

Classic Sci-Fi: Olaf Stapledon and R. A. Lafferty [pdf] - walterbell
http://efanzines.com/SFC/ScratchPad/scrat023.pdf

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pmoriarty
I love Lafferty's work. It is so funny, quirky, and insightful. Nine Hundred
Grandmothers, Continued on Next Rock. Brilliant stuff.

Lafferty's critically acclaimed, and has a small, devoted following of
readers, but somehow most scifi readers haven't heard of him, much less read
him. Perhaps his work is just too strange for mainstream readers, who can only
appreciate traditional scifi.

I've tried reading Stapledon (Last and First Men, and Star Maker), and I
wanted to like him, I really did. His ideas and sheer breadth of vision
(billions of years of history, spanning galaxies) sounded amazing. But when I
got down to actually reading him, he sounded so dated, so tedious, so
bombastic, so clumsy -- he's just a poor writer. His ideas might be
worthwhile, but they're just not expressed well. Given how highly he's
regarded, however, I intend to give his work one more chance someday.

~~~
walterbell
There's an active Lafferty group at
[https://www.facebook.com/groups/586744968045210](https://www.facebook.com/groups/586744968045210)

