Lord Randal had invented the bow-and-arrow. But Axel could shoot the arrows farther and faster. And higher. And when he was six years old, Axel did what many persons have dreamed of doing: he made his mark on the sky. He dipped the heads of his arrows in mud, and he shot them up with uncanny accuracy and made mud marks on that transparent sky-cover which was twenty meters above them. He made about a hundred mud marks that conveyed a message in the written form of ‘code Chalde

But when you have done all these fine things, quoth Trinquamelle, how do you, my friend, award your decrees, and pronounce judgment? Even as your other worships, answered Bridlegoose; for I give out sentence in his favour unto whom hath befallen the best chance by dice, judiciary, tribunian, pretorial, what comes first. — François Rabelais, Gargantua and Pantagruel, Book III, Chapter XXXIX, translated by Sir Thomas Urquhart His passion is for the British law, and he has spent

The first offense was the taking of the forbidden fruit. The second offense (which I believe is more grievous than the first) is the refusing of the bidden fruit. It is even the hacking down of the tree of the fruit. Advanced Lafferty today, and undoubtedly too brief. I’ve been rereading Serpent’s Egg, trying to understand how the Kangaroo connects to Inneall’s ocean, and throughout that novel one fact kept coming up. Once again, Lafferty is thinking about original sin, maybe

By anybody’s standards, this was a beautiful place. The folded, rolling hills were covered with clover, or they were covered with grapes. Everywhere the three explorers walked the air was pleasantly noisy with bees. There were a dozen heavy white cattle grazing belly-deep in clover, there were exposed rock strata of shale and slate and chalk. There were beech groves. “I have never seen time piled up so deep in a place,” Ethan Farquharson said. “Not insufferably ancient time,

Even with Nipkow, his “spirally apertured rotating disc that provided, at both sending and receiving ends, a simple and effective method of image scanning”, I wish I had an illustration of it. I can't quite figure what the damned thing looked like. — Handwritten note On November 18, 1992, Lafferty wrote to Patrice Duvic about his story “Selenium Ghosts of the Eighteen Seventies.” Some handwritten notes about Nipkow also survive. In the letter, he wrote, “Paul Nipkow got his p

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

Saskia van Uylenburgh “I change history here and now, Saskia. I paint forgeries of things that would not exist for a generation yet, and now will never have existed.” — "Dutch Master" Doodkiststraat: A street in Amsterdam where the death-house and Dead Christ Church are located. The name literally translates to “Coffin Street,” reinforcing the chapter's focus on mortality and the blurred lines between life and death. — Half a Sky After that, Dana and Galopade were following t

And Lamech took unto him two wives: the name of the one was Adah, and the name of the other Zillah. And Adah bare Jabal: he was the father of such as dwell in tents, and of such as have cattle. And his brother’s name was Jubal: he was the father of all such as handle the harp and organ. And Zillah, she also bare Tubal-cain, an instructor of every artificer in brass and iron: and the sister of Tubal-cain was Naamah. —Genesis 4:19–22 Those students who are now developin

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.

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

“Mr. Hamadryad” is a wonderfully weird Lafferty story. It follows a traveling coconut salesman who has three encounters with an eccentric cosmologist whose explanations of ancient monuments lead to a disturbing account of the world’s past and future. Meeting in Dongola, Oklahoma City, and Easter Island, the two figures discuss fallen races, faith that moves mountains, and, a topic that Lafferty explored quite a few times, the approaching replacement of our muddled human world

[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

I have total freedom to do whatever I want to do, but at this point in time I am enjailed in a pokey or slammer in Boondocks New Jersey. — “The Wheel and the Shoosh” (unfinished draft) Lafferty was extremely good at getting the most out of his drafted material and ideas. Almost everything gets used, as if he were dealing with a buffalo. Over the twenty-plus years of his writing life, as he turned out the huge corpus, he seems to have made most of it work. There are the unwrit

"There's a piece here on Pete Teilhard putting him into context as a talented science fiction writer with a talent for outré burlesque. The Brainworld Motif was overworked when he tackled it, but what a shaggy comic extravaganza he did make of it! And there's Muldoom, Zielinski, Popper, Gander, Aichinger, Whitecrow, Hornwhanger—we owe so much to the juice of the cultists! In the main line there are whole congeries and continents of great novels and novelists." — "Thus We Frus

And there is a sort of unreality-compounded in it, and that simply will not do in a mystery story, and every story at the heart of it is a mystery story. Real things and persons can do things in a real world, and real things and persons can do things in an unreal world: but unreal things and persons can't do things in an unreal world. There is no way that an illusion (and every story is an illusion) can be maintained without clarity in either its setting or its movement. Some

The quicksand eels will finally eat all his flesh and bones, but they cannot eat his form or his displacement. But these cranky old ko-el ghosts are the ancestors of some of us. When they kill and dismember one of our children, it may be a descendant of theirs. Cannot dead ancestors do whatever they wish with their descendants? The NFL season, my favorite time of the year, started last week, which brought to mind one of Lafferty’s great unsung works, an odd one even by Laffer

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