Tag Archives: R.A. Lafferty

Continued from Previous Rock

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By John Hertz: (reprinted in honor of RAL’s birth month from Vanamonde 485)  A.E. van Vogt called R.A. Lafferty the most original writer in s-f (Science Fiction Review 23, 1977).  There’s a tribute.

Lafferty is gone now (1914-2002).  He was a strange dreamer, a strong drink.  He published 200 short stories and 20 novels, if that’s what they were.  He won the World Fantasy Life Achievement Award (1990), and a Hugo for “Eurema’s Dam” (1972); he was nominated for three other Hugos and seven Nebulas.

His best may be Past Master (1968) and The Fall of Rome (non-fiction, 1971).  Okla Hannali (1972), an Amerind novel, is celebrated.  Small presses reprint him; you can get Does Anyone Else Have Something Further to Add? (short stories, 1974; repr. 2000) or many others.

He worried about men who knew everything, machines, manipulation; they made him mordant, and Gene Wolfe says he was the favorite of Joe Mayhew (Locus 496, 2002).

Damon Knight in the original-story anthology Orbit ran nineteen by Lafferty, and introduced the collection Lafferty in Orbit (1991), attracted, I fear, by satire, praising diamonds most for their hardness.

Even the title Past Master is a jest; the expression is “passed master”, i.e. one who has passed the test – “of the guild or public opinion”, W. Follett, Modern American Usage p. 312 (1966) – and earned recognition, but Sir Thomas More has been brought centuries into the future, because or in spite of his mastery.  At the end, re-reading just now, I cried.

Lafferty beginning Rome starts on mosaic chips in the Empire, catches himself with Dimitte nobis rhapsodia nostra, “Forgive us our rhapsodies”, and sails away.

Knight did have another side.  In the “Arcs & Secants” part of Orbit 18 (p. 249; 1976) he printed from Lafferty “the following poem about Ms. Wilhelm:

“Oh Kate has gone to writing pomes!
   Hi ho!
She writes them bright without the bromes,
She piles them up as tall as tomes!
    Hi ho!  The Gollie Woll!
She routs the temper of the times,
    Hi ho!
She cuts the strings that worked the mimes,
It doesn’t matter if they rimes.
    Hi, ho!  The Gollie Woll!

“This was a contribution to a round-robin letter circulated among a few Orbit writers.  Mr. Lafferty later withdrew from it, alleging unparliamentary remarks and stuffiness.”  R.I.P.

Visible Ray

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Bud Webster’s extraordinary appreciation of R.A. Lafferty — Secret Crocodiles and Strange Doings (or Sometimes the Magic Really Works) – for Grantville Gazette is well worth your time. Webster says —

Lafferty wasn’t a science fiction writer, regardless of the section of the bookstore in which his titles may have appeared; rather, he was a mad fantasist, a maker of mythologies, a Wizard of Oddities.

Quite right.

Lafferty’s short story “Slow Tuesday Night” is most memorable to me. The pace of human life has accelerated to such a degree that civilization has split into three shifts, the Auroreans, the Hemerobians, and the Nyctalops. People, laughably, still have the exact same superficial attitudes towards wealth, celebrity and love.

“Slow Tuesday Night” is available at this link on the Wayback Machine although to get it to load I had to spit in the back and kick it a couple times, which is to say, click on the “Impatient?” link.

Webster looks at many aspects of Ray’s life. None is more troubling than his heavy drinking, painfully evident when he went to conventions. Seeing that myself made it impossible to laugh anymore at the point-of-view character in “Slow Tuesday Night” who claims to put himself to sleep using the “Natural method. And a bottle of red-eye.”

Classics at Lunacon 2010

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The Lunacon 2010 program features several discussions organized by John Hertz, each devoted to one of the “Classics of Science Fiction”. Three of John’s selections are:

Isaac Asimov
I, Robot (1950)
Framed in Dr. Suan Calvin’s reminiscences is this set of stories first published over the years 1940-1950. The author originally wanted to call the book Mind and Iron; what would that have told us? How are the stories as character studies? Narrative? What’s missing from the final episode?

R.A. Lafferty
Past Master (1968)
Thomas More is brought five centuries across time and space, maybe to help — as defined by whom? Lafferty was one of our original authors. This, his first novel, is poetic, satirical, and strange. You can guess which of those I think most lasting; what do you think? A book note by me is at Collectingsf.com.

E.E. Smith
Skylark Three (1948)
Here is the second and my favorite of the Skylark Series, which begins with The Skylark of Space (1946). Space and Three were each published in earlier forms. Discovery and invention fuel the story, which is driven by people, some of whom are aliens. Excitement, adventure, you bet, and it’s remarkable how much is timeless.

Hertz on Collectingsf.com

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John Hertz’ contribution to Collectingsf.com this December is a review of R.A. Lafferty’s Past Master (1968):

Science fiction in 1968 was athrob with protest.  There is no sign Lafferty marched to that drummer then nor does this book seem to now.  In the resonance of Past Master his warnings are neither because of nor despite what other people cry.  He speaks in a voice singularly his own.