Friday, August 17, 2012

French Lafferty!




Being reissued with a new introduction by Andrew Ferguson?

Here's the contents as listed at the website this came from:

Le livre d'or : Raphael A. Lafferty (1984) de LAFFERTY Raphael A., anthologiste DUVIC Patrice
Pocket, Le Livre d'Or n° 5187, 1984.
ISBN : 2-266-01444-7 
Genre : SF 
Indexation : non validée 
Sommaire :

7 comments:

Daniel Otto Jack Petersen said...

Very interesting selection of stories here. The only stories I haven't read are 'The Pani Planet' and 'Rangle Dang Kaloof' and I don't know what sources they come from. It looks like the rest are also found in the collections Nine Hundred Grandmothers, Strange Doings, Does Anyone Else Have Something Further to Add?, Golden Gate, Through Elegant Eyes, Lafferty In Orbit, and Iron Tears.

philiph35 said...

Daniel, you need ready access to this site at all times: http://www.isfdb.org/cgi-bin/ea.cgi?36. I will leave you to source the 2 stories, neither of which are very easy to find.

Daniel Otto Jack Petersen said...

Yeah, thanks,Philip - you introduced me to this invaluable resource some time ago and I've used it regularly ever since. I was just citing what I knew off the top of my head, without further research.

Andrew said...

Haha, I gave the wrong impression, that's what I get for posting in between dissertation pages on no sleep.

This book is just part of a series that was brought out a few decades back in France, translating works by Anglophone SF authors and providing substantial introductions to them by writers who knew their work. In this case the writer was Patrice Duvic, a French SF anthologist and some-time filmmaker (who actually wanted for years to film Lafferty's "Selenium Ghosts of the Eighteen Seventies" but could never work up the funding). I'm translating his introduction (slowly, slowly) for my own edification.

Rangle Dang Kaloof (or Rang Dang Kaloof, in some sources) was Ray's one and only appearance in Playboy, by far the highest paying market for genre fiction at that time. (He found out later that they would've taken "About a Secret Crocodile" as well, but it had already been sold by that point.) Old issues of Playboy aren't penny-cheap like many old pulps, but there are always plenty circulating, for obvious reasons.

Pani Planet is just a Worlds of Tomorrow story, which I didn't think was particularly hard to get hold of. Ray's original title, I think, was "Pani People."

Andrew said...

Oh, and a quick word on the Gollancz Masterworks series: the ones coming out now have generally been reprints of books originally published by Gollancz or its partners (Houghton Mifflin, a few others). Since Ray was never published by them, the options were limited. This may change in the near future though.

philiph35 said...

What I should have said is that these 2 stories are merely not in any anthology. In fact, any of the published stories which are not in the various Lafferty anthologies can be found fairly easily and cheaply except for Hound Dog's Ear and Anamnesis. The Lafferty anthologies themselves are,of course, rather harder to find, especially the United Mytholgies ones.

Daniel Otto Jack Petersen said...

Thanks for the clarification, Andrew - sorry I jumped the gun! My next question would have been whether we could hope to see a translation of that French introduction. Share with the world when you're done?

I guess it's good to know it's possibly been more of a technical issue preventing Lafferty from joining the Masterworks ranks. It's surprising how many of the classics they published then. Of course, the French publishers managed it...

'It was all strong talk with the horns and hooves still on it.'
(R. A. Lafferty, The Devil is Dead)