Customer Reviews

Nine Hundred Grandmothers.

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R. A. Lafferty, "the cranky old man from Tulsa," has written some fine novels: OKLA HANNALI, THE DEVIL IS DEAD, FOURTH MANSIONS, and others equally good. However, his weird (but wise) view of the world is at its best in his short fiction. NINE HUNDRED GRANDMOTHERS is his best single collection, one of the true landmark collections of modern fiction. It's amazing that such a wonderful collection hasn't had more influence, but then again it's hard to imagine anyone else writing anything even remotely like a Lafferty story except as a pastiche or tribute. He's that different.

The stories here include many of his best: the title story, "Ginny Wrapped in the Sun," "Slow Tuesday Night," "Thus We Frustrate Charlemagne," "Narrow Valley," "Hog-Belly Honey," "The Hole on the Corner," "Name of the Snake," and others. The only excuse for not buying this is that you're waiting for the collected Lafferty!

The "cranky old man from Tulsa" is one the great eccentrics of fantastical literature.His stylish, tumultuous, absurdist and sui generis short stories often blends theological speculations, satire, black humour, conspiracies, cartoonish humour..UUUFFFFFFF.He is a conscious stylist that assaults the reader with torrents of words, invention and craziness not often encountered in any kind of literature.On the surface his short stories seems to be aimed only to entertain ( and they DO entertain !! ) but more often than not they address serious issues. NINE HUNDRED GRANDMOTHERS is a fine introduction to Lafferty and shoudn't be missed .

Contents:

Nine Hundred Grandmothers ========== *****
Land of the Great Horses =========== ****
Ginny Wrapped in the Sun =========== **
The Six Fingers of Time ============ *****
Frog on the Mountain =============== ****
All the People ===================== ****
Primary Education of the Camiroi==== **1/2
Slow Tuesday Night ================= ***1/2
Snuffles =========================== ****
Thus We Frustrate Charlemagne ====== ****
Name of the Snake ================== *****
Narrow Valley ====================== *****
Polity and Custom of the Camiroi === **
In Our Block ======================= ****
Hog-Belly Honey ==================== ****
Seven Day Terror =================== ****
The Hole on the Corner ============= ****
What's the Name of that Town ? ===== ****12
Through Other Eyes ================= *****
One at a Time ====================== ***1/2
Guesting Time ====================== ***1/2

The short stories of R.A.Lafferty are (still?) a treasure known to not many people. Forget about writers filed under "Fantasy" and leading you to another Middle Earth copy. THIS is Fantasy and it will lead you both to the End of Time/Universe AND to your own block where aliens just started a new trade on the other side of the road for "Jupiter only offers freezing cold and you can only do business with insects" (story: "In our block")
I read and re-read this compilation since I was 18 years old. It tickles ALL your senses. And leaves you rolling on the floor sometimes too. Buy it, you will be amazed!

How on earth do you describe Lafferty? You can't. Think of a mad uncle telling tall tales. Sometimes he reminds me of Cordwainer Smith, sometimes of Daniil Kharms. He's unique.
This is probably the best introduction to his short stories, although there is rather more pure SF in here than you'll find in some of the other collections. It doesn't contain all of his best stories (such as the wonderful "Been a long, long time" in the collection "Ringing changes") but it's got a fair bunch of them.
There's currently a volunteer project under way to publish the Collected Works of Jack Vance, the Vance Integral Edition (VIE). I wish there was a similar bunch of dedicated people doing a LIE.

R.A. Lafferty describes description. Even his fans can't tell you whether his stories are science fiction, fantasy, horror, comedy, social commentary, farce, or satire.

Nine Hundred Grandmothers is Lafferty's masterpiece, a collection of two dozen of the most unusual, funny, deranged, haunting short stories you will ever read. Tales like "Thus We Frustrate Charlemagne", "Hog-Belly Honey", and "Slow Tuesday Night" will stick in the most remote recesses of your mind forever. Wacky characters encounter even wackier characters in the most bizarre circumstances imaginable, all told in the down-home, conversational style of an old country storyteller. Soon Lafferty lulls you into believing that these weird goings-on are perfectly normal and *you're* the one who's odd. And then things *really* get strange....

I have read perhaps 10,000 books in my lifetime. This wonderful short story collection is simply my favorite of them all. Great to see it back in print.

As a reader of science fiction, I've encountered many poorly plotted and conceived, shoddily written and edited publications within that genre. Lafferty, however, is one of the best short story writers I've encountered who combines the art of concentrating a wonderful story within a few pages with a wryful wit that is a pleasure to read. I have found his stories and plots to be better conceived than most popular writers; his desire to produce a good story exceeds all else. Finally, even though 900 Grandmothers is most definitely science fiction and fantasy, the social commentary is apparent. As other writers before him, such as Voltaire, Mark Twain, and Swift, by placing these stories into such fantastical settings, the social irony is extracted into a purified form, and becomes even more biting.

R.A. Lafferty was an eccentric storyteller and his tales are intriguingly odd in ways that will truly reward the adventurous reader. Sci-fi (and perhaps fantasy) fans with a historical mindset should get hip to Lafferty's works, as they deserve far more appreciation. This collection of short stories from the 1960s is a great starting point. Lafferty's unique writing style took on aspects of fairy tales or tall tales, with often unsubtle prose and ridiculous sci-fi situations that reveal surprisingly deep explorations of the human condition.

There are a couple of running themes of note in this collection. The sheer alien-ness and incomprehensibility of other races (or even advanced humans), to regular narrow-minded earth dwellers, are masterfully explored in the often humorous but oddly disconcerting "Nine Hundred Grandmothers," "Ginny Wrapped in the Sun," a couple of tales about an alien race called the Camiroi, and this volume's extended centerpiece "Frog on the Mountain." That same mix of the strange and the disturbing can be found in a couple of unexpectedly deep ruminations on religion. "Snuffles" and "Name of the Snake." Lafferty was also adept at exploring the absurdities of the old don't-alter-history motif of time travel tales, with several stories featuring a team of eggheads trying to make the world safer for nerds via weird history-correction machines. Lafferty also exercised his offbeat, ironic, and disarmingly black sense of humor in tales like "Guesting Time" and "Seven Day Terror," which somehow still advanced surprising themes about human and social foibles.

This odd mix of absurd situations with deep thoughts, written as if they were sung by a teller of tall tales, is what made R.A. Lafferty truly unique, and worth rediscovery by adventurous readers. [~doomsdayer520~]

I found my copy of this book in a used bookstore but did not recognize the author. However the reviews on the back were very good and it cost less than a dollar so I bought it. Little did I know what I had stumbled upon. Since that day, I have read and reread the collection many times and recommended it to many people. Lafferty's prose was deceptively simple: a strange mix of humor, the macabre, Swiftian satire, sci-fi, fantasy and myth. Once I had digested the stories, I came to realize that I had discovered a huge intellect with a backwoods sense of humor who was expressing the human condition in a completely unique manner. As for imitators and/or literary brothers, there are few; the best of Harlan Ellison's short stories, Homer, the middle section of Wolfe's novel "the Fifth Head of Cerebus", and some native stories from the beginning of the world......more than twenty years after I discovered this collection, it remains in my top ten of all-time favourite books.

--
Christien Gagnier

This one of the few books that I really treasure. After havingowned a German translation for something like 20 years, I got mypresent Dobson (London) edition about three years ago... Thank youAmazon.com for your excellent out of print book search facility, thisbook is worth every penny! (And it is nice to see it beeingreissued)

My favorite story of course is the title story (which isactually based on a Kiowa myth, see W. W. Newcomb, Jr.: The Indians ofTexas).

"Slow Tuesday Night" is a close second, all therest is simply great.

Lafferty combines strange humour, tallfrontier tales, and native myths into weird stories told in a freshand bold approach at the English language.

Lafferty holds up a mirror to humanity. It is a funhouse mirror. Humans are shown to be quite unique, but not too bright. Children make things disappear. A PTA visits another planet. The earth becomes host to overpopulating aliens. A city is destroyed and then the memory of its destruction is destroyed. In this collection of stories there is humor, prescience, and the amazing realization that anything that can happen, happens.

This is my favorite of the madman's collections, and I'm glad to see it back in print. If you want to read something similar by a different author, I recommend 'The DaVinci Machine' by Earl Conrad.