What Is It To Be Human? Does Only R.A. Lafferty Know?

by Luke Dylan Ramsey

Generally people have trouble classifying R.A. Lafferty in terms of genre, but I think he slides right into the Weird fiction canon: he writes an elevated mixture of horror with sci-fi and fantasy. There are always absurd elements, the horror is rather cosmic, much is intentionally left obscure or just unaddressed… all to say:

The reading public has long had trouble classifying the works of R.A. Lafferty. Though he is often placed in the general new wave science fiction milieu, his fiction operated with the tools of horror and myth upon his readers’ brains. These much needed operations have for me induced visions of a grand wizard toying with his underlings through his often unsettling mixtures of science fiction settings, unconventionally shaped narratives that are usually told in a tall tale’s easy rhythm and vernacular, and apocalyptic absurdities both cosmic and personal. 

The breakdown of logic inherent in Lafferty’s work seems as good an excuse as any for me to slot him firmly into the Weird fiction canon, and the places that Lovecraft would so lovingly call ineffable or too terrible for the human mind to comprehend are exactly where you can locate the true heart of so many Lafferty stories, which is to say that the Lafferty of “Configuration of the North Shore” (where the characters at one point literally explore an endless void) and of “Snuffles” and “Thieving Bear Planet” (in which initially cute bear-things prove to be almost godlike and eventually destroy a team of human explorers) completely illuminated planes of existence that other Weird fiction authors only hint at.

The Weird fiction canon is often defined by its unutterably monstrous presences and reality-breaking worldbuilding, sure. But there is also a tendency towards breaking down all forms of human logic, and that was where Lafferty shone the most. His aliens were almost as hard to figure out as his humans, and they often tried to mimic, distort, and even absorb us. 

Weird fiction is not just genre fiction with odd creatures, it is a type of fiction that experiments with questioning the nature of storytelling and how and why we acquire knowledge. 

Lafferty’s unique style and keen sense of knowing how to sequence infotainment just right do render him singular in some respects, but, given how he so often was contacting the incomprehensible (what Jeff VanderMeer in an interview called hyper-objects) and the fact that he was always pushing the boundaries of what his readers could comprehend, if he does need to be classified by genre, Weird fiction would be a far superior classification than science fiction. 

In the coming weeks and months, I am going to be exploring Lafferty’s possible influence on other Weird authors, like Jeff VanderMeer and Gene Wolfe, along with some other stuff about the overlap between the works of Philip K. Dick and Ursula K. Le Guin.