The Best of R. A. Lafferty by R.A. Lafferty

Author:R.A. Lafferty
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Tom Doherty Associates

Continued on Next Rock

Introduction by Nancy Kress

Some stories you don’t forget.

I first read R. A. Lafferty’s “Continued on Next Rock” over forty years ago, in the autumn of 1975. I remember it exactly. I was in graduate school, taking a Master’s degree, and I’d signed up for a course in science fiction. The text was Speculations: An Introduction To Literature Through Fantasy and Science Fiction, edited by Thomas E. Sanders. It included poetry, three essays, and forty-one stories. I know the exact number because I still have the book. The stories ranged widely, including genre precursors by Nathaniel Hawthorne, Herman Melville, and Rudyard Kipling; 1940s stories by writers such as Walter Van Tilburg Clark, Murray Leinster, and Judith Merril; and a lot of newer stories by then-current stars like Robert Silverberg, Theodore Sturgeon, and Robert Sheckley.

I read the entire volume the first weekend after I purchased it.

Among the stories was “Continued on Next Rock.” I read it, puzzled a while, and read it again. This was different. This was way different. It was clearly a love story, but not like any I’d ever read. Magdalen and Anteros seemed very strange, if not downright crazy. Actually, they are crazy. Sexually obsessed, he chases her through time, leaving amorous poems in strata of ancient rock. She spurns him, in what may or may not be a courtship ritual. Or murder.

The writing was wonderful, the characters inventive, the tone perfectly balanced between wryness and passion, the kind of passion that annihilates. I could not get it out of my head.

A few years later, a different one of my graduate-school professors, who’d become a friend, told me how much he admired R. A. Lafferty. He gave me a bound, uncorrected page-proof copy of Iron Tears, the 1992 Lafferty collection from Edgewood Press (I still have this volume, too). I thanked him, but my main reaction was indignation that the fifteen stories in the volume didn’t include “Continued on Next Rock.”

My admiration for the story, which I just read yet again, has only grown. After all, Anteros’s love poems are, if nothing else, unique: “You are the freedom of wild pigs in the sour-grass, and the nobility of badgers. You are the brightness of serpents and the soaring of vultures. You are passion of mesquite bushes on fire with lightning. You are serenity of toads.”

As I said—unique courtship poetry. And how come no man has ever told me that I am the nobility of badgers, let alone the serenity of toads? Why not, I ask you?

Maybe if I could have done the things that Magdalen could …

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