"Slow Tuesday Night" (1964/1965)

When the Abebajos block had been removed from Human minds, people began to make decisions faster, and often better. It had been the mental stutter... Transportation and manufacturing had then become practically instantaneous. Things that had once taken months and years now took only minutes and hours. A person could have one or several pretty intricate careers within an eight-hour period.

It had been a slow Tuesday night. A few hundred new products had run their course on the market . . . Hundred-storied buildings had been erected, occupied, obsoleted, and demolished again to make room for more contemporary structures . . . The city was rebuilt pretty completely at least three times during an eight-hour period.

Our treatment of the question of the meaning of Being must enable us to show that the central problem of all ontology is rooted in the phenomenon of time, if rightly seen and rightly explained, and we must show how this is the case. — Martin Heidegger, Being and Time (1927)

So familiar is "Slow Tuesday Night" to anyone who likes Lafferty that it scarcely needs a recap, so this summary will be succinct. Lafferty imagines a sped-up society in which the surgical removal of something called the Abebajos block eliminates the human mental stutter. As a result, civilization reorganizes itself into three temporal castes: those who flourish in the morning, afternoon, and evening. Most of the story follows team Nyctalops, a few members of the night-shift cohort, who compress entire lifetimes of romance, career, and collapse into their slice of the day's eight-hour slice.

The story unfolds as a manic concatenation. We follow the rise and fall of Basil Bagelbaker, who begins the evening in panhandler rags, begging for capital to rebuild his fortune. We meet the trend-chasing Ildefonsa Impala, whose serial marriages to fleetingly successful men, including the inventor of the manus module and the architect of actinic philosophy, barely last longer than a cocktail. The pace is relentless: by midnight, the city skyline has been erected, occupied, obsoleted, and demolished three times.

Through shrewd manipulations, Basil amasses titanic wealth, collapses industries, recombines them, and finally loses his billion-dollar paper empire just five minutes before the shift ends. We begin and end with Basil, who is our our portal into the world of Tuesday Night. As the story closes, Basil is stripped of his tycoon toga and expelled from the elite Toppers Club. The Auroreans, the Dawners, prepare to take over. Broke once again, Basil bears no resemblance to the Wall Street banker who hurls himself out a window after financial ruin. He goes to the street, asks Ildefonsa for a dollar to buy a bottle of red-eye. He whistles as he walks away, leaving behind the slowness of it all.

The obvious first. “Slow Tuesday Night” is one of Lafferty’s great short stories. I agree with much of what has been said about its satire of the psychological effects of late modernity, though I have experienced nothing other than it. We often hear it said that technology and media make time feel faster by compressing our experience of the present. With a constant flow of information, technologically mediated environments shorten the lifespan of events. Sixty years after Lafferty wrote the story, we see this in algorithms that curate only the most stimulating fragments of reality. These fragments displace the natural temporal markers that once paced the days of Westerners—and that were the foundation of liturgical time: the sacred rhythm of seasons and feasts—Advent (which begins tomorrow), Christmas, Lent, Easter. These are the temporal structures through which the Church annually relives the life of Christ.

No such rhythm exists in “Slow Tuesday Night.” There is only the 24-hour cycle. So while it is right to read the story as a satire of temporal compression, it is also a satire of secularization, visible in elements like the mayfly marriages.

What always stands out to me is that this is a story of immense speed, but one that freezes acceleration by fixing the 24-hour cycle. This decoupling of speed from acceleration matters. Humans experience acceleration most meaningfully in extended time frames. In traditional storytelling, rising action depends on acceleration—it reflects the time and effort required to overcome narrative inertia. It creates weight, delay, and transformation. From this, we get story satisfactions, especially the arc of character growth.

But one of Lafferty’s deep signatures is that he does not write character growth; he writes character revelation. He operates on the imperfection-perfection continuum, not the developmental-growth continuum that shapes most fiction. In “Slow Tuesday Night,” he annihilates narrative friction. Characters possess immense speed but nearly zero acceleration. They move between poverty and wealth, between singleness and marriage, with the vertical suddenness of a switch, not the gradual slope of a climb.

What the reader experiences, then, is something like a step function, instant transitions from one state to another, rather than a curve, where values evolve continuously. Lafferty removes the drag of time. With one hand, he suppresses flowing progression; with the other, he offers discrete jumps. It works because the story is short and informationally dense. By stripping the narrative of time’s resistance, Lafferty gives us a paradox: events occur with blinding velocity but generate no momentum. The story vibrates frantically but does not move forward. We are left in a secular, de-sacralized version of cyclical time.

It may be worth saying a bit more about the mechanics of all this. Lafferty repeatedly returns to variations on the story structured by clock-time. “Slow Tuesday Night” is, without question, the best-known example of this pattern, not only because it is one of his masterpieces, but also because it was included in the collection Nine Hundred Grandmothers (1970). Yet the last story I wrote about, “One at a Time,” shows him experimenting with the same constraints, working out novel responses to the temporal compression imposed by clock-driven storytelling.

Neither story has a conventional narrative. Conventional narrative requires

friction. A protagonist must encounter resistance, which creates rising action and culminates in climax. But in “Slow Tuesday Night,” the removal of mental inertia eliminates narrative friction altogether. Consider Basil Bagelbaker: he moves from pauper to tycoon to pauper again with no resistance and no arc. He is an anti-Horatio Alger, stripped of struggle. Speed flattens Freytag’s pyramid. Climaxes arrive so quickly that they dissolve their own meaning. Life events are reduced to data points. Bagelbaker feels nothing. Nor does his author. And that is the point: affective ties are neutralized, between author and character, reader and character, and character and character, as seen in the story’s disposable marriages and business partnerships. The narrative does not move forward. As I said earlier, it vibrates in a closed loop. It resembles a static image composed of frantic motion.

Maxwell Mouser, the philosopher in the story, is said to have created actinic philosophy, brilliance without heat. A theological counterpart to this might be having reason without love. His presence seems designed to prompt the reader to reflect on the role of philosophy in this fictional world, and how, within it, philosophy cannot, in its fullest sense be philosophy. In our own world, it was Heidegger who, more than any other major twentieth-century thinker, sought to wrench philosophy to the question of time and human meaning. For Heidegger, the nature of Being is not grounded in mechanical clock-time but in lived duration.

What makes being human human in the story is Abebajos block. But its disappearance is the real being of this story, which is essentially a posthumanist fable. The loss of the Abebajos transforms human experience, something close to what Heidegger identifies as the essence of being human, into a rapid sequence of disconnected nows. When one is given so many chances to live toward death, the long arcs that traditionally define a life (marriage, career, family, philosophy, religion) cease to matter. This is the ontological thinning Heidegger warns against: the collapse of lived time into other temporal enframements that strip experience of depth, coherence, and meaning.

Lafferty’s “Slow Tuesday Night” depicts a world akin to the one some transhumanists might desire, even if it satirically preserves older Lebenswelt structures, like marriage, that such a future would probably discard. Just this week, I heard someone smart observe that one under-discussed P-doom AI scenario is the one in which we succeed, which means that we overcome what we currently perceive as barriers, only to become creatures so altered in our second-order natures that the people of the past become unintelligible to us. Old news in science fiction, I know, but it is a deeply Laffertyan fear. It is amnesia; it is Astrobe; it is Abebajos. It is the utopia trap, one reason he is someone to read.

"Slow Tuesday Night," strange as it is, is a Lafferty utopia, which is to say a dystopia because Lafferty despised the utopian. Barriers have fallen away. Men and women believe they are fulfilled—and who can tell them otherwise, at least if one does not believe in a higher order? But the test of a Lafferty utopia is simple: it crawls into the bed and murders eschatology. There is no hope of future fulfillment, the wish for perfection that ends most of Lafferty's oceanic novels. That, I think, is the joke behind the story’s otherwise strange neologism, the word prozymeides, which means something like “primitive fermentation” and alludes to the yeast (zymē) in Matthew 13:33, a passage Lafferty returns to often, most notably in the climax of Past Master (1968). The Tuesday Night society isn’t fermenting anything, just as the actinic philosophy isn’t.

Finally, while the diegetic world is sped-up, the narrative voice is not. It is detached and ironic in its pacing. Compared to the folksiness of “One at a Time,” this difference reveals Lafferty’s command of what might be called his pragmatic marker trick: he draws the reader closer to his voice not by encouraging identification with the character, but by refusing to do so. The comedy is made possible by Lafferty's copyrighted refusal to look like one is moralizing when one is, in fact, moralizing, in this case, about how novelty and excitement can replace depth. The title itself is something of a masterpiece. A night filled with careers, fortunes, and marriages is labeled slow because, without the weight of human being, nothing meaningful has really happened.

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