Oh hang the cliffs with corpses nailed, For revel and for banger. Our enemies are here impaled In Cliff-and-Mountain-Hanger "Song of the Traitors of Tarshish" “We here are seven moral buzzards, yes. And we are up against an evil so enormous that only we evils can even see it.” Haunter of Moons and The Giant Ratchet of Sumatra were round-robin collaborations in which members of Oklahoma Science Fiction Writers (OkSFW) took turns continuing a story. OkSFW began in 1977, when C.

[T]he image realized in pictorial form is not a garden-variety product but, on the contrary, the response to an intuitive vision whose invisible substance it seeks to realize and communicate in visible form. Far from contriving some idolatrous appearance or other, the true image attests to the fact that the visible scene or face it depicts has found the iconographer or artist. —Thomas Pfau, Incomprehensible Certainty: Metaphysics and Hermeneutics of the Image (2022) The mount

Lign in drerd un bakn baygl! There is already something like a Jewish monopoly in high finance. There is a growing tendency to Jewish monopoly over the stage for instance, the fruit trade in London, and to a great extent the tobacco trade. There is the same element of Jewish monopoly in the silver trade, and in the control of various other metals, notably lead, nickel, quicksilver. What is most disquieting of all, this tendency to monopoly is spreading like a disease. —Hilair

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

There is an old canard that twins are less fertile than singletons. This probably has its source from the fertility difficulty that the heifer co-twin of a bull calf is likely to encounter. —Alan F. Guttmacher, Pregnancy and Birth, 270. canard, n. “A false or unfounded report or story,” especially “a fabricated report”; from the French, literally “duck.” And still there were the flaming ducks, all of them capons, stenchy and outrageous, thudding, thudding, thudding to earth d

Once I was crossing the Neva in a boat with my friend A., with whom, before this and later, I had many conversations on the subjects touched on in this book. We had been talking, but approaching the fortress we both fell silent, looking at the walls and probably thinking more or less the same thoughts. “There are factory chimneys too!” said A. And indeed from behind the fortress there rose brick chimneys with smoke-blackened tops. And suddenly, as he said it, I had an incredi

Peggy Marie Tyrone had long since taken it upon herself to keep Loretta Sheen in good repair. Loretta Sheen, the daughter of Barnaby and Monica MacLish Sheen, had died three and a half years before this, in 1959. — In a Green Tree, Lafferty's synopsis Some Barnaby thoughts. During the fall of 1978, Lafferty was looking for someone (anyone) to publish a completed masterpiece, the quasi-autobiographical tetralogy, In a Green Tree. To help the effort along, his agent, Virginia K

The only encouraging statistics I can think of is that "Believers on the average have six times as many children as atheists." — Letter Your fertility rate is pathetic. You barely double in fifty years. Your medicine, adequate in other fields, is worse than childish in this. We find that some of the nostrums peddled to your people actually impede fertility. Well, get in the Surgeon General and a few of the boys and we'll begin to correct the situation. — "Guesting Time" Laffe

There are nine basic colors: hylicon, violet, indigo, blue, green, yellow, orange, red, and mystes. There are persons who say that there are more basic colors than these: but they confuse hues with colors, or they list non-basic colors such as the purples and magentas and the variously named non-spectral violets and reds. To such persons we can only say, "You are mistaken." There are other persons who say that there are fewer basic colors than these listed here, that the fir

And what if all of animated nature Be but organic Harps diversely framed, That tremble into thought, as o’er them sweeps Plastic and vast, one intellectual breeze, At once the Soul of each, and God of all? It was another of those extraordinary enlivening events. It got them. It got Erma Planda of the golden body, and Judy Brindlesby of the sometime incredible hair. It got Lisetta Kerwin of the now shattered serenity; it got Rushmore and Hilary and Blase. Perhaps it had

Idolatry is distinguished from Image-worship by an undue finality. It rests in the relative as though it were the Absolute, worships the creature, the image and vehicle of the Divine Spirit, as though it were that Spirit. — E. I. Watkin, The Bow in the Clouds Here is one of the more complicated clusters in the Lafferty canon: four stories, all published in 1973, that form a sequence within The Men Who Knew Everything. The ongoing Centipede Press edition chose to break them up

"No, no, you are no child of mine" Originally titled "The Multitudinous Grandmothers," "Nine Hundred Grandmothers" was a Lafferty favorite. Many of his longtime readers hold it in especially high regard. Most come to it early for at least two reasons: its title is unforgettable, and it gives its name to Lafferty’s most successful short-story collection. It might as well be the Jaffa Gate to his canon. Yet, contrarian that I am, I question its reception and am less smitten wit

There came a roaring like horses in the sky. Then was the multiplex crash (God save his soul, his body is done for) of bloody torso and severed limbs falling into the room froma great height, splintering the table at which the five of them sat, breaking the room, splattering them all with blood. But the ceiling above was unbreached and unharmed and there was no point of entry. “I am not man enough even to watch it,” Buford Strange gurgled, and he slumped sideways unconscious.

“I fear I did not fully understand all that the club comprised. I had not expected a live girl.” “I am a live one all right. Sign here and we’ll get rid of the business and then get down to the business. In a few days you’ll get an invoice for me and you can mail the remittance. And any gratuity (which I am sure you will be delighted to give) I will take in cash in the morning.” “Yes, this is an interesting club. It is very piquant for them to send a live girl to talk to.” “T

A man out of a job is a species distinct from a working man. There are similarities. And there is a wide difference. The man out has a seedier appearance and longer whiskers. And he feels himself looked at queerly in the street. He is more hurried, though he has less to hurry for. He sits alone in public places such as terminals and depots and hotel lobbies and does figures on the back of envelopes, long division problems of minimal outlay into accumulated savings to give day

“Yes. Even ourselves it would kill. That is why we have our eyes always shielded. That is also why we erect another shield: that of our ritual politeness, so that we may never forget that too intimate an encounter of our persons may be fatal.” Lafferty wrote “The Polite People of Pudibundia” early, in 1959. Gene Wolfe once said that early Lafferty is Lafferty with water, and later Lafferty is straight Lafferty. “Pudibundia” falls squarely into the first category. It is also o

“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

Being without clothes, he was embarrassed of the girl sitting there on the box. "I am sorry, Temo. I will get on my pants as soon as I find out whether these things are pants, and if they have the proper holes in them. I am sorry, Temo, that you should see me like this." Then he smiled, for he knew something else like a fundamental thing. The girl was dead and could not see him at all . . . Be sober-minded, be vigilant; because your adversary the devil, as a roaring lion, wal

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?

But the lie had to be a good one, because if your lie is badly done it makes everyone feel wretched, liar and lied-to alike plunged into the deepest lackadaisy, and everyone just feels like going into the other room and drinking a glass of water, or whatever is available there, whereas if you can lie really well then get dynamite results, 35 percent report increased intellectual understanding, awareness, insight, 40 percent report more tolerance, acceptance of others, liking