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R(aphael) A(loysius) Lafferty

1914-2002

Nationality: American
	Entry Updated : 04/21/2003
Place of Birth: Neola, IA

Genre(s): Romance/Historical fiction; Science fiction; Fantasy fiction; Fiction; Novels; Short Stories

Award(s):
    Nebula Award nomination, Science Fiction Writers of America, 1968, for Past Master, 1970, for Fourth Mansions, and 1971, for The Devil Is Dead; Hugo Award nomination, World Science Fiction Convention, 1968, for Past Master; Phoenix Award, 1971; Invisible Little Man Award, 1972; Hugo Award, 1973, for story "Eurema's Dam"; E. E. Smith Memorial Award, 1973; World Fantasy Lifetime Achievment Award, 1990; Arrell Gibson Lifetime Achievement Award, 1995.


Table of Contents:

    Personal Information
    Career
    Writings
    Sidelights
    Further Readings About the Author
    Obituary Sources


Personal Information: Family: Born November 7, 1914, in Neola, IA; died after an extended illness deriving from a series of strokes, March 18, 2002, in Broken Arrow, OK; son of Hugh David (an oil-lease broker) and Julia Mary (a teacher; maiden name, Burke) Lafferty. Education: Attended University of Tulsa, 1932-33; further study with International Correspondence Schools, 1939-42. Politics: Independent. Religion: Roman Catholic. Memberships: Science Fiction Writers of America.


Career: Novelist. Clark Electrical Supply Co., Tulsa, OK, buyer, 1935-42, 1946-50, and 1952-71; freelance writer, 1971--. Military service: U.S. Army, 1942-46; became staff sergeant; received New Guinea Campaign Star.
WRITINGS BY THE AUTHOR:
SCIENCE-FICTION NOVELS

    * Past Master, Ace Books (New York, NY), 1968.

    * The Reefs of Earth, Berkley Publishing (New York, NY), 1968.

    * Space Chantey, Ace Books (New York, NY), 1968.

    * Fourth Mansions, Ace Books (New York, NY), 1969, reprinted, Bart Books, 1988.

    * The Devil Is Dead, Avon (New York, NY), 1971, reprinted, Bart Books, 1988.

    * Arrive at Easterwine: The Autobiography of a Ktistec Machine, Scribner (New York, NY), 1971.

    * (With Gene Wolf and Walter Moudy) In the Wake of Man: A Science-Fiction Triad, Bobbs-Merrill (Indianapolis, IN), 1975.

    * Not to Mention Camels, Bobbs-Merrill (Indianapolis, IN), 1976.

    * Apocalypses, Pinnacle Books, 1977.

    * Archipelago, Manuscript Press (New Orleans, LA), 1979.

    * Aurelia, Donning, 1982.

    * The Annals of Klepsis, Ace Books (New York, NY), 1983.

    * My Heart Leaps Up, 3 volumes, Chris Drumm Books, Chapters 1 and 2, 1986, Chapters 3 and 4, 1987, Chapters 5 and 6, 1987.

    * Serpent's Egg, Morrigan Publications, 1987.

    * East of Laughter, Morrigan Publications, 1988.

    * Iron Tears, Edgewood Press (Cambridge, MA), 1992.

    * More than Melchisedech, illustrations by R. Ward Shipman, U. M. Press (Weston, Ontario, Canada), 1992.

    * Tales of Midnight: More than Melchisedech, U. M. Press (Weston, Ontario, Canada), 1992.

    * Argo, United Mythologies Press, 1992.

    * Mantis, Corroboree, in press.

OTHER NOVELS

    * The Fall of Rome (historical novel), Doubleday (Garden City, NY), 1971.

    * The Flame Is Green (historical novel), Walker & Co., 1971.

    * Okla Hannali (historical novel), Doubleday (Garden City, NY), 1972, reprinted, University of Oklahoma Press, 1991.

    * Sindbad: The Thirteenth Voyage, Broken Mirrors Press (Cambridge, MA), 1989.

    * How Many Miles to Babylon?, United Mythologies Press (Weston, Ontario, Canada), 1989.

    * Cranky Old Man from Tulsa: Interviews with R. A. Lafferty, United Mythologies Press (Weston, Ontario, Canada), 1990.

    * Episodes of the Argo, United Mythologies Press (Weston, Ontario, Canada), 1990.

    * Dotty, United Mythologies Press (Weston, Ontario, Canada), 1990.

    * The Early Lafferty Two, United Mythologies Press (Weston, Ontario, Canada), 1990.

    * Mischief Malicious, United Mythologies Press (Weston, Ontario, Canada), 1991.

STORY COLLECTIONS

    * Nine Hundred Grandmothers, Ace Books (New York, NY), 1970.

    * Strange Doings, Scribner (New York, NY), 1971.

    * Does Anyone Else Have Something Further to Add?: Stories about Secret Places and Mean Men, Scribner (New York, NY), 1974.

    * Funnyfingers and Cabrito, Pendragon Press (Oregon), 1976.

    * Horns on Their Heads, Pendragon Press (Oregon), 1976.

    * Golden Gate and Other Stories, edited by Ira M. Thornhill, Corroboree, 1982.

    * Four Stories, Chris Drumm Books, 1983.

    * Heart of Stone, Dear, and Other Stories, Chris Drumm Books, 1983.

    * Snake in His Bosom and Other Stories, Chris Drumm Books, 1983.

    * Through Elegant Eyes: Stories of Austro and the Men Who Knew Everything, edited by Ira M. Thornhill, Corroboree, 1983.

    * Ringing Changes, Ace Books (New York, NY), 1984.

    * The Man Who Made Models and Other Stories, Chris Drumm Books, 1984.

    * Slippery and Other Stories, Chris Drumm Books, 1985.

    * Lafferty in Orbit, Broken Mirrors Press, 1991.

OTHER

    * Laughing Kelly and Other Verses, Chris Drumm Books, 1983.

    * It's down the Slippery Cellar Stairs (essays), Chris Drumm Books, 1984, revised and expanded as It's down the Slippery Cellar Stairs: Essays and Speeches on Fantastic Literature, Borgo Press (San Bernadino, CA), 1995.

Contributor to anthologies, including Isaac Asimov, editor, Four Futures: Four Original Novellas of Science Fiction, Hawthorn Books, 1971; Fred Saberhagen, editor, A Spadeful of Spacetime, Ace Books (New York, NY), 1981; Martin H. Greenberg, editor, Fantastic Lives: Autobiographical Essays by Notable Science-Fiction Writers, Southern Illinois University Press, 1981; Alan Ryan, editor, Perpetual Light, Warner Books, 1982; Isaac Asimov and Alice Laurance, editors, Speculations, Houghton, 1982, and the anthology series "Chrysalis," "Universe," "Shadows," "Whispers," "Orbit," and "The Year's Best Fantasy Stories." Contributor of stories to Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction, Literary Review, New Mexico Quarterly Review, and other publications. Author of column "Alien."

Also author of Tales of Chicago and Alaric: The Day the World Ended. Author of chapbooks The Early Lafferty, Promontory Goats, Strange Skies, The Back Door of History, True Believers, and How Many Miles to Babylon, all published by United Mythologies Press.

"Sidelights"
R. A. Lafferty was one of those writers "who usually [publishes] under a science fiction label but whose stories stretch the definitions of 'reasonableness' to the breaking point," Gerald Jonas wrote in the New York Times Book Review. Jonas called Lafferty "a teller of tall tales" rather than a science-fiction writer. Lafferty's stories are often based on absurd or satirical situations and then develop logically, following their unlikely premises to their natural conclusion. Writing in A Reader's Guide to Fantasy, Baird Searles, Beth Meacham, and Michael Franklin claimed: "Lafferty doesn't see the world in quite the same way that most people do; his logic is rigorous, but his premises are deadpan insanity." During his long writing career he penned stories about a speeded-up world in which fads last only a few hours, about a child's shoebox camera that makes things disappear, and about a group of archaeologists who unearth an old chimney which not only tells them of the past, but of the present and future as well. Writing in Fantasy Review, Paul Feeny allowed that Lafferty's "writing suggests at its best a collaboration of [Jorge Luis] Borges, Mark Twain, and [Arthur] Rimbaud." "Lafferty's stories," Mary Weinkauf stated in Science Fiction and Fantasy Book Review, "represent the best in science fiction--whimsical examinations of the notions and obsessions of the most exotic animal[--man]." In his introduction to his Ringing Changes, Lafferty modestly commented: "These stories are intended to be entertainments, even the several of them that leak a little blood out of them. They are amusements."

Lafferty's novels display the same freewheeling inventiveness as do his stories. Speaking of the novel Aurelia, Thom Gunn in Science Fiction and Fantasy Book Review described what makes this book different from more conventional works of science fiction. It is, maintained Gunn, "decidedly not in the 'hard' SF tradition of gadgetry and physics; this book is rather a whimsical Magical Mystery Tour. [It features] a shifting kaleidoscope of cartoon characters . . . all bopping about a daffy Dali-esque canvas of comic surrealism, a big glittering junkyard of linguistic effects, literalized puns, and overstated symbolism. . . . At its best it is a firework celebration of imagination."

Often Lafferty combined his comic exuberance with a concern for the eternal struggle between good and evil, and approached this subject from a surprisingly traditional Roman Catholic perspective. But, as Patricia Ower of the Dictionary of Literary Biography pointed out, Lafferty's "vision, despite his Roman Catholicism, does not incline to the positive. It is at best ironic and comic in a black vein." In Extrapolation, Dena C. Bain saw Lafferty as "a shaper of myth who . . . bases his mythological pictures on the mystical tradition of the West, and on the attempt of man to transcend the rational and expand his perception of the cosmos." Bain further viewed Lafferty as primarily concerned with a theological struggle. "To Lafferty," Bain wrote, "the mystical Christian archetypes of good and evil represent the eternal struggle between forces of darkness and light in a dualistic universe, and he creates out of his own beliefs an ethic as well as a cosmology."

In The Devil Is Dead, for example, Lafferty chronicles the struggle between two "archetypal groups of dark forces" for control of humanity, Bain wrote. These two groups--the Demons, who are descended from aliens, and the Elder Race, an ancient group of prehumans--have been battling for centuries and, even though the climactic battle at novel's end is certain to destroy them both, they are destined to rise once again and renew the struggle. Told in a rambunctious style heavily influenced by Irish folktales, the battle features a menagerie of characters, including a mermaid, a king, and various devils and aliens. The "convoluted plot," Ower wrote, makes "it difficult for the narrator, Finnegan, and therefore for the reader, to tell exactly who the devil is, who is on which side of the fight, and who is really dead." Ower saw the "strange logic and metamorphoses of the novel" as "most strongly rooted in the world of dreams."

Another Lafferty novel concerned with theological struggle is Fourth Mansions, a work about "'returnees,' people who reincarnate themselves in order to prevent mankind's breakthrough to a higher plane of existence," as Ower explained. The struggle between the returnees and the "Harvesters," a rival group seeking to push mankind to a higher evolutionary level, is chronicled by Freddy Foley, a reporter investigating the failures of human history. As James Blish commented in the Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction, the novel's "genre is rare but well known: Heraldic fantasy with a religious intent." Despite its serious intentions, the novel manages to be "a light, entertaining book," Ower stated. Blish found that Lafferty's style is "cadenced without being pseudo-bardic, he relies heavily on extravagant metaphors, and he often bursts into verse, much of it original and all of it good."

In Past Master Lafferty treats the question of religion in another manner, creating the society of Astrobe, a utopian world that has denied man's religious nature and in so doing has destroyed his essence. Designed in accordance with the ideas of Sir Thomas More, Astrobe finds itself being abandoned by its citizens. They leave the cities, where all of man's traditional fears and wants have been conquered, to live in Cathead, "Astrobe's largest city," explained Harold L. Berger in Science Fiction and the New Dark Age, is "a monstrous, festering cancer of a city, a sprawl of twenty million ground down by hunger, plague, poisonous stench, and breaking labor, an infernal place of short life and bodies rotting in the streets." The leaders of Astrobe bring Thomas More forward in time to examine their society and suggest a solution to this perplexing situation.

What More finds is that Astrobe has cut man off from his unconscious mind and made all nonmaterial ideas illegal. Religion, superstition, and psychic phenomena, for example, are suppressed. Because of mechanical thought-police who can literally read minds and instantly kill those who think "incorrectly," the cities of Astrobe have become inhuman and sterile places to live. As the leaders of Astrobe seek to deny the human unconscious, "the archetypes of the collective unconscious are able to assume physical reality," Bain wrote. More finally "allies himself with the rebels of the slums and the group of archetypal figures," Bain related, ". . . and his death at the end of the novel triggers the revolution that will destroy the world and bring about the birth of a new order."

"Though prolific," noted Ower, Lafferty was "neglected, and his lot has been relative obscurity perhaps traceable to the limited appeal of his religious themes." During the late twentieth century much of his work was published in scattered magazines or by relatively small presses. Ower viewed this situation as changing; because Lafferty was cited by other science-fiction writers for his "virtues of vitality, absurd vision, and underground humor," Ower believed that "these qualities may yet lead to a broad readership for R. A. Lafferty."

Jack Dann wrote in the Washington Post Book World: "Writing as he does from a conservative Catholic teleological point-of-view, [Lafferty's] . . . major themes are transformation, resurrection, and redemption. His preoccupation with the nature of reality and a sort of Heisenbergian notion of history is evident." The best of Lafferty's stories, Dann believed, "convey a real joy coupled with a comic lamentation; they are wrestlings with life and all its forces." Feeny also finds much to praise in the author's work. "Lafferty," he wrote, "is one of the finest contemporary writers of science fiction and fantasy. His work is an unprecedented combination of allegory, tall tale, myth, dream, and comic strip, written in one of the most unique styles in [late twentieth-century] . . . letters."
FURTHER READINGS ABOUT THE AUTHOR:
BOOKS

    * Berger, Harold L., Science Fiction and the New Dark Age, Bowling Green University, 1976.

    * Dictionary of Literary Biography, Volume 8: Twentieth-Century American Science-Fiction Writers, Gale (Detroit, MI), 1981.

    * Drumm, Chris, R. A. Lafferty Checklist: A Bibliographical Chronology with Notes and Index, Chris Drumm Books, 1983.

    * Greenberg, Martin H., editor, Fantastic Lives: Autobiographical Essays by Notable Science-Fiction Writers, Southern Illinois University Press, 1981.

    * St. James Guide to Science-Fiction Writers, 4th edition, St. James Press (Detroit, MI), 1996.

    * Searles, Baird, Beth Meacham, and Michael Franklin, A Reader's Guide to Fantasy, Avon (New York, NY), 1982.

    * Walker, Paul, Speaking of Science Fiction, Luna Publications, 1978.

PERIODICALS

    * Amazing Stories, September, 1983.

    * Extrapolation, summer, 1982; fall, 1997, p. 240.

    * Fantasy Review, February, 1985; April, 1987.

    * Foundation, October, 1980.

    * Locus, July, 1991, pp. 46, 57; February, 1992, pp. 25, 53; May, 1992; July, 1992; January, 1993, p. 23; February, 1993; April, 1994, p. 48.

    * Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction, May, 1968; May, 1971; January, 1972; January, 1976; May, 1992, p. 46; July, 1992, p. 27; February, 1993, p. 55.

    * New York Times Book Review, August 8, 1971; October 3, 1976.

    * School Library Media Quarterly, summer, 1992, p. 242.

    * Science Fiction and Fantasy Book Review, December, 1982; June, 1983.

    * Science-Fiction Chronicle, June, 1992, p. 35; April, 1993, p. 33.

    * Science-Fiction Review, fall, 1986.

    * Social Education, October, 1993, p. 308.

    * University Press Book News, March, 1992, p. 42.

    * Washington Post Book World, May 27, 1984; January 31, 1993, p. 8.



Obituary and Other Sources:
PERIODICALS

    * Independent, April 2, 2002, p. 6.
    * New York Times, March 29, 2002, p. A27.*



Source: Contemporary Authors Online, Gale, 2004.

Gale Database: Contemporary Authors




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