The Best of R. A. Lafferty

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Objectivity is a good thing. We rely on our commentators, our observers, our critics to be objective. It’s what makes a critic a good critic and a reviewer a good reviewer. We trust them to tell us about books and films, music and authors.

You cannot trust me to tell you anything about R. A. Lafferty. It would be like asking a string tuned to G to give its opinion on the strings of a lower octave. When it hears another G, it’s going to thrum in joyous recognition. That’s the way of it. It’s just how it is.

I was about nine years old, and somebody had left a copy of Judith Merril’s SF-12 in our house. I don’t know who. It might conceivably have been my father’s. Whoever owned it, I appropriated it, and proceeded to have my mind turned inside out. William Burroughs and Samuel R. Delany, Carol Emshwiller and Kit Reed, Brian Aldiss and Harvey Jacobs and John Updike and Tuli Kupferberg, J. G. Ballard and Hilary Bailey, Sonya Dorman and Tommaso Landolfi, none of them authors one would automatically recommend to nine-year-olds. I didn’t care. I read the stories and took what I could from them. I had a bunch of new favorite authors. I had new rules about what fiction could be. The Brian Aldiss short story, “Confluence,” was a dictionary. And one of the two stories by R. A. Lafferty was a school curriculum.

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