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

Yes, The Devil Is Dead was probably the most “haunting” of my thirty-or-so published books. I’ve had this “haunting” in a dozen or so of my short stories, but this is my only novel in which this is the case. The haunting has always been a long series of recurring dreams, and the only way to resolve them was to get them on paper. This has solved about ninety percent of the “haunting” but never all of it. I originally intended The Devil Is Dead to be one of three “Simutaneous N

But something, almost from the beginning, has been seeping in to diminish the good-humor of the stories of our Earth. I do not know whether the tales of the friendly nine hundred and ninety-nine monstrous and alien species are subject to the same spoiling as are the tales of our own world. Everything in the world, in every world, is either good-humored or bad-humored. So all the bad-humored things were once locked up in an iron cavern and the iron doors made firm with bolts a

Lafferty wrote the unpublished “Pomponia” in 1958, when he was trying to break into different markets, and, like some of the stories he wrote for that purpose, it is both unmistakably Lafferty and somewhat askew from the Lafferty we know. One of the handful of places to which he sent the draft before giving up on it was Seventeen magazine. It reads like the kind of piece he imagined Seventeen might like. It takes the form of an exchange between a flighty girl and a mid-centur

Little Will with a rubber band Shot his sister out of hand Shot her with a joyful shout In the eye and put it out. Two stories that seem to belong together. One is mostly unknown. The other is mostly forgotten. Each is about a practical joker who gets his just deserts. “Live It Again” and “Of Laughter and the Love of Friends” are weak Lafferty stories, though that is unfair to say of the unpublished “Live It Again,” which should be held to a different standard. “Of Laughter a

If present mathematics does not fit black holes, then present mathematics must be extended a trifle. That's better than smashing and exploding all the worlds. The fictions based on all this are unoriginal, yes. And the science that stutters around it is likewise unoriginal. — "Something New Under the Black Suns" (1979) Lafferty wrote “Aloys” in the Fall of 1957 when he started his serious bid to be a professional writer, one of the strongest of the early Lafferty stories just

My stories are slightly future history, set just far enough into the future as not to get stepped on by the present. Yes, I hope the bits and pieces will fall into it. I am always out in the rain with a bucket and trying to catch something. Yes, sometimes I use the old trick of having stories connected by a common minor character or otherwise. Balzac was one of the inventors of this device a hundred and forty or so years ago. In his Human Comedy, he ran quite a few of his cha

I began to try to write in about 1959 and went a year or so before my first sale . . . My life has been mostly interior and that interior very shallow. . . I am forever a Catholic, a bachelor, a political independent, a lone badger (lone wolves are a legend, they are always in groups, but even the bachelor badger digs himself a hole and spends most of his time in it). So it stands. There isn't much of a biography. Most of my life I forgot to live. — letter to Damon Knight, Se

A short post on a curiosity. Lafferty wrote a sequel to “Quiz Ship Loose” that has never been published. The work survives in an intermediate stage. His handwritten notes and a complete typed version exist, though he never polished it. The story is typed on lined notebook paper, a sure sign of a first-typed draft. Had Lafferty wanted to save the story, he would have next typed it out on carbons. For whatever reason, he abandoned it. In “Hooligs,” we again meet the crew of Qui

“But if I want to murder somebody, will it really be the best plan to make sure I'm alone with him?” Lord Pooley's eyes recovered their frosty twinkle as he looked at the little clergyman. He only said: “If you want to murder somebody, I should advise it.” — G. K. Chesterton, “The God of the Gongs” "Seven Story Dream" (1961) centers on a delusional, self-exculpatory fantasy that recasts a murder victim as art. Two years before Lafferty wrote it, he had already written a sto

The professor looked at his watch, looked at his schedule, saw that he still had a little time before his final class, glanced at the final entry in the book, "I love you, Emily," smiled, closed the small notebook, and put it in his pocket. "Women have a satirical turn of mind," he said to his companion. "What? Are you sure?" the companion asked. "Blenheim denies it, and the evidence in Creager is doubtful. And Pfirschbaum in his monumental monogram Satire und Geschlecht has

The setting of "One at a Time," Galveston, TX (c. 1950s) It has been bedlam around here. One of my great enthusiasms is cooking, so I usually handle most of the Thanksgiving preparation. Then, this morning, my son had surgery, which is always tricky. He is non-verbal and profoundly autistic, so even a routine visit to the doctor comes with its own set of challenges, and there are many such visits. Still, I found a little time to update the blog, experiment with some code, and

“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 is

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

“The answer to the Mystery of Matter (why should there even be so cumbersome a thing as matter? Why did the Word have to be made Flesh? Was not the Making of Matter rather a cheap, and also difficult, trick for a Spirit to indulge in?) — the answer to this contains the answer to the question ‘How Did God Get to be God?’” — “In the Turpentine Trees” (1983) "Snuffles" on my mind. It was a good excuse to reread the edited transcript of the LaffCon3 panel on the story. It was an

"LAUGHING KELLY" Black comedy about the burials of several Lafferty characters. The titular Kelly won’t go quietly. He keeps laughing from the grave. Here one thinks of The Devil is Dead and its "Diabolique." "A STRINGLESS-FIDDLE NOTION" This nonsense verse tells the story of an inventor. He creates an impossible stringless fiddle and uses its music to bake waffles. He and his partners open a successful restaurant. Lafferty having fun. "SYLVESTER" Surreal and melancholy. It's

Imagine that in front of you are four Lafferty levers: plot, character, madcap, and tempo. My favorite Lafferty story (not his best by far) is what he called his Collier’s Piece, the early "Saturday You Die" (1959)—an autobiographical account in the psychological sense: it captures what it must have felt like to be Lafferty as a child. I think it’s a story that opens a clear view into many of his extraordinary children and why he creates them. But I’m already getting off topi

“Bertigrew Bagley was fat and ungainly, grown old ungracefully, balded and shaggy at the same time, rheumy of eyes and with his mouth full of rotten teeth, discredited, violent and vulgar: an earthen pot, and a cracked one at that.”— Fourth Mansions (1969) The French surgeon René Leriche once said that “Health is life lived in the silence of the organs.” Lafferty’s “Rang Dang Kaloof” is about what happens when a gnome makes them scream. It’s one of his funniest stories, and a

The objective truth as such is by no means adequate to determine that whoever utters it is sane; on the contrary, it may even betray the fact that he is mad, although what he says may be entirely true, and especially objectively true. I shall here permit myself to tell a story, which without any sort of adaptation on my part comes direct from an asylum. — Søren Kierkegaard, Concluding Unscientific Postscript (1846) Like a handful of other Lafferty stories, "Milly" is not incl

A short post today on the unpublished “Condition Quick: A Dia-log Between Two Dia-Persons.” It's a squib, what we now call flash fiction. It is one of the many pieces where Lafferty vents his frustration with the cultural and literary shifts of the 1970s and 1980s, but here the satire is compressed into two pages. We find Lafferty's ongoing exasperation with America's distorted media ecology and his sense of how rotten the state of science fiction is. The punning title is our