Tor Essentials presents science fiction and fantasy titles of proven merit and lasting value, each volume introduced by an appropriate literary figure. Acclaimed as one of the most original voices in modern literature, a winner of the World Fantasy Award for lifetime achievement, Raphael Aloysius Lafferty (1914-2002) was an American original, a teller of acute, indescribably loopy tall tales whose work has been compared to that of Avram Davidson, Flannery O’Connor, Flann O’Brien, and Gene Wolfe. The Best of R. A. Lafferty presents 22 of his best flights of offbeat imagination, ranging from classics like “Nine Hundred Grandmothers” and “The Primary Education of the Cameroi” to his Hugo Award-winning “Eurema’s Dam.” Introduced by Neil Gaiman, the volume also contains story introductions and afterwords by, among many others, Michael Dirda, Samuel R. Delany, John Scalzi, Connie Willis, Jeff VanderMeer, Kelly Robson, Harlan Ellison, Michael Swanwick, Robert Silverberg, Neil Gaiman, and Patton Oswalt. At the Publisher's request, this title is being sold without Digital Rights Management Software (DRM) applied.
Acclaimed as one of the most original voices in modern literature, Raphael Aloysius Lafferty drew more from traditional oral storytelling techniques than from the usual pulp roots of SF. His inventive style and fondness for tall tales marked him out from his contemporaries, and writers of the calibre of Harlan Ellison, Neil Gaiman and Gene Wolfe acknowledge him as a major influence and force in the field. His fiction has garnered numerous award wins and nominations and he has been given the prestigious SFWA Grand Master Award and the World Fantasy Award for Lifetime Achievement. This volume contains three of his early novels: the Hugo- and Nebula-shortlisted Past Master, space opera re-telling of The Odyssey, Space Chantey, and Fourth Mansions, also shortlisted for the Nebula.
Manuel shouldn't have been employed as a census taker. He wasn't qualified. He couldn't read a map. He didn't know what a map was. He only grinned when they told him that North was at the top. He knew better. But he did write a nice round hand, like a boy's hand. He knew Spanish, and enough English. For the sector that was assigned to him he would not need a map. He knew it better than anyone else, certainly better than any mapmaker. Besides, he was poor and needed the money. They instructed him and sent him out. Or they thought that they had instructed him. They couldn't be sure. "Count everyone? All right. Fill in everyone? I need more papers." "We will give you more if you need more. But there aren't so many in your sector." "Lots of them. Lobos, tejones, zorros, even people.
Collected her are eighteen stories that bend time and space by the incomparable R. A. Lafferty. Lafferty was the winner of the Hugo and World Fantasy Award and a six time Nebula Award Nominee. His quirky style made his work hard to pigeonhole and market, but he still managed to influence a wide array of today's best writers. Simply on of the best writers the science fiction and fantasy field has ever produced. If you enjoyed this book, you'll want to search on "Positronic Publishing Super Pack" and check out all our other Super Packs! Try to Remember Adam Had Three Brothers Through Other Eyes All the People Day of the Glacier The Wagons Dream World The Ugly Sea In the Garden The Six Fingers of Time Mcgonigal's Worm The Polite People of Pudibundia Other Side of the Moon Seven-Day Terror Saturday You Die Aloys The Weirdest World Sodom and Gomorrah, Texas
Here at last are the finest of Lafferty's shorter works, stories about: a man who found one day that he knew absolutely everyone in the world; a race who kept their most ancient ancestors on shelves in the basements; a speeded-up world where a man could earn and lose a dozen fortunes a night; a friendly bearlike creature named Snuffles who said he was God ... In all, twenty-one immensely enjoyable stories that will continue to delight you long after you've finished reading them."--Page 1
The fall of the Roman Empire was the denouement of a long and dramatic confrontation between powerful ideological forces and legendary men. R. A. Lafferty captures the true meaning of both, and examines the people, places, ideas and feelings that led to this epic struggle. Rome's demise was not a simple case of fierce barbarians sacking and subduing a decadent, crumbling city. The author has skillfully balanced the turmoil and illusions of a mighty, dying Empire against the vitality of the aggressive Huns, Vandals, and above all, the Goths. The result is one of the most perceptive and stimulating historical accounts ever written. This is history told and read for sheer pleasure: exciting, splendid and complex. The Fall of Rome is a story of the men and women who made things happen, who were as awesome, poignant, and in some cases, as savage as the era itself.
Without a doubt, Raphael Aloysius Lafferty (1914-2002) was one of the most quirky and unusual authors every to work in science fiction. That's saying a lot. His stories are often unusual, challenging, uncategorizable, and brilliant. This collection assembles 18 of them, including his very first story. Included are: ALOYS ADAM HAD THREE BROTHERS SEVEN-DAY TERROR DAY OF THE GLACIER SODOM AND GOMORRAH, TEXAS THROUGH OTHER EYES THE WEIRDEST WORLD THE SIX FINGERS OF TIME, by R. A. Lafferty TRY TO REMEMBER McGONIGAL'S WORM THE POLITE PEOPLE OF PUDIBUNDIA IN THE GARDEN ALL THE PEOPLE DREAM THE WAGONS OTHER SIDE OF THE MOON THE UGLY SEA SATURDAY YOU DIE If you enjoy this ebook, don't forget to search your favorite ebook store for "Wildside Press Megapack" to see more of the 290+ volumes in this series, covering adventure, historical fiction, mysteries, westerns, ghost stories, science fiction -- and much, much more!
Wolf Hall meets The Man in the High Castle in this mind-bending science fiction classic, now presented in an authoritative new edition from Library of America Plucked from time, Sir Thomas More arrives on the human colony of Astrobe in the year 2535 A.D., where there is trouble in utopia. Can he and his motley followers save this golden world from the Programmed Persons, and the soulless perfection they have engineered? The survival of faith itself is at stake in this thrilling, uncategorizable, wildly inventive first novel—but the adventure is more than one of ideas. As astonishingly as Philip K. Dick and other visionaries of the 1960s new wave, Lafferty turns the conventions of space-opera science fiction upside-down and inside-out. Here are fractured allegories, tales-within-tales, twinkle-in-the-eye surprises, fantastic byways, and alien subjectivities that take one's breath away. Neil Gaiman has described Lafferty “a genius, an oddball, a madman”; Gene Wolfe calls him “our most original writer." Long-hailed by insiders and now with an introduction by Andrew Ferguson as well as unpublished omitted passages included in the notes, Past Master deserves to perplex and delight a wider audience.
Aurelia was a fifteen-year-old girl from a very advanced world. She'd passed Starship building easily enough, but she'd slept through most of celestial navigation. That was how she ended up on a little back-water dump like Earth, where her advanced powers seemed like miracles. Some thought she was the Messiah. Some thought she was the Devil. No one was prepared for the truth.
The stories contained in this volume demonstrate the unique and unpredictable imagination, style and vision that earned R.A. Lafferty the 1990 World Fantasy Award for Lifetime Achievement.
Three memorable creatures world jump in a meta-cosmic universe that orbits with nightmarish landscapes that thrive on anti-matter, anti-space, and anti-time. What mind and body searing challenges await the Pilger, Pilgrim, and Polder, who are really one man?
There have always been the Twenty One Pillars of Rectitude who sustain the World: Seven Saints to insure the sanity of the world; Seven Technicians to insure its correct mechanical working; and Seven Scribbling Giants to write its scenarios and histories. The Saints and Technicians were always in plentiful supply. But not so the Scribbling Giants. So when Atrox Fabulinus, the greatest of the Scribbling Giants, was most foully murdered with his own nine-foot-long goose feather quill, the World staggered with the collapse of its most sustaining pillar. Then the remaining Scribbling Giants (all of them very old and tired) cried out for replacements so they could go to their restful deaths. This is the story of how the World, at the uneven changing of its supporting pillars, staggered and reeled. It is also the story of the Group of Twelve, an Group remarkable for its creativity and elegance, and how it set out to sustain the World in its new days of tottering terror. Whether the Group will be successful, indeed whether they have been successful, remains to be answered on the ninth day of the week, east of Laughter.
Set in the far future, Space Chantey chronicles the adventures of Space Captain Roadstrum and his crew, on a journey through galaxies resonant with myth and peril as Roadstrum valiantly battles to return across the cosmos to Big Tulsa, the Capital of the World, and to his wife and young son Tele-Max.
Presents a fictionalized account of the history of the Choctaw Indians and their removal from Mississippi to what is now southern Oklahoma, as seen from the perspective of Okla Hannali, a Choctaw giant in the tradition of Paul Bunyan, who had a reputation as a farmer, fiddler, blacksmith, philosopher, and jack of many trades.
Seven very special people blending to create a higher form of humanity... A laughing man living alone on a mountain top, guarding the world... The returnees, men who live again and again, century after century... A dog-ape plappergeist who can be seen only from the corner of the eye... And a young man named Foley, very much like you or me, who begins to find out about these people and these things, and how they are shaping the destiny of the world...
Let us say that we have a green thing growing forever. Everything that is done is done by it. And on it we also have the red parasite crunching forever; and everything that is undone by that. It is required of each man that he rule over himself in justice, and that he rule over the world in justice. This has gone on forever, though it is hard to trace through garbled history. And it must still is hard to trace through garbled history. And it must still go on forever. For all your own life and for the life of all your children, you will carry on the green battle.
This, I believe, is the first autobiography of a machine,' writes Epikt, a Ktistec machine. In the resulting mindbending, at times hilarious, work of the imagination, the careful and attentive reader realizes that Epikt is not only presiding at its own birth at the Institute for Impure Science, but it is also addressing itself to the interpretation of mankind's most profoundly puzzling problems.
Two novellas by an author who has earned a reputation for original and imaginative writing, with a spark-bladed humour that is unlike anything ever written. Contents: Where have You been Sandaliotis? The Three Armageddons of Enniscorthy Sweeney
A constellation of persons or events will have precedent. It will not appear out of nothing; it's a converging of previous trails and persons. Before one set of adventures, there was always another set; and before those, still another set, back to the beginning of the world. We pass from one set to another now, from the Green-Flame adventure to the Half-Sky adventure. We are still in the middle of the nineteenth century, that most unreal of centuries, looking for reality under stodgy and ridiculous surface.
OH COME TO KLEPSIS TO CLAIM YOUR SHARE ... AND BREATHE THE RANK AND LAWLESS AIR! Plots and intrigues and romances abound. Smoke pictures, ghosts and treasure chests to be found. Magnifying monocles and hallucinogenic grapes - the unvoiced dreams of the dregs of space. Long John Tony Tyrone, the peg-legged historian, journeys here... And marries a princess with rainbow hair. But the Ghost of Christopher Brannagan will not rest Until mathematician Aloysius has put to the test His theory concerning the Doomsday Equation Which might save the plane from total devastation. Or might not.
It was the End of Summer of the year 2035. The Global Village that was the World was ruled by a Kangaroo Court of Compassionate Aldermen who ordered assassinations when it was deemed to be for the common good. As a sign of their openness, they were always experimenting to find new ways of looking at the World. Most of these experiments would would fail; some of them would succeed to an extent; and others would succeed only too well, and so would have to be crushed in the shell for the good of the World. The Lynn-Randal Experiment raised three children together almost from infancy. Of these three, Lord Randal was human (though somewhat enhanced and tampered with). Axel belonged to the gargoyle-faced 'Golden People' ('God believes they are the most beautiful creatures he ever made,' a theologian said, 'and there will be hell to pay when he founds out that we don't agree.'). And the third child was Inneal who often elicited the comment 'she's really something different, isn't she!' Yes, she was. All of these were super-mega-persons, which meant that they might be able to change the world itself. But why did they begin to change the Ocean first? When these three were just short of ten years old, they were merged with children of three other experiments, and formed with them a Magic Dozen. Immediately they began to have an astonishing effect on the World. And the fave of the children themselves hung in the balance. Was the experiment too successful? Was their effect on the World too dangerous? Would their group be, as other groups had been, adjudged to be a 'Serpent's Egg' that had to be crushed in the shell for the good of the world? The Three Days of Summerset, the End of Summer, would give the answer.
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