(urth) OT: Lafferty recommendations
Matthew King
automatthew at gmail.com
Thu Jul 26 07:43:09 PDT 2007
Here is the introduction to Lafferty that hooked me:
http://greatsfandf.com/AUTHORS/RALafferty.php
Lafferty is never "realistic." However ordinary his settings may seem
when first we start one of his tales, we must remember that for a
certainty they are surreal fantasies in the truest sense of those
words. I think the most apt analogy for Lafferty's works is animated
cartoons. Things in Lafferty tales happen at the breathless,
breakneck pace--and with the madcap ad hoc paralogic--of a Bugs Bunny
cartoon. We believe none of it because we are never for a second
expected to believe any of it, any more than we are expected to
"believe" what happens to Bugs and Elmer; we do not participate to
behold "slices of life" but to behold madcap exaggerations and
distortions of it. The single worst error a reader new to Lafferty
can make is to think that a world Lafferty introduces in apparently
ordinary science-fiction terms actually is (even by science-fiction
standards) ordinary.
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