OT: Lafferty recommendations

Matthew King · 26 Jul 2007, 14:43 · from 2007-July.txt.gz

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From: automatthew at gmail.com (Matthew King)
Date: Thu, 26 Jul 2007 09:43:09 -0500
Subject: (urth) OT: Lafferty recommendations
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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.

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