Editor's note: This story was originally published in This Land, Vol. 5, Issue 21, November 1, 2014.
They convened in a meeting room in the back of an old Borden’s Cafeteria. A bald man with a soft paunch, looking perfectly at home at the first meeting of Oklahoma Science Fiction Writers, sat wordlessly in the back, peering over thick glasses. His name, R.A. Lafferty—that’s Raphael Aloysius, but usually he settled for just Ray—seemed familiar to Warren Brown and the others.
He’d seen Lafferty’s name in his old copies of Galaxy, one of the preeminent magazines of science fiction and fantasy writing. Then there was Lafferty’s Okla Hannali, a novel about a great Choctaw. Dee Brown, author of Bury My Heart at Wounded Knee, called it “art applied to history”; The Wall Street Journal said it was “elemental Americana and a great deal of fun.” Married there were years of research with folklore, fantasy, and humor; Brown had marveled. He still has the copy he picked up at a JC Penney in Toledo, back when there were still bookstores in JC Penney.
By that time —1977—R.A. Lafferty had written much of what would, by the end of his life, total more than 200 short stories and more than a dozen novels. He had been awarded the Hugo Award, one of the highest prizes in science fiction and fantasy writing, early in his career. Harlan Ellison and Gene Wolfe were lavish in their praise. A fan of languages, Lafferty could read the copies of his novels and short stories that had been translated to French, Italian, German, and Dutch; the ones in Japanese, though, gave him some trouble. He’d been nominated for several more awards, but Lafferty, a writer whose work defied classification and confounded the traditions of the genre, didn’t quite fit the bill.
Most of Lafferty’s stories begin ordinarily enough. In “Nine Hundred Grandmothers,” the short story that carries the name of a collection cherished by the small core of Lafferty fans, a man wonders how life began. Then, in the space of a few hundred words, he discovers a cave filled with beings who never die. “It is a foolish alien custom which we see no reason to imitate,” one of them says. In “The Six Fingers of Time,” another landmark Lafferty work, a man shatters a glass and an alarm clock before he realizes the cause of his clumsiness: he controls the flow of time, a problematic new reflex. Lafferty claimed G.K. Chesterton and Balzac as influences. “Neither of them could plot worth a dam [sic], and both of them got along without any nonsense about structure or outline,” he once wrote.
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