Building Blocks

With this hobby blog approaching three hundred posts, it is time to codify the assumptions that have been guiding it. If you are here mainly for commentary on specific Lafferty stories, this post serves as a blueprint for how the blog approaches his work.

A helpful way to define science fiction is as a shared set of expectations—what writers tend to assume is possible in the genre, and what readers have been trained to notice. In science fiction criticism, this shared expectation set is sometimes called a megatext. One of my working hypotheses is that Lafferty felt a deep hostility toward the megatext of science fiction. When he writes within science fiction, he is constantly trying to bypass the genre’s habits—those expectations that limit what a writer can imagine and what a reader is ready to recognize—because he suspects that the genre is complicit with modernity, even if he is in love with how it frees up storytelling because it is culturally marginal, at least when he broke into it. Of course, it eventually walled him out.

His escape route from those constraints turned out to be what he created, the ghost story, the whole Lafferty, what the resources on the blog try to make available to Lafferty readers. He uses the ghost story as a countermove against the science-fiction megatext because his alternative megatext allows the past, the dead, and the eternal to intrude upon the present, a violation of science fiction's usual forward-facing materialism.

Calling the ghost story a "counter-megatext" is risky, because a megatext is not something a single writer can invent. However, I believe Lafferty writes from within a massive, inherited megatext counter to mainstream sf: the Christian tradition, broadly understood to include not only canonical materials but also the marginal strands often grouped under the gnostic tradition. Within that woolly allotment, the element hardest for science fiction to absorb is eschatology, thinking oriented toward the four final things under mystery, and the anagogical mode that goes with it. He made it his home. Where science fiction often cycles between utopia and dystopia and future histories, Lafferty chooses a different horizon: an "end" that is neither de-trascendentalized perfection nor de-sacralized ruin, not more history, but fulfillment at odds with either, the dare we hope. He seems to say the only alternatives to this are the moth-eaten megatext of the realist tradition, which ended in the early 20th century, or that of science fiction, which had limited itself by constituting itself through an exclusion of the eschaton. He had terms for each dead end: the trashed-life principle and heroic tedium.

To make that concrete, here are ten interpretive assumptions I use when reading Lafferty, along with the questions I ask myself as I go.

1. Lafferty is fundamentally a metaphysical writer.

I treat Lafferty as a writer who uses fiction to make religious claims about reality itself. His humor, folklore, satire, and exaggeration are not, in my view, the point; they are tools, ways of hiding and revealing what he is really doing. Religion is what sustained and nurtured his imagination. The rest are masks: put on for effect, then dropped. When they drop, what remains are arguments about what is real: what exists, what is fake, and what kind of universe we actually live in.

This puts me at odds with the tendency to treat Lafferty as mainly stylistic, comic, or simply eccentric. Those qualities are obviously present, but I read them as means rather than ends. For me, the center of gravity is metaphysical: being against nonbeing, truth against deception, and the unsettling possibility that the world we take for granted is not the world that is actually there. In rereading his letters today, I came across one where he told someone that religion was what he was called to do, and the strange thing to him was that more weren't called to do the same.

• What is this story saying about what is real?

• What kinds of beings exist here—and which are fake, diminished, or derivative?

• If I stripped away the humor, what structure of reality would remain?

  
  

2. The stories are ontological thought-experiments.

I read Lafferty as aggressive and confrontational, often writing with a chip on his shoulder beneath the genial surface. On this view, the stories are less entertainment than trials: not allegories you decode once and file away, but tests a reader is meant to undergo. In short, they are art.

A strong Lafferty story sets up a world with a particular load-bearing view of reality, then lets that view run at full speed until it starts to break. For me, where it breaks matters more than the initial gimmick. Lafferty seems less interested in what is amusing than in what follows if we agree, even briefly, to live as if this world were true. When the world falls apart, stagnates, or turns grotesque, I read that as diagnostic. It's one reason that a typical post here is meant to be a toolkit for others to use, setting aside agreement or disagreement.

• What assumptions about reality does this world start with?

• If those assumptions are true, what has to follow?

• Where does the system begin to fail—and why?

  
  

3. Allegory matters, but it’s meant to wobble.

I don't think Lafferty’s major allegories are puzzles with a single solution but sliding scales. What interests me is not the answer, but what the big puzzle does to you as you worry at it, until something in it opens toward the anagogical. As a rule, the longer the Laffery story, the more he is up to.

I take this to be intentional. I think of Lafferty's allegory, science-fictional or otherwise, as a ladder. It is helpful if you climb it, but worse than useless if you settle on it as a permanent perch. The point is to kick the ladder away. If you don’t, you risk becoming what Lafferty called a true believer in unreal things, a reader satisfied to stay inside the genre’s megatext. That is hostile, but it was the Lafferty hostility Lafferty brought to the megatext as evinced by his essays, what he said about other science fiction writers in letters, and his poems mocking the genre and its brightest lights.

• Where does the allegory start to feel strained, excessive, or incoherent?

• What interpretive move does that breakdown prevent?

• What kind of meaning would require the allegory to fail?

  
  

4. Many Lafferty worlds are counterfeit.

A pattern I see across Lafferty is a distinction between true worlds and counterfeit worlds. By "counterfeit," I mean internally coherent worlds—often even brilliant ones—that are metaphysically sealed. They have rules, energy, and motion, but no openness to ultimate reality. They function as closed systems whose completeness is part of the fraud.

This contrasts with other Lafferty worlds that are ontologically open: worlds where the real can still intrude, judge, redeem, or transfigure. The distinction isn't mainly about tone or setting. It is about permeability: whether the world is sealed in on itself, or porous to what exceeds it. The novels are all open, except for Not to Mention Camels, which appears closed only because it occurs displaced from Prime. Many of the short stories are closed, which is why they are horror fantasies.

• Is this world open to something beyond itself, or sealed?

• Who or what claims ultimate authority here?

• Does the story end because it resolves, or because it runs out of reality?

  
  

5. Time is Lafferty's primary metaphysical concern.

In closed or counterfeit worlds, time tends to be cyclical, frozen, or defective: events repeat, advance without meaning, or pile up without consequence beyond the strangulation of their players. By contrast, when grace appears in Lafferty, it usually does not develop from inside the system of time; it arrives as an interruption from beyond it. Grace is not just one more event in time; it is a breach in time’s enclosure.

This provides a practical test: a sign that a Lafferty world is ontologically open is whether the story’s temporality can be broken open, rather than merely rearranged.

• What kind of time governs this story?

• Is time meaningful, or merely repetitive?

• Is the ending an ending in time—or an escape from time?

  
  

6. Evil is theater, but not just theatrical.

Lafferty is a theatrical writer, but a strange feature of his work is that agentive evil often appears as administrators, planners, educators, or technologies. The more person-like evil becomes, the more gently Lafferty treats it. Even major villains are tied into larger systems: more important than Overlark as a character is that he is a Returnee. For me, evil in Lafferty usually appears not as chaos, but as order without truth.

• Where is agency displaced into systems or processes?

• What is presented as "reasonable" or "necessary"?

• How does the system prevent alternatives from even being imagined?

  
  

7. Personhood is fragile and under relentless assault.

I read Lafferty as deeply concerned with what it means to be a person. I watch how his fiction splits, duplicates, mechanizes, or abstracts human beings. Animals and machines are often persons in his work. Story after story examines how personhood can survive rationalization, technological mediation, or ideological compression, or how it is blown out entirely.

• Who is recognized as a person in this story?

• Where are selves divided, merged, or instrumentalized?

• What does the story treat as irreducible about being human?

  
  

8. The Catholic metaphysical substructure is decisive.

Lafferty’s Catholic imagination governs the deep logic of his fiction even when religious language is missing. I am often surprised by how easily readers set this aside. Concepts like creation, fall, grace, incarnation, and eschatology shape what kinds of worlds are possible in Lafferty.

I don't mean every story is preaching doctrine. I mean that, in Lafferty, ultimate reality is usually not negotiable in predictable ways, for all his surface unpredictability. Worlds that deny this cannot finally succeed, and he presents those as closed worlds.

• What does this storyworld assume about creation and origin?

• Can salvation occur within this story world?

• Is failure narrative—or metaphysical?

  
  

9. Humor and excess are camouflage.

Lafferty’s humor is a huge part of why people love him. But I think something is easy to miss: his humor is often defensive and strategic. Comedy distracts hostile readers, overwhelms shallow ones, and hides seriousness from premature interpretation.

I treat his excess (too many ideas, too many jokes, too much informational density) as three things at once:

1. It is simply how he builds fiction.

2. It saturates the stories with meaning.

3. It works as intellectual camouflage.

   
   

There is a consequence to this: even readers who love Lafferty rarely hold hundreds of stories in their minds at once, or talk coherently about the novels as an interconnected whole. Given the volume of his output, it’s striking how little has been said about their internal architecture, but I don't think that’s an accident. He built his work to defy easy mapping as a defense mechanism and because he was fundamentally a Catholic esotericist.

• What seriousness is being hidden by comedy?

• What does the humor prevent me from flattening?

• Where does excess overload interpretation instead of clarifying it?

  
  

10. Responsible reading requires moral accountability.

While the previous points concern how Lafferty builds his worlds, this final point concerns what he leaves out. For the fullest possible reading of Lafferty, interpretation cannot be morally neutral because Lafferty was a die-hard moralist. I work from the belief that authorial beliefs, historical silences, and ideological commitments shape what Lafferty can imagine, and what he cannot. I argue that some absences, especially historical ones, are not accidental. Ignoring them produces distorted readings.

• What realities are conspicuously absent?

• What kinds of suffering or history are not imagined?

• How do those refusals shape the world the story builds?

  
  

That is where the blog stands. I read Lafferty by asking what kind of world is being built, where that world fails, and what kind of reality that failure points toward.