Lafferty" (1983), D. This is Lafferty at his most traditional. One of the signs that this is a Lafferty story is the language's thorough theological grounding. The story’s organizational structure is Lafferty at his simplest. Alphonse seems to have gained the whole world, but what started many years ago in the cool of the evening

It is late Lafferty. One recurring claim of this blog, following Lafferty himself, is that every Lafferty reader must assemble his own Lafferty. character and Lafferty’s God. If the book requires a double act of reading, and if it enacts real authorship through Lafferty while

Advanced Lafferty. That understanding came from tracing its sources and working out a way to read Lafferty as a whole. Lafferty allows the journey to end in stranding. There was a steamship in the middle of Fourteenth Street; it had the whole thoroughfare blocked. Lafferty probably liked these places.

Together they form Lafferty’s commentary on exposition itself. Is this how Lafferty sees exposition in science fiction? Probably. Lafferty reserves his full inversion of conventional exposition for the ending. Lafferty instead gives us this exchange: “I shudder, too, Clarissa. “So there are whole episodes in these High Journals which the humans concerned will swear did not happen

Awareness of the latter comes from reading a lot of Lafferty and what he read. Lafferty wants the attuned reader to see this. The poetic sublimation of male eros is the setup for the whole “Higher Set of Values,” though the very The whole construction is sophistic and Platonic (through the Pythagorean line that one finds in the Is this what Lafferty intends? I don't know.

Lafferty assumes the reader knows why it’s white. Lafferty clearly says his target is the whole world, but it still feels like he is talking about younger Cubic isn’t a full stand-in for Lafferty, though he’s much closer to Lafferty than the youth culture Lafferty surely did not see himself that way. too mechanical himself (Lafferty is not); and, while the story mocks the youth culture—the lippies,

this failure to observe normal canons of writing still awaits a coherent presentation of his work as a whole But I think this misses Lafferty’s point. But that is certainly not what Lafferty is saying. To put it more sharply: this is not a story about “getting the whole story.” Lafferty is not saying that history is a text we write.

" (1965/1980) Lafferty began writing Crocodile as early as 1961, before his first novel, yet the story and imagery, I want to contrast the hopeful apocalypse of Past Master (1968) with Crocodile, one of Lafferty Lafferty presents the uprising of the machines as a disjunction of language games—distinct, rule-governed There, Lafferty writes: Lightning, a billion times as bright as that on Electric Mountain, a billion Contrast the ending Lafferty gives to “Crocodile” and the one he later wrote for Past Master, where the

.” — Thomas Aquinas Advanced Lafferty today. “The Effigy Histories” is one of my favorite Lafferty stories. Lafferty gives us Karl Effigy, a young man and former juvenile delinquent. For Lafferty, the ultimate stakes of this must be religious. That makes him an extremely weird moderate foundationalist, one who can appeal to both the whole-hog

.” — Lafferty, interview Lafferty repeatedly said that he swore off writing on his seventieth birthday Lafferty is called cartoonish. She is another of Lafferty's Whores of Babylon. And Lafferty makes it nearly impossible to miss the whole point of it by placing the word hell in the “Something Rich and Strange” is not Lafferty at his best, but it is Lafferty at the very end of his writing

It is a typical Lafferty raw draft, full of caret insertions, strikethroughs, pasted-over notes, and From Lafferty’s notes, one learns that he intended the piece as the opening of a novel rather than a The last will make a Lafferty reader’s ears perk up. Lafferty writes, Artificially deformed heads bedamned. Those are not artificially deformed heads. The whole hidden world is concealed by ground-based devices that deflect aircraft and by artificial storms

Advanced Lafferty today. visible in what I am going to call Lafferty's invisibilia-and-futura stories. We abjure the whole business. We're well quit of the old nightmare." And then Lafferty does something he rarely does. Because Lafferty takes them to be the shape of reality itself.