of physical years. I went up that muddy shore and entered into the green and burgeoning years of my life. If I remember to do it, I can come back to that same shore, and to that same year, and have another sixty green and burgeoning years to my life.

“History is the peopled worlds. History is ourselves in our clearest aspect. Only in history do we find the substance that is our justification. History is the account that we will give to God when, on the last morning, He will ask us to give an account of ourselves in species and persons. Only in history do we find the clarity that is our purpose of being.” Today I want to sort out the events preceding Long John Tong Tyrone's planetfall in Annals of Klepsis. Readers will kno

There are the Kings: Godigisel and Respendial and Uldin the Hun. The ministers, the heresiarchs, the great ladies were all parts of the big picture. Sometimes the picture of the passion and death of the Empire will be the face of the crucified Christ: but often there will emerge the most fulfilled, the most shatteringly profound image ever, the laughing Christ of Creophylus. — The Fall of Rome The meaning of the references came clear with the examination of reproductions of c

Well, why did not the men of Kyklopolis get together in great numbers with many boats and torches and weapons and hunt out and kill this Grendel? Should such a peril be allowed to live? But this is to ignore who Grendel really was, to forget of what race he was the last surviving member. For Grendel, who had once been completely human, was of the race of Cain. Moreover, Grendel was not only the descendant but also the murderer of the murderous Cain. He had disregarded the Mar

No, I haven't broken my good resolution to stop writing. I finished the story Flaming Arrow on January 8, 1982. This was quite a while before November 7, 1984 (my 70th birthday) when I swore off writing. The book in which this appeared (Magic in Ithkar #2) had its first printing in December 1985 and was copyrighted by Andre Norton and Robert Adams in 1985. — Letter, 1987 “I’m impressed by your irrationality. It’s beyond anything I ever met with in my own time. I’m impressed b

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

Lafferty drew on ideas from Gnosticism for many of his most important short stories, from "Snuffles" to "The All At-Once Man" to "In the Turpenine Trees." Gaps in historians' knowledge of Gnosticism became grist for his metaphysical imagination throughout his writing career. I’d like to have a post on this blog where I can keep updating my understanding of this side of Lafferty’s work. That’s the purpose of this space. It will include a timeline of how the West has understood

I thought it would be fun to build a program that generates visual maps for R. A. Lafferty’s fiction and nonfiction. After a fair bit of trial and error, I now have a version of the code that does part of what I originally had in mind. As I create these story maps, I’ll be sharing them, most likely in unedited form for now, in the hope that others will find them helpful. You can interact with the story map by moving the nodes. The connection lines between nodes are adjustable