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"Who Is R. A. Lafferty?" (2021) https://www.wired.com/story/who-is-r-a-lafferty-best-sci-fi-writer-ever/ https://www.wired.com/story/who-is-r-a-lafferty-best-sc

"Who Is R. A. Lafferty?" (2021) https://www.wired.com/story/who-is-r-a-lafferty-best-sci-fi-writer-ever/ https://www.wired.com/story/who-is-r-a-lafferty-best-sci-fi-... > 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.

walterbell 2y ago
> From “Selenium Ghosts of the Eighteen Seventies,” Lafferty’s alternate history, published in 1978, of television: There seemed to be several meetings in this room superimposed on one another, and they cannot be sorted out. To sort them out would have been to destroy their effect, however, for they achieved syntheses of their several aspects and became the true meeting that never really took place but which contained all the other meetings in one theatrical unity. > ..On first read, yes, it’s nonsense, but this is the experience of experiencing Lafferty. He doesn’t make any sense, until you decide, and you must decide, that he does. Then, suddenly, he becomes a genius. Read the paragraph again. What’s he talking about? Today, you might realize he’s predicting Zoom: a main meeting full of individual nonmeetings taking place in chats and side slacks that together constitute a constant and overarching supermeeting! Tomorrow, it’ll sound like something else entirely.

walterbell 2y ago

> From “Selenium Ghosts of the Eighteen Seventies,” Lafferty’s alternate history, published in 1978, of television: There seemed to be several meetings in this room superimposed on one another, and they cannot be sorted out. To sort them out would have been to destroy their effect, however, for they achieved syntheses of their several aspects and became the true meeting that never really took place but which contained all the other meetings in one theatrical unity. > ..On first read, yes, it’s nonsense, but this is the experience of experiencing Lafferty. He doesn’t make any sense, until you decide, and you must decide, that he does. Then, suddenly, he becomes a genius. Read the paragraph again. What’s he talking about? Today, you might realize he’s predicting Zoom: a main meeting full of individual nonmeetings taking place in chats and side slacks that together constitute a constant and overarching supermeeting! Tomorrow, it’ll sound like something else entirely.