But one of the soldiers with a spear pierced his side, and forthwith came there out blood and water. John 19:34 “Your name is ape,” the man said, smiling in his pain. There are elements of sourness in Lafferty that surface in his eschatological thinking, and I haven’t worked out how to understand them. “And Name My Name” is bleak and beautiful. It denounces humanity. A figure who is certainly Christ—still bearing the wound from Longinus’ spear from which water and blood flowe

“I'm going to invent a cogitational meter later today,” Mary Mystic said,“to demonstrate that people are thinking more and deeper and straighter and with more invention, now that the several ‘Flatland Decades’ are over with and the mountains are generating again.”— In a Green Tree, Part 5 God promised neither the Golden Apes nor the Whales to be successors to Man, nor did He promise Man that he would have no successor. Inneall’s Ocean is only about ten thousand square miles i

" . . . just as Atrox devised one hundred and one tests by which one might know whether one was in a dream or in reality." In an interview, Michael Swanwick says something really interesting about Lafferty's novels. They are obscure not because of what they are, but because readers don’t yet have the reading protocols to decode them. The novels he has in mind often feature numerous characters (books like Arrive at Easterwine, The Elliptical Grave, and East of Laughter). As a

A brief update today. My preliminary map of the sources Lafferty mined for Okla Hannali is now live under Resources. Exploring Choctaw history has proved fascinating and humbling. I've also expanded the Serpent's Egg glossary and will continue refining it. With that housekeeping done, I want to revisit Past Master within the context of our AlphaFold era, a moment when, according to recent analyses, AI capability doubles roughly every five months. Past Master touches many them

Several million evolvate computers, computers who said that they were the only true born-again humans, accompanied the pilgrimage or tour instrumentally. Entities of races closely related to the humans were on the pilgrimage also, and fortunately most of these entities had the quality of ‘being present but not occupying space.’ And there were representatives of quite a few animal species, barons and dukes of bears and apes and asses and dolphins and most of the other intellig

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 of Invisible Alfred" Today, I was thinking about Lafferty’s image of pulling the hole in after yourself and its connection, in his imagination, to the mouth. The phrase recurs across his writings, often looking lighthearted, but it rarely is. It usually indexes metaphysical terror. But what kind of metaphysical terror? Not materialism. It

“It was like an old Puca comedy: one person falls into the quicksand, drags another in after him, then a third, then a fourth—until they all vanish to their deaths. Who could help laughing at a thing like that, especially when the actors were not Puca themselves but had been given parts in a play that was real?” The Reefs of Earth (1968) Reading large chunks of Lafferty is anything but straightforward. It’s not just that his thinking is wildly inventive, sharp, and lateral—i