“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, when he turned out the huge corpus, it seems he made most of it work. There are the unwritten

John Logie Baird demonstrating a Nipkow disk in 1927 It is worth preserving as a remnant of that early era when there were giants on the earth. And, if it is preserved, someday someone will gaze into the old kerosene-powered receiver and cry out in astonishment in the words of the Greatest Bard: "—what poet-race shot such Cyclopean arches at the stars?" Whoever you are, and whenever or whereever you read this first story in the book, it will be best story you will r

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

“As to the ‘Square Hills of Quintana Roo’ (dammit [. . .] you’ve got my typewriter upset again), I loved that title but I DON’T believe I ever actually wrote the piece. The square hills were the strange pyramids in Yucatan, believed by some archeologists to be older than the pyramids of Egypt.” — Letter, 1993 MAYA - YUCATAN setting novel. The HUITMANNA, bearded QUOTZO, still lives, and the civilization is still thriving under jungle shades. — Notes The Square Hills of Quinta

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

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

When the Abebaios Block (the Hesitation Block) had been removed from most human minds (usually by simple childhood metasurgery), people began to make decisions faster, and often better. The "Block" had been a mental stutter. When it was understood what it was, and that it had no useful function, it was done away with. And individuals sharpened up as if they had been gone over by a honing stone. Future readers are lucky that so much of Lafferty’s writing process survives, thou

“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”

“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 fact

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

Maybe Jones is on my mind, so a short note on something fun. Early on, when Lafferty was considering how he would use the Watkin material that would eventually find its home in the Men Who Knew Everything sequence, he seems to have considered using Watkin as the basis for a Maybe Jones novel. There is a note that reads, “The Color-Chapter Sequence from Watkin’s The Bow in the Clouds,” followed by some additional sketching and then a portrait of Jones. Jones was somehow going

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

This is a very miscellaneous post about a text I have wanted to write about for a few months: To Aurelia With Horns. It can hardly be called a version of Aurelia, but it is a kind of drafting out of ideas that were later repurposed for it, even if 90 percent of those ideas were drained away. There is zero St. Thomas Aquinas here, which will be surprising for anyone who has read Aurelia. Altogether, it is one of the strangest Lafferty documents that I have read. Enough of it s

Casey's verses are all doggerel . . . His musical compositions hide a greatness, but they hide it well. His drawings are all comic, but only a few of them are meant to be. Let us consider the drawings on the opposite page: (For technical reasons, there is no drawing on the opposite page, but Schrade's description will suffice.) This supposed itself to be a drawing of Hell, but it is a second-hand drawing of a second-hand Hell. We believe that, in most respects, it is authenti

“Yes, basisphaira as you call it, baseball has been played at least seven hundred years,” old Josh told them, and he began to put a story together about old bingles and bunts and bases on balls. “The first regular team was a barnstorming team named The House of David. That was before a regular league was established. The House of David boys were bearded and they had a lot of hokus to them; but they could play baseball. They beat every town team up and down every valley and co

The Collective Unconscious is all one, of course, just as all the waters of the Earth are one. And those ghost-fish called the archetypes are to be found repeating themselves all through it. And yet they do change, slowly but relentlessly: and possibly the Crooked Hole Drilling Company has had much to do with their recent changes. Your allegation that I treat my followers as patients is demonstrably untrue. . . . It is a convention among us analysts that none of us need feel

The first of a series of posts. For about a month, I have been typing up a Lafferty compendium, which is full of fascinating material: a partially written Camiroi story about a rhino fair, clues to the “Men Who Knew Everything” story sequence, an abandoned sequel to “Slow Tuesday Night,” reasonably worked out stories such as "The Wheel and the Shoosh" about the invention of time/being and space, abandoned poetry, where Lafferty derived titles (“And Mad Undancing Bears”), how

“Looking at the Japanese from the outside (as I must) it seems that one of your finest literary entertainments and pleasures is the ‘Ghost Story’. And the essence of the Ghost Story is the juxtaposition of horror and fun, or reality and dream state, of the familiar suddenly gone strange and weird, of the loved and cherished suddenly turned frightening, and of the comic standing up like a giant among the various realities and rationalities.” “I seldom write ‘ghost stories’ pe

Unlike some other unpublished Lafferty stories, “Whittle Come Back” does not work. Not because it is not a traditional murder mystery, but because it is an incompletely conceived screwball comedy. Lafferty does not seem to know what he wanted to write here. After the story, I will say more about what may have happened. The story centers on Wilton Whittle, the wealthy inventor of Plasto. Whittle is an unemotive man, and he has a habit of leaving his affairs unfinished. Suspec