“History is the peopled worlds. History is ourselves in our clearest aspect. Only in history do we find the substance that is our justification. History is the account that we will give to God when, on the last morning, He will ask us to give an account of ourselves in species and persons. Only in history do we find the clarity that is our purpose of being.” Today I want to sort out the events preceding Long John Tong Tyrone's planetfall in Annals of Klepsis. Readers will kno

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