Álvar Núñez Cabeza de Vaca But the high pageant would never be over for the four travelers. And as for reality, who is to say that the high road is less real than the low one? — Esteban I added a tool for reading Esteban that might be helpful if you want to think about this story . Many Lafferty readers know about the existence of Esteban . Lafferty mentioned it. Readers wanted it and didn’t get it. Diehards also know the short story connected to the novel, “Tongues of the M

“You will hear it for yourselves, and it will surely fill you with wonder.” — Marco Polo, The Travels “All the voyages, whether to the moon or to worlds ten million times more distant, take about the same time to complete," the sea captain said. "When you use anti-geodetic force for propulsion, all places are equally close, all places are really only “six leagues from Lop. Come. It is a great enjoyment if you have not traveled to far places before!" What an unusual story “Six

This is the crux of Herder’s thesis, that language is constitutive of reflection. And at the same time, this shows how a constitutive theory of language breaks out of the bounds of the enframing. We can’t explain language by the function it plays within a pre- or extralinguistically conceived framework of human life, because language through constituting the semantic dimension transforms any such framework, giving us new feelings, new desires, new goals, new relationships, an

"Are not Abana and Pharpar, rivers of Damascus, better than all the waters of Israel? may I not wash in them, and be clean?” So he turned and went away in a rage." (2 Kings 5:12) Part of The Men Who Knew Everything  cycle, “Rivers of Damascus” is one of Lafferty’s standout stories. It is also one of his great meditations on the nature of history. I view it as a spiritual sequel to an earlier and more accessible "Thus We Frustrate Charlemagne" (1967). At this point, Lafferty h

Philosophical, unloved Lafferty this time. "Symposium" is not reader-friendly, so it is no surprise no one talks about it. As with the demanding " Buckets Full of Brains ," Lafferty is more interested in his ideas than in charming the reader. Summary without commentary is also unhelpful in its case, so let’s cut to it. Here is a metaphysical story about mechanical, chattering alphabet blocks in a child’s toy box. The blocks do not know the most important fact about their stor

“No one has ever really slaked his thirst in the bogus waters of reality. But almost everyone has imagined that he has. And the imagining is just as good. It was once said that subjectivity and objectivity were opposite sides of the same coin. Now we know that they are the same reverse side of the same coin, and the face of the coin is blank.” It would be fun to have a chrestomathy of Lafferty’s ideas about media with smart connections drawn to media studies for at least two

And Duffey, dipping into the Sebastian mind, found that there really was a countess and that she was now twelve years old. Duffey even extracted the information (not from Sebastian — he couldn't have known it — but from the fates somewhere) that he, Duffey, would someday make the acquaintance of this Countess and that she would be his close friend. – More than Melchisedech “They never take very long to make things anymore,” Oread was continuing, “not since that time, you know

Pierre de Ronsard (1524-1585) They were very friendly little girls for about ten years, from the time they were eight or nine years old. — More Than Melchisedech " Ce premier jour de May, Helene, je vous jure " (“This first day of May, Helen, I swear to you”) — Pierre de Ronsard, Sonnets pour Hélène The effect of Eva was similar — and of Roberta and of Helen (who had three little daughters as like her as three golden apples) . . . . This post moves into tricky territory. Sign

What the Eleans call the pillar of Oenomaus is in the direction of the sanctuary of Zeus as you go from the great altar. On the left are four pillars with a roof on them, the whole constructed to protect a wooden pillar which has decayed through age, being for the most part held together by bands. This pillar, so runs the tale, stood in the house of Oenomaus.— Pausanias, Description of Greece  5.20.6 “Which Great God, yours or mine?” Porcellus grunted. “They aren't the same,

“The last story is always true until it is superseded.”— "Cabrito" (1957) “Gees, his eyes were bugged out when they cut him down. He wasscared to death by the ghost all right. That ghost made about a dozenmore hang themselves up there too.” “That many?” “Ghost in the Corn Crib” is an exciting piece of prenucleation period Lafferty, showing, in a nascent form, how his later preoccupation with consensus reality can be created, revised, and forked over a short period. It i

First, let it be understood that I am a very prejudiced man. “Prejudiced” means simply working from prejudgments, from previously acquired information. A juryman in a trial case should be free from prejudice as to that case, but I cannot think of another circumstance where prejudice is a disadvantage, though unfortunately the word has a bad name. It is a distinct disadvantage to have to wake up in a new world every day and to learn it all over again. — Luna #67, interview wi

There was the Asteroid Midas, a big-beaked bird of a gambler who could do things with card and dice and markers in his long talons that seemed unlawful. — Space Chantey  (1968) They plucked that Asteroid Bird, the two of them, man and machine. He had been one of the richest and most extended of all creatures, with a pinion on every planet. They left the great Midas with scarcely a tail feather. When Tell and Gahn did business with a fellow now, they really did business. And

“I began to see that there was an element of humor in that dubious transaction that I had made so many years ago, and that part of the joke was on me.” In September of 1976, Lafferty finished “Bright Coins in Never-Ending Flow,” a short story about a man named Matthew Quoin who may or may not have made a deal with the devil. I’ve been thinking about it because of the role the U.S. penny plays in Quoin’s life. The story builds up to the consequences for Quoin after the penny c

This was the outrageous prediction: ‘Eleven-year-old Caspar Lampiste didn’t seem very much worried when I told him that he had only one day to live, that he would be killed by an automobile then. “What kind of automobile?” he laughed. “Shouldn’t I get to pick what kind of automobile I want to be killed with?” “It will be a foreign car named Le Hot Sport,” your faithful reporter, I, George Hegedusis, told him.’ “Oh wow. Oh wow. Oh wow!” young Caspar sang out.” And the son Casp

“Laff, do you remember 'Johnny Crookedhouse,'" Barry Malzberg asked me once. ‘How could you have known, how could anyone have known?’ I gasped. ‘For my sins I was sometimes assigned to the slush piles when I worked for publishers,’ he said. ‘I don’t remember anything about it except the name, and I can never forget it. It was, it was—’ ‘The worst story ever written,’ we both said at once. No, of course there is no copy in existence. I hope not.” Being a big Barry Mazberg fan,

Lafferty finished the original draft of “Once on Aranea” in October 1961 and rewrote it in January 1965. It first appeared in his short story collection Strange Doings  (1972). Originally a story that focused on personal horror, in the rewrite it became a piece of cosmic horror and one of my favorite Lafferty stories. It begins with a survey team exploring the asteroids of the Cercyon Belt. They have an odd and funny procedure of leaving one man behind to test for latent thre

perfect (adj.)  — early 15c., classical correction of Middle English parfit  “flawless, ideal” (c. 1300), also “complete, full, finished, lacking in no way” (late 14c.), from Old French parfit  “finished, completed, ready” (11c.), from Latin perfectus  “completed, excellent, accomplished, exquisite,” past participle of perficere  “accomplish, finish, complete,” from per  “completely” + combining form of facere  “to make, to do” (from PIE root dhe-  “to set, put”). — Online Et

Joan de Joanes (Valencia, c. 1505 - Bocairent, 1579), Pentecost . "I took a live mermaid not far from here one morning," said John Counts. And then he paused. "That pause, old Wiedervogel," he said after a bit, "that pause was for you to say 'Incredible!' or something similarly apropos." "Consider it said. Was she real?" "She said that she was. She seemed to be. She was ugly as sin . . . Her skin was green and rough... She smelled like a mermaid, or at least like a fish

These animals on our coming up to them stared at us and remained quiet where they stand, not knowing whether they had wings to fly away or legs to run off, and suffering us to approach them as close as we pleased. Amongst these birds were those which in India they call Dod-aersen (being a kind of very big goose); these birds are unable to fly, and instead of wings, they merely have a few small pins, yet they can run very swiftly. We drove them together into one place in such

A quibble was to him the fatal Cleopatra for which he lost the world, and was content to lose it. It has been said, that a man of wit could not resist it; that it was a voluntary deviation from sense. But I believe he indulged himself in it, as a practice of the age, to show his reading or his memory, and to divert by producing something unexpected. — Samuel Johnson, Preface to Shakespeare  (1765) THE ANGEL. Yes. You are all now under judgment, in common with the rest of the