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

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,

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...

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...

I love to sail the ocean quaint, I love the waves that rush-o. I love to paint with sightless paint, I love to whack my brush-o. "Ballad...