Posts Tagged ‘New York Review of Science Fiction’

Unpublished R. A. Lafferty

Thursday, January 26th, 2012

I don’t have a love/hate relationship with The New York Review of Science Fiction, but I do have a “Love/Meh” relationship with it. I’ve been a subscriber lo these many years, and have contributed the occasional piece. But frequently much of it will either strike me as the sort of close-reading, semiotic, postmodern academic grab fanny (“The Anvil of Dissonance: Contextualizing the Other in the Early Work of Joanna Russ”) that I tried to stay away from back when I was publishing Nova Express, or subjects that, while theoretically worthy of study, I would get so little out of that I see no point in spending the time to read (“The Evolution of the French Vampire Novel: 1867—1894”).

But every now and then they publish something absolutely vital to my interests.

This month it was Andrew Ferguson’s piece on unpublished R. A. Lafferty works, which is much more extensive than either the list in The SF Book of Lists or anywhere online. I knew about the unpublished In a Green Tree volumes and a few others, but there’s lots of stuff I’ve never heard of, including the novels:

  • Loup Garou, a werewolf mystery
  • Civil Blood, an anti-communist novel
  • Antonio Vescovo, a very early novel described as “a cross between Rabelais and The Lives of the Saints” (!)
  • Dark Shines, about gifted children and an evil protagonist, and
  • When All the World Was Young, a plague novel in which everyone over the age of 10 is killed.
  • And there’s a huge list of unpublished stories, poems and essays as well. All of which I’ll no doubt end up buying when it comes out.

    If you’re a Lafferty fan, it’s well worth your $4 to pick up a copy of this issue.