Subject: (urth) OT: Lafferty recommendations

From: Matthew Groves <matthewalangroves at gmail.com>
Date: Sat, 21 Jul 2007 18:11:37 +0000

Wolfe seems to be a big admirer of R. A. Lafferty.  ("Has Anyone Seen
Junie Moon" from _Starwater Strains_ has a character named Roy T.
Laffer.)  Are there any readers of Lafferty here who can recommend a
good place for a Wolfe fan to start?

---

From: Bryan Alexander <bryan.alexander at gmail.com>
Date: Sat, 21 Jul 2007 18:31:59 +0000

The short stories.  I liked the Nine Hundred Grandmothers collection, if you
can find it.

On 7/21/07, Matthew Groves <matthewalangroves at gmail.com> wrote:
> _______________________________________________
> Urth Mailing List
> To post, write urth at urth.net
> Subscription/information: http://www.urth.net
>

-- 
Bryan Alexander
http://infocult.typepad.com/
http://twitter.com/BryanAlexander
-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: http://lists.urth.net/pipermail/urth-urth.net/attachments/20070721/6ca0f5b8/attachment.htm

---

From: Gwern Branwen <gwern0 at gmail.com>
Date: Sat, 21 Jul 2007 19:13:33 +0000

> good place for a Wolfe fan to start?

Start with ''Fourth Mansions'' for a good almost-mainstream immersion in Lafferty-style paranoia and story telling, and follow it up with ''The Devil is Dead'' and ''The Annals of Klepsis'' (in that order; Klepsis is even more paranoid and hallucinatory than the previous two put together, so I wouldn't start with it).

--
gwern
mania 701 CTP CATO Phon-e Chicago Posse NSDM
-------------- next part --------------
A non-text attachment was scrubbed...
Name: not available
Type: application/pgp-signature
Size: 189 bytes
Desc: not available
Url : http://lists.urth.net/pipermail/urth-urth.net/attachments/20070721/4c14713c/attachment.pgp

---

From: Roy C. Lackey <rclackey at stic.net>
Date: Sun, 22 Jul 2007 00:20:56 +0000

>good place for a Wolfe fan to start?

Echoing what others have said: Lafferty is probably most consistently at his
best in short stories, but it was _The Devil is Dead_ that first hooked me.
That's a fine book, as is its sequel, _Archipelago_. (Good luck trying to
find it! <g>) There are even a couple of related short stories in the
collections.

-Roy

---

From: Dan'l Danehy-Oakes <danldo at gmail.com>
Date: Sun, 22 Jul 2007 00:34:02 +0000

i'm going to go against the herd here and recommend Lafferty's book
_Apocalypses_, two short novels. The first, "The Three Armageddons
of Enniscorthy Sweeney," is about why the Twentieth Century never
really happened. The second, whose title I'm blanking on, is about
an agent appointed to investigate the sudden appearance of a major
landmass.

They're both very, very funny.

-- 
Dan'l Danehy-Oakes, writer, trainer, bon vivant
-----
http://www.livejournal.com/users/sturgeonslawyer
http://www.danehyoakes.com
Soon, where Toon Town once stood will be a string of gas stations,
inexpensive motels, restaurants that serve rapidly prepared food. Tire
salons, automobile dealerships and wonderful, wonderful billboards
reaching as far as the eye can see. My God, it'll be beautiful.

---

From: Roy C. Lackey <rclackey at stic.net>
Date: Sun, 22 Jul 2007 04:03:15 +0000

>They're both very, very funny.

Yes, they are. The other one is _Where Have You Been, Sandaliotis?_

_The Annals of Klepsis_ and _The Reefs of Earth_  are also funny.

-Roy

---

From: Andy Robertson <andywrobertson at clara.co.uk>
Date: Mon, 23 Jul 2007 12:32:23 +0000

> good place for a Wolfe fan to start?

I recommend ARRIVE AT EASTERWINE, a lovely, funny, wise book about the 
Institute of Impure Science and their creaton, Epiktistes the Ktistec 
machine.  Reads like it's a fix-up even if it isn't. 

hartshorn 

http://www.thenightland.co.uk 

01273-488272 / 0777-214-9545

---

From: Craig Brewer <cnbrewer at yahoo.com>
Date: Mon, 23 Jul 2007 14:00:47 +0000

It's a bit hard to find, but the collection _Lafferty
in Orbit_ (of his stories from Damon Knight's _Orbit_)
is quite a good source for small doses of very strong
Lafferty. There are some great little gems in there:
"The Skinny People of Leptophlebo Street," "One at a
Time," and "When All the Lands Pour Out Again," not to
mention about 15 others.

But since that's hard to find, I'd second those who
said _The Devil is Dead_.

      ____________________________________________________________________________________
Fussy? Opinionated? Impossible to please? Perfect.  Join Yahoo!'s user panel and lay it on us. http://surveylink.yahoo.com/gmrs/yahoo_panel_invite.asp?a=7

---

From: Fernando Q. Gouvêa <fqgouvea at colby.edu>
Date: Mon, 23 Jul 2007 14:17:31 +0000

Actually, many of these are not hard to find at all. Wildside Press has 
print-on-demand editions of quite a few of Lafferty's books (including 
these two). See http://www.wildsidebooks.com/LAFFERTY-R-A_c_31-1.html

They can also be ordered from Amazon.com.

Fernando

-- 
=============================================================
Fernando Q. Gouvea
Carter Professor of Mathematics
Colby College                     Editor, FOCUS
5836 Mayflower Hill               Editor, MAA Reviews
Waterville, ME 04901              http://mathdl.maa.org
http://www.colby.edu/~fqgouvea

... Mr. Auburn's brainiacs hail from the Hollywood school of genius. 
That's where highly photogenic people learn how to make Einsteinian 
breakthroughs without the benefit of a fancy degree while watching the 
late-show on TV. Call it the "Good Will Hunting" principle of brain 
power, in which a hero's brilliance can be measured in direct proportion 
to his or her kissability and sulky disregard for higher education.
   -- Amy Gamerman on David Auburn's play "Proof"
      (The Wall Street Journal, May 21, 2000)

---

From: Adam Stephanides <adamsteph at earthlink.net>
Date: Wed, 25 Jul 2007 16:06:01 +0000

Lafferty is one of my very favorite authors. I would start with _Nine Hundred Grandmothers_, his first story collection; it's his most new reader-friendly collection, and probably also his most consistent. Then probably _Strange Doings_, his next collection. _Lafferty in Orbit_ is good too, but SD has the advantage that you can probably find it cheap by hunting in used book stores. (_Ringing Changes_, another collection, is also good.) I'll also second the recommendation for _Apocalypses_.

Keep in mind that Lafferty is a very different writer from Wolfe. If I were going to describe him in one word, it would be "exuberant," as opposed to Wolfe's deliberateness. Conversely, Lafferty's work doesn't require the close reading that Wolfe's does. Also, Lafferty was even more conservative, politically and religiously, than Wolfe (he was a creationist, for example), though this is almost invisible in much of his fiction, including the collections I suggested.

Lafferty's catalogue as a whole is in a sorry state. In the 80s and early 90s, there were several small presses publishing Lafferty. Then, for some reason, they all stopped at around the same time (leaving two series up in the air), and most of what they published is probably unobtainable now except at collector's prices, if at all. There are also a lot of good stories that were afaik never collected. Somebody needs to publish The Complete Stories of R. A. Lafferty. (I'd like to see all the novels in print, too, but that's probably asking for the moon.)

--Adam

---

From: Matthew King <automatthew at gmail.com>
Date: Thu, 26 Jul 2007 14:43:09 +0000

Here is the introduction to Lafferty that hooked me:

http://greatsfandf.com/AUTHORS/RALafferty.php

Lafferty is never "realistic." However ordinary his settings may seem  
when first we start one of his tales, we must remember that for a  
certainty they are surreal fantasies in the truest sense of those  
words. I think the most apt analogy for Lafferty's works is animated  
cartoons. Things in Lafferty tales happen at the breathless,  
breakneck pace--and with the madcap ad hoc paralogic--of a Bugs Bunny  
cartoon. We believe none of it because we are never for a second  
expected to believe any of it, any more than we are expected to  
"believe" what happens to Bugs and Elmer; we do not participate to  
behold "slices of life" but to behold madcap exaggerations and  
distortions of it. The single worst error a reader new to Lafferty  
can make is to think that a world Lafferty introduces in apparently  
ordinary science-fiction terms actually is (even by science-fiction  
standards) ordinary.