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

Posed and “Injun’d up” in war bonnets. “Your analogy is a little strained,” Mary Mabel said. “Those Indians we saw in Florida and the ones at Atlantic City had war bonnets, and they couldn't very well have been the kind of Sioux you said. And just last night on the TV in the motel, those Massachusetts Indians put a war bonnet on the President and called him the Great White Father. You mean to tell me that they were all phonies? Hey, who's laughing at who here?” You can tell a

Condillac angrily beat on the lower part of the statue with his leaded cane, breaking off toes. “I will not be lectured by a rock!” he crackled. “You have not these ideas originally, and mature brain matter will reject such. Therefore, you have them not! Reason is the thing, Statue, rationality. We promulgate it. It spreads. It prevails. The tomorrow world will be the world of total reason.” “No, it will be the Revolution,” said Rock-Head. “A world condemned to such short far

A tour of the forty-seven planets in Lafferty’s story and the people, beliefs, and fashions behind their names.

“Say, this is not quite the speech I intended to give. Nobody is throwing fruit or vegetables or eggs at me. But in the Indo-China War things are not muddy. There is no possibility of American gain or advantage. There are just not any lootable assets for us in Indo-China. We do not need their rice crop, we do not need their fish crop. Times were good when we intervened in accord with our treaty promise, and it was our involvement that turned times bad for us. The enemy does n

SF has never been very forward-looking. It is likely the least innovative of literatures. It has certainly never been daring, though several of its practitioners wear the ‘I am Daring’ badge hypocritically. It is a field compounded largely of patsies who can be led by nose-rings anywhere at all. — "The Case of the Moss Eaten Magician" I want to think a little about Lafferty's support for Joseph McCarthy and his refusal ever to believe that McCarthy had been wrong about commun

“It is inconceivable, that inanimate brute matter should, without the mediation of something else, which is not material, operate upon and affect other matter without mutual contact…That gravity should be innate, inherent, and essential to matter, so that one body may act upon another at a distance, through a vacuum, without the mediation of anything else, by and through which their action and force may be conveyed from one to another, is to me so great an absurdity, that I b

Colonel Zornig instituted flogging to show the Pani thathe was serious about them keeping their places. He didn'tknow if it did any good. The Pani grinned when they werewhipped, and they grinned about it. “Have you people no sense of pain?” he questioned. “Man colonel, we sure don't like the stuff,” Ieska said. “But you grin when you're whipped.” “The happy grin is a convention of your own sort, Ibelieve. With us the grin doesn't mean the same thing.” “What does it mean then?

Lafferty is pretty divisive among readers, probably more so today than half a century ago: either you’re a fan of his stuff or you ain’t. I’m not a fan myself, really, but I’ll try anything once (or even twice). In the case of Lafferty it’s mainly because he’s Quirky™ that he has a love-him-or-hate-him reputation, although this same quirkiness also threw him into the midst of the New Wave, despite being politically and socially conservative and also already middle-aged, being

“Monitors were set up, and their capacity calculated. It was very wide, but not infinite. All credible impressions, projections, motifs, sensories, theories, and cogitations were catalogued. They were revised over a long period, added to as early randoms appeared, and put into final clarified form. Then the door was closed and nothing else could be added.” Lafferty wrote the unpublished dystopian short story “Vestige” in 1963, between two of his strong stories, “Pani Planet”

“The vulgar crowd always is taken by appearances, and the world consists chiefly of the vulgar.” — Niccolò Machiavelli Castlereagh served on many committees and national forums. His heading-up of any body guaranteed its integrity and success. No president felt properly inaugurated unless Castlereagh stood by his side. His was the most sought-after endorsement in the country. He was Respectability. “The Man With Aura” was first written in 1961, went through several iterations,

You make one comment though that is as totally backwards as anything can be in this world: “There is very little real tragedy in life because so few people have the emotional capacity to live them . . .” But the fellahin people who make up ninety-seven percent of mankind do have almost total emotional capacity for real tragedy, and that is the ambient they live in. It is only the effete semi-literates (there are no true literates) who have become innoculated against tragedy (

For the end of the world was long ago, And all we dwell to-day Like children of some second birth, Like a strange people left on earth After a judgment day. For the end of the world was long ago, When the ends of the world waxed free, When Rome was sunk in a waste of slaves, And the sun drowned in the sea. — G. K. Chesterton, The Ballad of the White Horse, Book I But we have divine sanction and assurance that the Church will endure to the end of the world, it is said. No, we

The Encyclopedia Britannica, Vol 13 (1894) “Dammit, fat man, I will ask questions and I won't hide. Now tell me what the four sorts of creatures are. I'm not stupid. That's only the permanent impression I leave.”“Oh, the four sorts of creatures that surround the Castle are the Pythons, the Toads, the Badgers and the Unfledged Falcons.”“Oh what botching! Unbotch it, Bagley. Where do you get your drivel?”“I have it anciently from my own ancient person and position. And beyond t

On August 8, 1971, a book by Lafferty received a rare notice in The New York Times Book Review. The review drew attention to the heady blend of “politics, poetry, [and] magic” in The Flame Is Green and noted the bright splashes of humor threaded through its moral symbolism. Unfortunately, the final two volumes of the Coscuin tetralogy remain unpublished. Taken as a whole, the Coscuin novels constitute a major work, worthy of being set alongside Argo and Green Tree. Until that

Today we have naming of parts. Yesterday, We had daily cleaning. And tomorrow morning, We shall have what to do after firing. But today, Today we have naming of parts. — Henry Reed, "Naming of Parts" (1942) An opinion. It is unhelpful critically, as a matter of Lafferty-talk, to call him reactionary, and I mean to make a case for that. No one needs to be told that the word reactionary is a political insult. That is beside the point. The problem is that it fails to touch on wh

“No, no, our heads don't itch at all,” Horace Rand protested. “The Pruritus-meters are running and they say that your heads do itch,” the chief of the WHEW crew said. “This Boding Itch” is not widely read, but the in-story appearance of Arpad Arutinov makes it a treat. Lafferty readers know that Arutinov is one of the great paratextual reservoirs of Lafferty’s conceits, a scholar-character who usually appears only in headnotes or passing references. Here, he steps out of his

Bernard Baruch with JFK The Three Armageddons of Enniscorthy Sweeny is so damned slippery. “It is slippery, General, slippery,” Austro said modestly. There will probably never be a consensus about it—how it works, what it does, what it says. The book overloads the mind. It arrests thought. It does so deliberately, aggressively. That is why serious Lafferty readers should think hard about it rather than settle for confusion as an endpoint. Aggressive Lafferty is interesting La

The skull of Cardinal John Morton, patron and benefactor of Thomas More "Only a God can save us."— Martin Heidegger, interview with Der Spiegel (1966; published 1976) I have been thinking about something Daniel Otto Jack Petersen recently said: that he found it difficult to get into Lafferty’s Fourth Mansions (1969) because of its conspiratorial theme. Unlike Petersen, I am probably too quick to assume that all social organization is impossible without extensive conspiracy, b