The Three Armageddons of Enniscorthy Sweeny is my favorite longer Lafferty work. One of its major ideas is silent radio, the drama that goes on inside us without being spoken or shown, yet somehow passes between us and enters the world we all share. Silent radio carries the ordinary richness of life, its pleasures, loves, and possibilities, but it also plays horrors that no one seems able to stop. Sweeny thinks he composes his own inward programs. He finds other people receiv

“Ginny Wrapped in the Sun” (1967) draws on a few unusual sources, including Isaac Asimov. Lafferty takes what should be a reassuring calculation from Asimov and turns it into evidence that humanity may be living on borrowed time. The source of the calculation is pretty obscure, and I came across it in some incidental reading. Lafferty, breaking into science fiction, must have read “The Slowly Moving Finger,” published in the February 1964 issue of The Magazine of Fantasy and

Lafferty's Door The things that the people were doing right now were a little bit extreme. Granted that they all loved one another. Granted that they were all present and were not doing these things behind each others’ backs. But the quick loving was going on a bit too hotly. And there shouldn’t have been that sort of mixing of generations. Well, everybody loved the several young girls who were there for the ‘evening’ (Mary Jill O’Trassy and Chiara and Teresa Benedict and