Lafferty in Orbit

by R.A. Lafferty, Damon Knight

The stories contained in this volume demonstrate the unique and unpredictable imagination, style and vision that earned R.A. Lafferty the 1990 World Fantasy Award for Lifetime Achievement.

Genres: Science Fiction, Short Stories, Fantasy, Collections

224 pages, Paperback

First published January 1, 1991

About the author

Raphael Aloysius Lafferty, published under the name R.A. Lafferty, was an American science fiction and fantasy writer known for his original use of language, metaphor, and narrative structure, as well as for his etymological wit. He also wrote a set of four autobiographical novels, a history book, and a number of novels that could be loosely called historical fiction.

Reviews

[Ashley · Rating 5 out of 5]

I'm a Lafferty partisan, too! This is a collection of Lafferty's more coherent - or, at least less brain-knottingly, dimensionally gymnastic - short stories, published in the science fiction magazine Orbit. But even Lafferty's novels, really, were loosely strung-together short stories. This is an excellent introduction to Lafferty, and sequentially couldn't be better. The first, "Old Foot Forgot", was the first Lafferty I ever read and remains one of my favorites to this day. Lafferty skips with the nimbleness of a veteran cosmos-crawler between realms galactic and apparently commonplace - but the latter soon reveals its undercurrent of weirdness. Like PKD, Lafferty had an extraordinary talent for subtly braiding plot twists and also a gift for analogy and metaphor, though I have a feeling he would have claimed his stories were about nothing except themselves. His curmudgeonly disdain for the contemporary and mundane prairiedogs hilariously now & then... I recall specifically a line one of his characters delivers (paraphrased here): "Gestalt One is dreary and intolerable beyond belief. Its dwellers call it "Earth". May the lowest of us never sink so low!" I've truly read nothing else quite like Lafferty, which is, in part, why he's one of my favorite authors. I've never read anyone else so utterly unreliant on cliche and precedent. With Lafferty, I've laughed I've cried, I've surrendered to the obscure genius of passages whose meanings evade me even after repeated readings.

[siejay · Rating 4 out of 5]

Yes, I am a Lafferty partisan. You would be too if you read him. I was fed Past Master first and didn't really like it, but then discovered his short fiction, learned how to digest it, and I was off. The old man has been gone for 5 years now and it is high time for a resurgence. Try it, you won't be sorry.

[Richard · Rating 5 out of 5]

There is no author like Lafferty. He sucks one into the world he creates. While this isn't the best collection in my opinion of his stories, that honour belonging to 900 Grandmothers, this collection features a whole lot of solid stories and some stand alones that rival anything he has ever written.

The first story Old Foot Forgot is something if anything that deserves the OMG term. The brilliance of this story is unparalleled in anything I have ever read featuring an analogous situation of disease between a spherical alien and the doctor who treats it.

Then there is Bright Coins in a Never Ending Stream. A beautiful little gem about a man making a pact with the devil so that he never runs out of money. And even though this story succumbs to the trope of the devil hurting the man in the deal, it is done so brilliantly that it is merely the background to the ride you are sent on.

Configuration of the North Shore is a beautiful nightmare of one man's single obsession captured in his dreams who his analyst finds a way to visualize.

The Skinny People is in my opinion a scathing critique of hyper efficient modes of living as we witness the descension of the protagonist when removed from anything on him that carries the slightest degree of excess.

And Dorg asks the question of: what happens if cave paintings and cartoon drawings were meant to bring the thing they drew into being and not just as the product of fanciful imagination or realistic depiction?

In any collection of his short stories, you can't deny the originality of this man. I've never come across any writer like him which I say with sadness because the world is all too deprived of such imagination.

[David · Rating 4 out of 5]

I have never read Lafferty before this, but I will read Lafferty again. Not every story here is a winner--for me the clunker was "Configuration of the North Shore"--but most them are jaw-droppers, wild and intricate improbabilities that manage to be silly and thoughtful at the same time. My favorite has got to be "Flaming Ducks and Giant Bread," an examination by the Institute for Impure Science of the year 1313, which was longer than a year, during which many impossible things happened and then un-happened, only to recur at some point in the more enlightened future. There is very little meanness in these stories, and a genuine playfulness that is seriously endearing.

[Yegor Voronin · Rating 4 out of 5]

One of the most original writers that ever lived. Love the ideas, the characters, the story lines, the settings, but the writing itself is rather dense and not flowing. I guess that's part of the charm too.

[Daniel · Rating 3 out of 5]

50 % of this book contains brilliant short stories.
The other half, I would like to think I could not grasp and grok enough to tell you I liked them. Maybe Lafferty is not for me but I loved Nine Hundred Grandmothers, and some of its best short stories are repeated here.