More Fantastic Stories

R. A. Lafferty was one of the most original and unpredictable voices in twentieth-century science fiction and fantasy. Born in Iowa and long associated with Tulsa, Oklahoma, Lafferty came late to professional fiction but quickly developed a reputation for stories unlike anyone else's: comic, theological, folkloric, grotesque, learned, exuberant, and structurally strange. His prose often sounds as though tall tale, myth, barroom anecdote, Catholic metaphysics, and science fiction had been fused into a single impossible instrument.Lafferty's best-known works include the novel Past Master and the story collections Nine Hundred Grandmothers, Strange Doings, and Does Anyone Else Have Something Further to Add? His fiction resists easy classification, but that resistance is precisely what has kept it alive for generations of readers and writers. He brought to science fiction a wildness of voice and imagination that made even familiar premises feel newly dangerous, comic, and uncanny.

During his fifty-five-year career, CLIFFORD D. SIMAK produced some of the most iconic science fiction stories ever written. Born in 1904 on a farm in southwestern Wisconsin, Simak got a job at a small-town newspaper in 1929 and eventually became news editor of the Minneapolis Star-Tribune, writing fiction in his spare time. Simak was best known for the book City, a reaction to the horrors of World War II, and for his novel Way Station. In 1953 City was awarded the International Fantasy Award, and in following years, Simak won three Hugo Awards and a Nebula Award. In 1977 he became the third Grand Master of the Science Fiction and Fantasy Writers of America, and before his death in 1988, he was named one of three inaugural winners of the Horror Writers Association’s Bram Stoker Award for Lifetime Achievement.