"“It had been a slow Tuesday night. A few hundred new products had run their course on the markets. There had been a score of dramatic hits, three-minute and five-minute capsule dramas, and several of the six-minute long-play affairs. Night Street Nine—a solidly sordid offering—seemed to be in as the drama of the night unless there should be a late hit. Hundred-storied buildings had been erected, occupied, obsoleted, and demolished again to make room for more contemporary structures. Only the mediocre would use a building that had been left over from the Day-Flies or the Dawners, or even the Nyctalops of the night before. The city was rebuilt pretty completely at least three times during an eight-hour period.”" —R. A. Lafferty
· 2010 Arthur B. Evans, The Wesleyan Anthology of Science Fiction · 1979 James Gunn, The Road To Science Fiction #3 · 1966 Nebula Nominee, Best Short Story
"“You are a little girl, Oread, a somewhat exasperating and precocious little girl.” “But I don't feel precocious. I feel like a rock-head. How can I be a little bit like papa and not anything like anyone else at all? What was the connection between myself and papa?” “There wasn't any at first, Oread, not like that. We were looking for a child since we could not have one of our own. I fell in love with you at first sight because you reminded me of Henry. And Henry fell in love with you at first sight because you reminded him of Henry." —R. A. Lafferty
"In the year 1893, land allotments in severalty were made to the remaining eight hundred and twenty-one Pawnee Indians. Each would receive one hundred and sixty acres of land and no more, and thereafter the Pawnees would be expected to pay taxes on their land, the same as the White-Eyes did. “Kitkehahke!” Clarence Big-Saddle cussed. “You can't kick a dog around proper on a hundred and sixty acres." —R. A. Lafferty
"“I have let my business go down,” Miller said. “My wife says that I have let her down. My sons say that I have turned into a sleepy stranger. Everybody agrees that I've lost all ambition and judgment. And yet I do have a stirring ambition. I am not able, however, to put it into words.” “We'll put it into words, Miller, either yours or mine,” Rousse said. “Slip up on it right now! Quickly, what is the stirring ambition?” “To visit the Northern Shore, and to make the visit stick.”" —R. A. Lafferty
"They were down on the big asteroid Proavitus — a sphere that almost tinkled with the potential profit that might be shaken out of it. And the tough men of the Expedition knew their business. They signed big contracts on the native velvet-like bark scrolls and on their own parallel tapes. They impressed, inveigled and somewhat cowed the slight people of Proavitus. Here was a solid two-way market, enough to make them slaver. And there was a whole world of oddities that could lend themselves to the luxury trade." —R. A. Lafferty
"He, whoever he was, stirred out of a fitful sleep into a frozen and apprehensive fear of falling. He supposed that he was a man of the human sort, as he usually was when he woke up in such a turmoil. His stirring had caused him to slip another notch and to dislodge something more of whatever was holding him up. And whatever had woke him up was the whistling of a frozen substance falling, through the frozen air, to a very great distance down. He felt insecure, and he realized that most of what he had been lying on had now vanished into space." —R. A. Lafferty
· 1993 Theodore Sturgeon Memorial Award Winner, Best Short Story
"Eginhard wrote that the Hinges of the World are, the one of them in the Carnic Alps north of the Isarko and quite near High Glockner, and the other one in the Wangeroog in the Frisian islands off the Weser mouth and under the water of this shelf; and that these hinges are made of iron. It is the Germanies, the whole great country between these hinges that turns over, he wrote, after either a long generation or a short generation. The only indication of the turning over is a groaning of the World Hinges too brief to terrify. That which rises out of the Earth has the same appearance in mountains and rivers and towns and people as the land that it replaces." —R. A. Lafferty
"It was clear to Barnaby that Blackie was really a villain. Not everybody knew this. A melodrama villain is only black behind the lights. Off stage he should have a heart of gold. Whether of wrestling match, or afternoon serial, or evening drama or film, or on the little stage here at the Golden Gate Bar, the villain should be — when his role is finished — kind and courteous, thoughtful and big-hearted, a prince of a fellow." —R. A. Lafferty
"Black Red had been sixteen years at stud. This was after a strict colthood and eight years of competitive horse racing. Now he had become a very slow and undependable stud. He was one old horse. He gnawed a clump of prickly pear. He had been a stupid and rock-headed horse from his youth, and now that his eyes were shot he would eat anything. His owner chewed on a length of big bluestem grass and contemplated him. It was too bad to sell, for nine dollars for cat meat, a horse that had earned five million dollars. But what else could be done with the old animal? But Black Red smelled a brother horse, an old flyer like himself, and he raised his head." —R. A. Lafferty
"“Properly to carry out the next assignment for this class, it will be necessary that you die,” the instructor said. “Some of you may not want to do this. If you do not, I will have to demerit you as for any other neglected assignment. There are several straight-A students in this class, however, and I am sure that they will want to continue so. To them I say ‘Carry out this assignment.’”" —R. A. Lafferty
"Christopher Foxx was walking down a city street. No, it was a city road. It was really a city trail or path. He was walking in a fog, but the fog wasn't in the air or the ambient: it was in his head. Things were mighty odd here. There was just a little bit of something wrong about things. Oceans of grass for one instance. Should a large and busy city (and this was clearly that) have blue-green grass belly-high in its main street? " —R. A. Lafferty
"“How old is saxophones?” “Born in the year 1840. The sire and inventor was Antoine Sax.” “How old is mice?” “Not old at all. About twenty-five million years old; almost the newest thing in animals. The first mouse, with no antecedents at all, popped out from behind a piece of baseboard quarter-round (in a cave, I suppose) just about that long ago.” “How old is Billy Dukes?”" —R. A. Lafferty
"He was about the last of them. What? The last of the great individualists? The last of the true creative geniuses of the century? The last of the sheer precursors? No. No. He was the last of the dolts. Kids were being born smarter all the time when he came along, and they would be so forever more. He was about the last dumb kid ever born." —R. A. Lafferty
· 1975 Seiun Winner, Best Foreign Short Story · 2001 Orson Scott Card, The Best Science Fiction of the Century · 1973 Hugo Winner, Best Short Story · 1973 Locus 16th, Best Short Fiction
"“We are on this mission because of one phrase, repeated by leaders of five different parties, and maintained in the face of vigorous courts martial,” Fairbridge Exendine, the singling leader, said with a sort of hooked wonder. “I have never been able to get that phrase out of my mind. ‘You'd never believe it’ was the phrase, and the men of the five parties, of the more than twenty parties in fact, would not elaborate on it much.”" —R. A. Lafferty
"The five underground levels had been parking places for motor vehicles when those were still common, but now these depths were turned into warrens and hovels. The Sky-Seller lurked and lived in the lowest and smallest and meanest of them all. He came out only at night. Daylight would have killed him: he knew that. He sold out of the darkest shadows of the night. He had only a few (though oddly select) clients, and nobody knew who his supplier was. He said that he had no supplier, that he gathered and made the stuff himself. Welkin Alauda, a full-bodied but light-moving girl (it was said that her bones were hollow and filled with air), came to the Sky-Seller just before first light, just when he had become highly nervous but had not yet bolted to his underground." —R. A. Lafferty
"Should there be another reason, Shackleton? Well, there is; but we go about it awkwardly and without knowing what we're doing. The thing about humans which nobody apparently wishes to notice, is that we're a species which has never had an adult culture. We feel that lack more and more as we become truly adult in other ways. It grows tedious to stretch out a childhood forever. The easy enjoyments, the easy rationality, the easy governments and sciences, are really childish things. We master them while we are yet children, and we look beyond. But there isn't anything beyond the childishness, Shackleton. We must find a deeper view somehow. We are looking for that something deeper here." —R. A. Lafferty
· 1973 Damon Knight, The Golden Road · 1971 Hugo Nominee, Best Short Story · 1971 Nebula Nominee, Best Short Story
"The chimney rock is only a little older than mankind, only a little younger than grass. Its formation had been up-thrust and then eroded away again, all but such harder parts as itself and other chimneys and blocks. A party of five persons came to this place where the chimney rock had fallen against a still newer hill. The people of the party did not care about the deep lime stone below: they were not geologists. They did care about the newer hill ( it was man-made ) and they did care a little about the rock chimney; they were archeologists. Here was time heaped up, bulging out in casing and accumulation, and not in line sequence. And here also was striated and banded time, grown tall, and then shattered and broken." —R. A. Lafferty
· 1972 Ditmar Nominee, · 1971 Hugo Nominee, Best Short Story · 1971 Nebula Nominee, Best Short Story · 1970 Locus 3rd, Best Short Fiction
"Art Slick and Jim Boomer went to the rundown building next door. It was smaller, about a six-foot cube, and the sign said Public Stenographer . The clatter of a typewriter was coming from it, but the noise stopped when they opened the door. A dark pretty girl was sitting in a chair before a small table. There was nothing else in the room, and no typewriter. “I thought I heard a typewriter in here,” Art said. “Oh that is me.” The girl smiled. “Sometimes I amuse myself make typewriter noises like a public stenographer is supposed to.”" —R. A. Lafferty