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

The four experimental groups were thrown together, on the North Shore of the growing Inneall’s Ocean, at a beautiful place named Heart’s Desire Cove. Inneall’s Ocean was now growing mostly to the South and East. It was capturing the valleys of the Verdigris, Grand, Illinois, Arkansas, and Middle and Lower Mississippi Rivers, and it seemed as if it would fill the whole area that had been filled by the Mid-American Ocean thrice in geological times. Yes, of course Inneall was ma

IX. Later Timelines / Non-Linear Events This section follows events outside the post-World War II chronology of Section V, drawing on Archipelago and the later temporal displacements and voyages in More Than Melchisedech. These include Duffey's early, formative "lost" period; Finnegan's increasingly isolated later travels and possible deaths or returns to life; the Argo journeys, set in a world featuring the revived and skeletal Duffey; and the separate realities found in the

G. The Argo & Argonauts (Primordial Aspects) The Argo and its Argonauts represent a complex system operating across multiple realities and timelines. Central is the Ship Argo, a foundational vessel acting with apparent intention [D:21], known under names and descriptions including Navicula Petri [A:44], Abd-Aliah's flagship [M:404], the Brunhilde [D:21; M:404], Land of Behest [M:404], Flying Serpent, Catherine, and Salle du Roi [M:404–405]. Archipelago adds the possible names

Making sense of the Argo Legend can be hard going. Its unconventional structure, shifting genres, fluid timelines, connections to the Coscuin Chronicles, and metaphysical oddities will confuse first-time readers. It bleeds into everything Lafferty writes. The Legend is like one of its great images: the always simmering crock that Melchisedech Duffey sets up inside the Pelican Press [A:132–134]. Everything goes into it. So, what are these notes for? They are a rough-around-the

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,

A Rat-King The plot has all the unhinged unity of any shipwreck. And there is movement and force and power. Power above all! This is Destruction as pageant and presentation. One has the feeling that something very large will come out of all of this. Yes, like the destruction of the world. — The Three Armageddons of Enniscorthy Sweeny (p. 352) My second read showed pretty clearly why I remembered merely the premise and little of the plot: there is little plot to remember, in a

The face was skinny and ruddy. The nose was powerful and beaked; not like that of a bird of prey but like that one of the Roman-nosed water birds. The nose was always peeling, as though it were growing out from the inside and flaking off in those strips. That gnarly ant and aphid image with its glistening drop? Really important for understanding 3A. Nuts and bolts or maybe bolts and nuts. The Three Armageddons can melt one’s brain, so it's helpful to have a baseline for under

Any statement can be held true come what may, if we make drastic enough adjustments elsewhere in the system. —W. V. O. Quine, “Two Dogmas of Empiricism” (1951) Even so, something was a little bit wrong with things. Some people said that the days were off by maybe a millionth of a second from what they should be. Other people said that the days were off by several hours. They were off, that’s certain. There was an easy solution, of course, for a mechanically sophisticated

But I hide hammers. I have several hammers hidden. A hammer is an advantage that you can use when you are driven into the next-to-final corner. A hammer is a sort of insurance. I make fictions as I am assigned to do, and many others also are carrying out collateral and equally weird fictions. But the others do not seem to play as many tricks as I play, they do not seem to hide as many hammers in their hurdles. I try to insure that the fictions that I am assigned to shall rema

Two opposite points on the rim of a rolling wheel cannot both be on the top at once: this is taken as an almost reasonable postulate. But they could both be on top at once if one of them were suppressed by Amnesia. —Matthew Woodbine Junior, in The Three Armageddons of Enniscorthy Sweeny The Three Armageddons of Enniscorthy Sweeny is difficult to discuss, even for those of us who know how magical it is. The difficulty lies in how much Lafferty packs into it. That informational

“I came ashore, swimming and wading through turbulent water. It was early morning. The shore was muddy with engendering mud, and full of promise. It was the year 1923, and I was a young man of no more than a quarter of a century of physical years. I went up that muddy shore and entered into the green and burgeoning years of my life. If I remember to do it, I can come back to that same shore, and to that same year, and have another sixty green and burgeoning years to my life.

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

“Molasses is a little like amber,” Diogenes said. “It flows so slowly that sometimes it seems to be solid. Creatures can be imprisoned in it and apparently be held motionless in it. They must deceive themselves as to their own time scale, for if they do not deceive themselves they will be dead . . . . Things can not have been going on for the orthodox time at the orthodox pace.” — "Out of the Molasses Trap" “There are no duplications in the Pristine World, and there are no no

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

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 from a 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

“Your machine can say how old a thing will be in its totality, but it can’t say how old a thing is right now?”— “Mostly it can do both. The present orientation can nearly always be coaxed out of it, though the clock considers the present of little importance. This is no gadgetry, people. It is positive science and it is wonderful.” “The block has solved many problems of involution and devolution,” Barnaby said. “Naturally the clock does not accept evolution, or has any intell

My working theory is that the best chronological anchor for The Devil Is Dead is Lafferty’s statement that “the Brunhilde sailed on November 7, a Friday morning.” Lafferty is usually vague about the year. Here he even says that “the year is uncertain.” Yet he does something unusual: he gives the day of the week, thereby creating several calendrical locks. November 7 was Lafferty’s birthday, which makes the specificity suggestive. Within the plausible postwar range, November 7