RA Lafferty Books in Order

Adam’s three brothers, Etienne, Yancy and Rreq, belong to a stranger account of human origins. Their descendants include the people known as the Wrecks, whose ancestry complicates the familiar family story.

Charles Vincent discovers that the world moves almost imperceptibly while he can work and wander for hours. A mysterious stranger offers him control over this accelerated existence, but its advantages carry a dangerous price.

The sea appears ugly and monotonous, offering only a handful of coarse faces. Mankind refuses to acknowledge those faces, and the reasons hidden beneath that denial become the subject of this unsettling story.

A machine allows its users to experience the world through another person’s eyes. What seems a way to share perception raises a stranger question: how much of reality changes when someone else does the seeing?

Anthony Trotz suddenly knows every person in the world, despite his ordinary life and limited education. He questions experts about the mind’s capacity while trying to understand why this impossible knowledge has come to him.

Space explorers detect intelligent life concentrated in a single garden on a small moon. There they meet a radiant man and woman whose innocence, forbidden fruit and unusual understanding of humanity suggest an unsettlingly familiar beginning.

Manuel, a poor local worker, is hired to take a census in remote Texas terrain. Unable to read his map, he relies on his knowledge of the country and an expansive interpretation of whom to count.

Transported to the year 2535, Thomas More encounters Astrobe, an Earth colony whose perfect society is unraveling. He and his unlikely followers confront the engineered conformity of the Programmed Persons as the world's spiritual survival hangs in doubt.

Space captain Roadstrum and his crew travel across a far-future universe filled with dangers echoing ancient myth. Their journey aims toward Big Tulsa, where Roadstrum hopes to return to his wife and young son after his cosmic wanderings.

The alien Dulanty family lives among hostile humans in an Appalachian town. Tired of persecution, the children devise a plan to eliminate humanity and make Earth their own paradise, though their murderous ambitions exceed their practical abilities.

Innocent reporter Fred Foley becomes entangled in the struggle among four secret societies seeking to direct humanity's future. Psychic experimentation, mysterious wanderers, and a threatened epidemic complicate his search for truth amid a period of profound change.

Epikt, a remarkable machine at the Institute for Impure Science, narrates its own autobiography. Its account of coming into existence becomes an exploration of humanity's perplexing questions, blending the machine's personal story with speculation about its creators.

A band of adventurers sets out in search of the Devil, moving through a world populated by monsters, mermaids, demons, and changelings. Their encounters complicate the boundary between living and dead in a tale assembled from shifting realities.

This historical account examines the people, ideas, and conflicts behind the Roman Empire's collapse. Lafferty considers Rome's internal turmoil alongside the expanding power of the Huns, Vandals, and Goths, presenting the period through its consequential individuals.

Dana Coscuin leaves Ireland to join the Carlists on mysterious orders, gathering companions with extraordinary abilities along the way. His nineteenth-century travels become part of a wider struggle between forces of growth and destruction threaded through history.

Hannali Innominee's life follows the nineteenth-century Choctaw nation through forced removal, rebuilding, and the Civil War. His family's experiences illuminate internal divisions and outside pressures as the community attempts to preserve its way of life in Indian Territory.

Pilger, Pilgrim, and Polder travel among worlds in a universe shaped by antimatter, antispace, and antitime. Though they appear as three distinct figures, they are manifestations of one man confronting nightmarish landscapes and challenges to mind and body.

Soldiers Finnegan, Vincent Stranahan, and their companions move from wartime service in the Pacific toward civilian life. Their friendships and relationships become entwined with echoes of the Argonauts, blending ordinary experiences with a larger mythic pattern.

Fifteen-year-old Aurelia can build a starship, but her poor attention to navigation strands her on Earth. Her advanced abilities appear miraculous to its inhabitants, provoking competing beliefs that she might be a savior or a devil.

Peg-legged historian Long John Tony Tyrone arrives on the lawless world of Klepsis, a place of intrigue, ghosts, and treasure. Meanwhile, mathematician Aloysius must test a Doomsday Equation whose implications could determine the world's survival.

Dana Coscuin's nineteenth-century adventures continue beyond the struggle recounted in The Flame Is Green. His return to Basse-Terre brings an anticipated marriage and a visionary bride, while old histories and intertwined destinies complicate the reality he encounters.

These essays consider fantastic literature, storytelling, and science fiction alongside unconventional reflections on scientific ideas. Lafferty discusses the relationship between fiction and reality, while questioning assumptions about black holes, extraterrestrial life, and the effects of ice ages.

Melchisedech Duffey's extraordinary life unfolds through childhood, business success, spiritual conflict, and possible worlds. This concluding work in the Argo sequence follows a magical figure whose history connects the companions and competing realities of the earlier novels.

Melchisedech Duffey moves into the world of his wartime associates, joining a St. Louis printing enterprise opposed to a rival publication. Their struggle expands into a spiritual conflict involving the Devil's release and the direction of the world.

In 2035, experiments produce exceptionally gifted children whose combined abilities begin to transform the world. A government willing to authorize killing for the public good must decide whether the children's extraordinary success makes them too dangerous to survive.

Lafferty reimagines Sindbad's travels through a fantastic world of magical cities and deceptive identities. Strange communications hidden in shells connect an unlikely challenger to powerful beings, complicating the question of who deserves the celebrated voyager's name.

Two interviews with R. A. Lafferty present conversations conducted by Darrell Schweitzer and R. J. Whitaker. The volume gathers the author's responses in a brief nonfiction format, including Whitaker's discussion centered on killing and the importance of happiness.

This collection brings together fifteen short stories, including tales involving ifrits, extraordinary machines, and altered perceptions of the world. Michael Swanwick introduces the volume, which ranges across Lafferty's imaginative blend of speculative fiction, fable, and unsettling invention.

Melchisedech Duffey's unusual childhood and schooling introduce a boy whose magic makes him more than an ordinary prodigy. Pursued by knife-wielding older boys, he forms friendships and begins remarkable business ventures in this opening section of More Than Melchisedech.

Bascomb Swicegood overhears a woman describing a grotesque nightmare and realizes he dreamed the same thing. As more people report identical details, an apparently private horror becomes a disturbing mystery shared across the city.

A sudden catastrophe leaves humanity and almost all its vertebrate relatives unable to reproduce. Scientists search desperately for a cure, while a peculiar surviving worm offers an unlikely hope for a world facing extinction.

On an alien world, a two-legged creature with forward-facing eyes seems both pathetic and dangerous. Its unfamiliar body and behavior turn an encounter with humanity into a question of whose world deserves to be called strange.