Posted on March 29th, 2002 by Scraps.
Categories: Words, Writers, Science Fiction.
R.A. Lafferty, 1914-2002
His death has been a long time coming -- he was a longtime alcoholic, and was a creaky old man when I last saw him twenty years ago -- but it still makes me dreadfully sad.
Lafferty was one of the true originals; there was no other writer like him. His style was recognizable in a single sentence; his narrative voice was a ludicrously overblown and self-conscious tall-tale teller's voice, suffused in Irishness, American Indian mythology, conservative Augustinian Catholicism, and just plain crankiness. He was also flat-out hilarious.
His work was published as science fiction by default, not because it fit there exactly but because it fit worse anywhere else. He wrote some of the best weird stories ever, and it's almost futile to begin listing them: "Nine Hundred Grandmothers", "Eurema's Dam", "Thus We Frustrate Charlemagne", "Continued on Next Rock" (the best geology story ever written), "Narrow Valley", "Slow Tuesday Night", "Entire and Perfect Chrysolite". . . and splendid outpouring over three decades.
He was an erratic novelist, though even at his shakiest there was always his incomparable voice; at his best -- Fourth Mansions, maybe, or Past Master -- they were marvelous. He started writing late, not publishing until he was in his forties (as an alternative to drinking, he said), and he'd written nothing new for perhaps the last fifteen years, maybe more.
He will be terribly missed.
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