Well, looks like Lafferty's short story 'Land of the Great Horses' will at least get a fresh re-issue on the 'SF MASTERWORKS' series. Apparently Harlan Ellison's Dangerous Visions is set to become part of that series in 2012.
Now if they'd just go the rest of the way and release Lafferty's own short story collection Nine Hundred Grandmothers (and/or Past Master? Space Chantey? a whole new configuration of short stories?), then they'd finally have done their 'Masterworks' series some justice! (Seems like they've put out just about every other author out there! How can they leave out someone so critically acclaimed by his fellow s.f. writers?)
And while they're at it, they can put out Lafferty's novel Fourth Mansions on the Fantasy Masterworks series!
8 comments:
Surely, further Gollancz rereleases will not happen for copyright reasons. I doubt the Locus Foundation would allow it as they have their own plans for Lafferty.
Yeah, it'll probably only be years after Lafferty has been republished through Locus and has decent sales that the Masterworks series will consider it financially justifiable to include him in their line. (I'm sure they've worked out copyright details with all the other books in their series that are already out through other publishers.)
I would think Masterworks made their arrangements some time ago, at a time when it seems the Lafferty Estate was unable to deal. This is not to say they may not try again but I doubt they will be successful for many years.
There have been talks with Gollancz.
Andrew, are these talks that are presently taking place?
I e-mailed Golancz a month or so ago, and they sent me this response:
"Thank you for your email. Unfortunately such is the number of SF authors out there and the difficulties in negotiating rights for many books that there are a lot of titles which cannot be put on the SF Masterworks list or which we have not got around to considering yet. We are looking into the possibility of publishing some of R.A. Lafferty’s books as eBooks in the future, though this is still in the preliminary stages."
I propose that we all mail, e-mail, call, wire, or use whatever means of communications technology we see fit to contact Golancz to let them know how much demand there is for Lafferty (that way they'll know they have guaranteed sales of at least a half a dozen copies...).
You can find their contact info:
Look up Orion Books, the owners of Golancz (http://www.orionbooks.co.uk/ ), go to the About Orion page, then to the Contact us page.
Good work, Kevin. I remember you mentioning this and its nice to see the verbatim comment from Golancz. Good to know he's at least under their consideration. (But I say we need hard copy! Nice, new paperbacks with great covers [and introductions!?] is the way to reintroduce these wonderful works to the world.)
I shall write them!
correction: it's
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