Posts Tagged ‘unpublished works’

Unpublished Lafferty Novels Redux

Thursday, April 22nd, 2021

Some nine years ago, I published this post on Andrew Ferguson’s NYRSF piece on unpublished R. A. Lafferty works. These included:

  • 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 Shine, 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.

    • I also knew about the unpublished “In a Green Tree” novels:

  • Grasshoppers and Wild Honey 1928-1942 (first two chapters published, the rest unpublished)
  • Deep Scars of the Thunder 1942-1960
  • Incidents of Travel in Flatland 1960-1978

    • (A project fifth volume, In the Akrokeraunian Mountains 1978-1990, was evidently started but never completed.)

    I was also aware of the third and fourth volumes in the Coscuin Chronicles series:

  • Sardinian Summer
  • First and Last Island

    • However, this wiki (evidently created by Ferguson) includes still more novels I haven’t heard about before:

  • Esteban, “a historical novel tracking the life and travels of the African slave who was the first ‘white’ (i.e., non-Native) man to enter much of what would become the southwestern United States”
  • Fair Hills of Ocean, Oh!, “About a dolphin who is a quadruple-agent spy and the invasion of dry land by the king of the oceans.”
  • Iron Tongue of Midnight (I know nothing about, except it shares the same title as a 1988 Lafferty poem)
  • Mantis (evidently a mystery novel)

    • Not listed there, and only listed on a couple of dubious webpages, so I have my doubts as to whether it actually exists, is The Giant Ratchet of Sumatra (with Sharon Scott). There is a reference to a first chapter manuscript in the University of Tulsa archives, but I see no sign that it had ever been completed.

    Excluding the dubious and unfinished, by my count that’s fourteen unpublished Lafferty novels…

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    Posted in Books, Fantasy, Science Fiction | 2 Comments »

    Unpublished R. A. Lafferty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.

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    Posted in Books, Fantasy, Science Fiction | 10 Comments »