One question in Lafferty’s thinking about the end of contingent worlds is how to measure a life against Lafferty certainly went through it. Lafferty draws attention to the gap between human desire and human limitation. That sounds like a reflection on what Lafferty was trying to do in his art. Another from my Lafferty playlist.

Tolkien, On Fairy-Stories Lafferty disliked Tolkien’s work. Even so, Tolkien is useful for thinking about the Lafferty stories that center on recovery. In “Rogue Raft,” Lafferty pushes back against the dogma that sea levels fall only during Ice Ages. It was the whole world laughing at them, in new mountains that had not been mountains a moment before For anyone interested in tracing Lafferty’s thoughts on catastrophism and fringe thought (beyond old

What stands out to me is how much Lafferty leaves in that he would usually leave out. The whole thing ends with the small Indian girl shouldering Blocker's corpse for the three-mile trek What makes it a Lafferty story is that the genre is being subverted. Here are two men who are that one thing we find so often in Lafferty: a schizo-gash. If there is a Lafferty twist here, it is that the story deconstructs the competent-man genre.

My answer is that Lafferty permits considerable freedom in the arrangements while retaining a small set What interests me is how much instability Lafferty permits while retaining those foundations. Within them, consensus can spin out of control, as it often does in Lafferty: Lafferty’s most unruly Lafferty imagines a laboratory in which myth has work to do. So what does Lafferty do with the situation?

Lafferty never worked it out. And here Lafferty does something remarkable. Getting out of structural binds was part of Lafferty’s genius. Nor was Lafferty going to put God on trial the way James K. So Lafferty moved on to other things.

So, instead, Lafferty wrote “Flaming Arrow.” Lafferty wisely discards most of Adams’s world creation. Lafferty isn’t having it. Here, Lafferty really goes to work. Lafferty has obvious fun here.

Earlier today, I shared some thoughts on how Jung’s Aion influenced Lafferty’s Past Master. Lafferty shares with Jung a sense of the spiritual world as oceanic and patterned. Lafferty draws on Erasmus’s portrait and turns physical detail into symbol and satire. Lafferty, then in his early twenties, admired several of the contributors. Knox reads it satirically, as does Lafferty. “It was a joke, I tell you, a bitter joke.

This kind of tonal whiplash is a staple of Lafferty’s fiction. Not long ago, Andrew Ferguson asked what the funniest Lafferty work is. Most Lafferty fans love how often he makes them laugh. He is a very funny writer. While I think Lafferty is often funnier than other writers, I struggle to name a single purely funny This is Lafferty’s Janusian peripeteia at its lightest.

“Slow Tuesday Night” is one of Lafferty’s great short stories. Lafferty removes the drag of time. Lafferty repeatedly returns to variations on the story structured by clock-time. "Slow Tuesday Night," strange as it is, is a Lafferty utopia, which is to say a dystopia because Lafferty But the test of a Lafferty utopia is simple: it crawls into the bed and murders eschatology.

"In Deepest Glass" I’ve written here about Lafferty’s zoon anthropikon, his vision of humanity not merely Lafferty is drawn to a conception of human nature that bears traces of an older, more inclusive state—one Both “Boomer Flats” and “In Deepest Glass” show Lafferty using his fastball, writing at the top of his Nonetheless, Lafferty continues to depict animals and humans as bound to the same higher reality. Lafferty’s stance seems to be precisely the opposite of post-humanism.

My preliminary map of the sources Lafferty mined for Okla Hannali is now live under Resources. In discussing The Elliptical Grave as a Lost Race novel, I focused on Lafferty's recurring exploration Lafferty's intuition about artificial intelligence's moral and spiritual dilemmas is remarkable. Lafferty’s Past Master. Capital and authority could concentrate inside fortified enclaves that echo Lafferty’s Cosmopolis, while

This is a long Lafferty story, but an exceptionally smart one. There are so many ways into it. As far as I know, no one has written about the moral economy of smell in Lafferty’s work. It dazzles, with Lafferty juggling language to track people who aren't what they seem. Lafferty begins by introducing Simon Radert and his wife, Norah. At the airport, Lafferty stages one of his finest set pieces involving identity exchange.