Babylon Thoughts

Feeling a little bitchy after working on “How Many Miles to Babylon?” It may be the Lafferty work readers have been dumbest about. A Lafferty person who should know better said that the story disappoints because Finnegan becomes a superman, as if Finnegan as Finnegan were even the point. The story is a black comedy in gloriously happy bad taste about the attempt to murder Catholicism. It uses Finnegan as a red herring to say something about fundamental attributes and the devilish attempt to dictate humanity's final cause.

Lafferty knew what he was asking of his readers. He knew they were going to let him down. He said that not many people would like the story. He also wrote, “It will be a puzzling, even incomprehensible piece to some readers, I know. But that’s the nature of the thing.” The story is full of wonderful puzzles. How, for instance, can we infer that it takes place in November of 1994? I'll let you work that out. I have thought about it for years, yet I can barely muster the energy to write about it. It almost seems better kept to oneself. So few readers, and such a blitheringly stupid reception.

Three words: visibility, infallibility, and indefectibility. In this story, Lafferty wrote beyond the bandwidth of those who preserved his reputation but did not understand what they were preserving.