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 u

"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

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

“Mad Man” could stand as an emblem of Lafferty’s work in the minds of many readers, even if it is not the story they first think of when they think of him. It is classic, quirky, light-seeming 1960s science fantasy, full of Lafferty’s humor and style. Read by itself, it is really fun. Read against the whole of his work, however, it becomes a fascinating story, especially for anyone interested in Lafferty’s developing thoughts about the relation between machines and human pers

John Gillan had been lying dead on his back. A great part of his tongue had been chopped off and the bare end of his nose. However what had killed him was a spike driven into the lower center of his chest. The spike was a steel footing designed as a base for a wooden post or pier such as are sometimes used for support in these ramshackle buildings. It had its floor plate, and the center spike was meant to drive into the wooden pole to secure it. The spike—much sharpened—was d

Some modern scientists feel a powerful affinity with their ancient intellectual forebears. While Anaximander’s understanding of the apeiron may be hard to grasp, some 20th-century physicists found it a helpful concept. In the 1930s and 1940s, physicists worked to turn quantum mechanics (a theory of particles and their interactions) into a theory of particles and fields (i.e. quantum field theory). But they encountered difficulties, as attempts to do so often led to the appea

Little c went to visit the Great Zambesi-Chartel in his cell. “It is time we had a talk,” he said. “No, no, it's too late for talk,” said Charles Chartel. “You have disgraced us both, Charles,” said celach. “It goes very deeply when it touches me.” “I never even knew who you were, little c. You are protean and you are not at all plausible.” Advanced Lafferty. Charles Chartel is our main character, a professional magician who performs under the name the Great Zambesi. He is kn

Dotty resolved to become the foremost Galveston-style piano player in the world. There are those who say that she became just that. She was good, very good, possibly the best. But that was some years after this first period of her return. — Dotty A twelve-year-old girl, a cripple, the daughter of the proprietor, was playing the piano. It was not for some time, due to the primacy of other matters, that Moysha realized that she was playing atrociously. Then he attempted to corr

The world's a blast (Ka-whoosh! Ka-whish!) With healthy soul and belly, And all the skies are full of fish, And all the fish are smelly. Charles Fort’s Super-Sargasso Sea comes up on the blog from time to time. Judging by the number of variations Lafferty gave the idea, he loved it. Oceans, seas, rivers, springs, and other waterways are a major part of his corpus. He uses them to write about time, the unconscious, and the suprahistorical. Yet there are the twists. For instan

“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”

“But on the third hand, and often to the exasperation of critics, the writer usually knows what is wrong or right with a story better than a critic does.” — Letter The drowsy stillness of the afternoon was shattered by what sounded to his strained senses like G. K. Chesterton falling on a sheet of tin. — P. G. Wodehouse To start a fight with someone who loves Chesterton, say that Chesterton was an alcoholic. Though it is in poor taste to mention, one of the qualities Lafferty

“Well, I started writing everything. I wrote a Saturday Evening Post story and an American Magazine story and a Collier’s story, and some sort of a western story, and science fiction and mystery stories. I sent them around. The science fiction story sold and the others didn’t, so after several repetitions then, I just wrote science fiction. It took me about a year before I was selling.” —1983 interview with Schweitzer Andrew Ferguson has already noted the most important fa