My copy of Lafferty's Nine Hundred Grandmothers arrived yesterday and I must say I'm stunned at the quality of the writing. It collects 21 of his short stories, all of which were previously published in various magazines throughout the 1960s. "The Six Fingers of Time", mentioned in message 65, is the fourth story in the book.
A modern trend in sophisticated writing technique employed by many Weird writers is to use narrative viewpoints that present a slice of what's being perceived and to then write in such a way as to make it very challenging to really know what's going on. This often is not fully cleared up by the end of the story, thus leaving many ambiguities. A good case in point is last month's selection, Never Now Always. I consider Samuel R. Delany to be the earliest prominent author of this school of writing.
R. A. Lafferty, I would say, is not a member of this school, but rather its antithesis. Called by contemporaries a science fiction author, he does use many of the tropes, but they're never the point of what he writes. He is actually a quintessential Weird writer. His point is to depict an aspect of reality from a completely different, usually alien, perspective. The use of SF tropes helps him most easily reach this goal, but the point is the shift in perspective, and the clever use of words in new ways to make that shift seem natural. That sounds like it might be easy to do, but I've tried, and know it's not.
The best thing about Lafferty's work is that he never obscures his story, or his plot, in order to lend an air of sophistication to it. His plot ideas are usually startlingly original, and even when they're not, as in "The Six Fingers of Time", there will be original twists. Best of all, maybe, is the methods he uses to state something that gets a point across, but in a way that no one has ever used before.
Here are a couple examples:
From "Nine Hundred Grandmothers" He walked down the ramps through centuries and millennia. The atmosphere he had noticed on the upper levels was a clear odor now--sleepy, half-remembered, smiling, sad and quite strong. That is the way Time smells.
From "Land of the Great Horses" They were mineral explorers doing ground minutiae on promising portions of an aerial survey. The trouble with the Thar was that it had everything--lead, zinc, antimony, copper, tin, bauxite--in barely submarginal amounts. Nowhere would the Thar pay off, but everywhere it would almost pay. Now it was lightning about the heights of the mirage, and they had never seen that before. It had clouded and lowered. It was thundering in rolling waves, and there is no mirage of sound. "There is either a very large and very busy bird up there or this is rain," Rockwell said. And it had begun to rain, softly but steadily. It was pleasant as they chukkered along in the vehicle through the afternoon. Rain in the desert is always like a bonus.
What does "doing ground minutiae" even mean, and who would ever put it like that? Yet we know in succinctest form without Lafferty having to say so (other than these three words) that these are exploratory geologists of some sort looking for mineral wealth.
More than half his paragraphs contain dialogue, too, at which he is very adept. This is just wonderful to read--my highest recommendation!
My copy of Lafferty's Nine Hundred Grandmothers arrived yesterday and I must say I'm stunned at the quality of the writing. It collects 21 of his short stories, all of which were previously published in various magazines throughout the 1960s. "The Six Fingers of Time", mentioned in message 65, is the fourth story in the book.
A modern trend in sophisticated writing technique employed by many Weird writers is to use narrative viewpoints that present a slice of what's being perceived and to then write in such a way as to make it very challenging to really know what's going on. This often is not fully cleared up by the end of the story, thus leaving many ambiguities. A good case in point is last month's selection, Never Now Always. I consider Samuel R. Delany to be the earliest prominent author of this school of writing.
R. A. Lafferty, I would say, is not a member of this school, but rather its antithesis. Called by contemporaries a science fiction author, he does use many of the tropes, but they're never the point of what he writes. He is actually a quintessential Weird writer. His point is to depict an aspect of reality from a completely different, usually alien, perspective. The use of SF tropes helps him most easily reach this goal, but the point is the shift in perspective, and the clever use of words in new ways to make that shift seem natural. That sounds like it might be easy to do, but I've tried, and know it's not.
The best thing about Lafferty's work is that he never obscures his story, or his plot, in order to lend an air of sophistication to it. His plot ideas are usually startlingly original, and even when they're not, as in "The Six Fingers of Time", there will be original twists. Best of all, maybe, is the methods he uses to state something that gets a point across, but in a way that no one has ever used before.
Here are a couple examples:
From "Nine Hundred Grandmothers"
He walked down the ramps through centuries and millennia. The atmosphere he had noticed on the upper levels was a clear odor now--sleepy, half-remembered, smiling, sad and quite strong. That is the way Time smells.
From "Land of the Great Horses"
They were mineral explorers doing ground minutiae on promising portions of an aerial survey. The trouble with the Thar was that it had everything--lead, zinc, antimony, copper, tin, bauxite--in barely submarginal amounts. Nowhere would the Thar pay off, but everywhere it would almost pay.
Now it was lightning about the heights of the mirage, and they had never seen that before. It had clouded and lowered. It was thundering in rolling waves, and there is no mirage of sound.
"There is either a very large and very busy bird up there or this is rain," Rockwell said.
And it had begun to rain, softly but steadily. It was pleasant as they chukkered along in the vehicle through the afternoon. Rain in the desert is always like a bonus.
What does "doing ground minutiae" even mean, and who would ever put it like that? Yet we know in succinctest form without Lafferty having to say so (other than these three words) that these are exploratory geologists of some sort looking for mineral wealth.
More than half his paragraphs contain dialogue, too, at which he is very adept. This is just wonderful to read--my highest recommendation!