That the Prince of the World was following a time-table relentlessly was clear. But it was also clear that nobody cared very much about that. The Writing of Fiction ceased everywhere in the world with the unstructuring of the world. Fiction required a structured world. Without consensus fact and happening for background, there could not be fiction. When the structure was gone, people lived partly in the framework of fact and partly in the framework of fiction. But with one fo

“There’s only one thing in the world more pompous than a SF writer who takes himself too seriously.” “Whazzat?” “A SF writer who takes herself too seriously.” —Letter to Sheryl Smith, January 2, 1976 I have heard another Lafferty reader express some unease at the way Lafferty sometimes spoke about other science fiction writers. He certainly was no flatterer. We see this side of him in No Stone Unthrown, a series of short satirical squibs aimed at writers, editors, and reviewe

Sometimes one caught sight, upon a bell tower, of an enormous head and a bundle of disordered limbs swinging furiously at the end of a rope; it was Quasimodo ringing vespers or the Angelus. Often at night a hideous form was seen wandering along the frail balustrade of carved lacework, which crowns the towers and borders the circumference of the apse; again it was the hunchback of Notre-Dame. Then, said the women of the neighborhood, the whole church took on something fantasti