R.A. Lafferty: “The Greatest Catholic Novelist You Never Heard Of”
No wait! That’s not the important thing. The important thing is that Lafferty soldiered off to the Pacific during World War II and disappeared on Willie Jones Island.
Oh shoot, that’s not the important thing, either. The important thing is that after drinking full-time until about 1959, Lafferty went to drinking part-time, so he decided to fill up the extra hours writing stories. He wrote all kinds of stories, but the ones he sent to the science-fiction magazines sold. That’s how R. A. Lafferty became one of the most important science-fiction writers of the 20th century. He won science fiction’s prestigious Hugo Award in 1973 for “Eurema’s Dam,” which ironically was one of the stories he didn’t think was so hot.
No, that’s still not the most important thing. Here it is: R. A. Lafferty is the greatest Catholic writer of our age whom you’ve probably never heard of.
He wrote nine short novels between 1968 and 1972. The world may dub it science fiction, but Lafferty wasn’t really a science fiction writer. He was a speculative metaphysical novelist, or a lay preacher, or a sacred historian with plausible argumenta stuck in. He dressed all that up in science fiction and it sold. Some enterprising grad student in the future might compare his novels in this respect to Walker Percy’s Love in the Ruins.
