> You’ve never heard of him, but your favorite writers have, and his mad-drunk prose will knock you sideways.. Just one problem: Nobody reads him. They didn’t when he was alive, and they don’t now that he’s dead.. Lafferty didn’t just write possibly the best short stories in the world, of which more than 200 were published by various pulps and small presses in his lifetime. He also wrote 36 novels.. In 1972, Lafferty published one of his rare non-sci-fi novels, Okla Hannali, a history of the Choctaw Indians in the 19th century.. One of Okla Hannali’s most startling passages:
There is an interesting question in the Summa of St. Thomas Aquinas and also in an old science fiction story, the name of which I forget, concerning the paradox of free will and predestined fate. It asks whether a man in making a great decision that will forever set the seal on his future does not also set the seal on his past. A man alters his future, and does he not also alter his past in conformity with it? Does he not settle not only what manner of man he will be, but also what manner of man he has been?
> The point is that Native myths, Catholicism, and science fiction all ask versions of the same question: How preordained is destiny? In a single paragraph, Lafferty elevates sci-fi to the level of theology and ultimate truths, and unifies his entire artistic and thematic project in the process.
defrost
Walter M. Miller Jr.
Also a science fiction novelist, also Catholic by conversion, incidentally also bombed a Benedictine Abbey.
I've read Lafferty, I like much of Lafferty, it was a prolific time for SF authors although cents on the pages in payment.
JoelMcCracken
I read his “The Reefs of Earth” a few years back and it blew my mind. Such an interesting book.
emmelaich
The best is of course subjective but I'd rate C.S.Lewis up there too.
> You’ve never heard of him, but your favorite writers have, and his mad-drunk prose will knock you sideways.. Just one problem: Nobody reads him. They didn’t when he was alive, and they don’t now that he’s dead.. Lafferty didn’t just write possibly the best short stories in the world, of which more than 200 were published by various pulps and small presses in his lifetime. He also wrote 36 novels.. In 1972, Lafferty published one of his rare non-sci-fi novels, Okla Hannali, a history of the Choctaw Indians in the 19th century.. One of Okla Hannali’s most startling passages:
> The point is that Native myths, Catholicism, and science fiction all ask versions of the same question: How preordained is destiny? In a single paragraph, Lafferty elevates sci-fi to the level of theology and ultimate truths, and unifies his entire artistic and thematic project in the process.