R. A. Lafferty (1914–2002), full name Raphael Aloysius Lafferty, was an award-winning and highly unusual US science fiction and fantasy writer who generally defied classification due to his sui generis imagination and unique story lines. A working-class man, Lafferty was an autodidact (and voracious reader) whose post–high school education consisted of two years of night school at the University of Tulsa and courses in electrical engineering from the International Correspondence Schools. A correspondence with teenage Neil Gaiman led to his becoming invaluable in helping keep Lafferty’s works visible after the author’s death.
Lafferty came to writing late, publishing his first story in 1959. Most of his best fiction appeared in Fantastic, Galaxy, and Damon Knight’s Orbit anthology series. Like Gene Wolfe, Lafferty was strongly influenced by his Catholic beliefs, but despite this conservatism was associated with the New Wave because of the originality of his fiction. His best-known novels are Past Master (1968) and Fourth Mansions (1969), both nominated for a Nebula Award. Past Master also received a Hugo Award nomination. He won the Hugo Award in 1973 for the short story “Eurema’s Dam.” In 1990, Lafferty received the World Fantasy Award for Life Achievement.
Lafferty was primarily known for his hundreds of highly original short stories, many of which draw on the Irish and Native American tradition of tall tales. His stories are marked by their use of wit, humor, and absurdism. In this regard, Lafferty’s work had much in common with writers like Kurt Vonnegut, Stepan Chapman, and William Tenn. Recently, Centipede Press has embarked on a quixotic nine-volume quest to return all of Lafferty’s short fiction to print, under the auspices of series editor John Pelan. The Man Who Made Models: The Collected Short Fiction, Volume 1 (2014) featured an introduction by Michael Swanwick, and The Man with the Aura: The Collected Short Fiction, Volume 2 (2015) featured an introduction by Harlan Ellison.
In his introduction to volume 1, Swanwick calls Lafferty “the single most original short fiction writer of the Twentieth Century…Many of his readers will skim happily over the [wildly entertaining] surface like windsurfers. But, like the ocean, there are depths, and in those depths strange shapes stir…”
Lafferty’s science fiction stories generally do not strive for realism but in their surreal approach are perhaps more useful than some “hard science fiction” in expanding possibilities about alien life. In the story “Thieving Bear Planet” (1982), for example, aliens are portrayed as capricious and erratic because their ultimate motivations cannot be understood by human beings. The human expedition on a distant planet encounters weird gaps in time, small replicas of themselves, and hauntings that only make sense as part of an alien methodology. Lafferty’s genius is to show only glimpses of that methodology but still convey just how frightening and odd such an encounter might be.
However, “Nine Hundred Grandmothers,” reprinted here, remains the quintessential Lafferty story. Somehow in just a few short pages Lafferty subverts half a dozen space exploration tropes, pokes fun at military science fiction, and also writes what is at its heart a feminist tale that also presents one of the most truly alien scenarios in all of speculative fiction. The story first appeared in IF magazine in 1966, where it no doubt both delighted and confused many readers.