(Notes for Speech for DeepSouthCon'79, New Orleans, July 21, 1979)

I'm going to talk about the peculiar science-fictionish circumstance and condition in which we are living.  It is, unfortunately, an overworked theme and situation that has been used hundreds of times and has never been well-handled even once.  It is the 'Day After The World Ended'  situation, subtitled 'Grubbing in the Rubble'.  It is the business of making out, a little bit, after a total catastrophe has hit.  There are possibilities for several good stories in this situation, and I puzzled for a long time as to why no good ones had ever been written.  I even myself tried and failed to write some good ones based on this set-up.  And only recently have I discovered why plausible fiction cannot be based on this situation.

The reason here is that fact precludes fiction.  Being inside the situation, we are a little too close to it to see it clearly.  Science Fiction has long been babbling about cosmic destructions and the ending of either physical or civilized worlds, but it has all been displaced babble.  SF has been carrying on about near-future or far-future destructions and its mind-set will not allow it to realize that the destruction of our world has already happened in the quite recent past, that today is 'The Day After The World Ended'.   Science Fiction is not alone in failing to understand what has happened.  There is an almost impenetrable amnesia that obstructs the examination of the actual catastrophe.

I am speaking literally about a real happening, the end of the world in which we lived till fairly recent years.  The destruction or unstructuring of that world, which is still sometimes referred to as 'Western Civilization' or 'Modern Civilization', happened suddenly, some time in the half century between 1912 and 1962.  That world, which was 'The World' for a few centuries, is gone.  Though it ended quite recently, the amnesia concerning its ending is general.  Several historiographers have given the opinion that these amnesias are features common to all 'ends of worlds'.  Nobody now remembers our late world very clearly, and nobody will ever remember it clearly in the natural order of things.  It can't be recollected because recollection is one of the things it took with it when it went...

[from R.A. Lafferty Non-Fiction: It's Down the Slippery Cellar Stairs, published as Drumm Booklet No. 14]