Fourth Mansions

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.