The two Lafferty stories, like virtually all Lafferty stories, sting and tickle at the same time. There is nobody, there has never been anybody, who writes like Lafferty. Under the puckishness, the color-bursts, the wild, weird and wonderful characterizations, the tumble and sparkle of language, is an undercoat of sharp and serious observation - observation of human motivations, of human institutions (universities, for example, or rituals which have lost their reason-for-being) so that, like Gulliver's Travels, almost all of Lafferty can be read as enchanting entertainments, or as sharply-etched political cartoonery, or as analogs of a superbly thought-out philosophy concerning human nature and human conduct. In other words, you get out of Lafferty, as out of Swift, whatever you're equipped to bring in.
-Theodore Sturgeon, referring to Lafferty's stories 'Bright Flightways' and 'The Man Who Walked Through Cracks' in Chrysalis 3 (1978), edited by Roy Torgeson
