R.A.Lafferty

[Steven Maas (CUTR)]

Well at lunch I went and borrowed a couple of the several Lafferty books
at this university library.  One is a skinny collection of essays called
_It's Down the Slippery Cellar Stairs_.  As I was randomly scanning
samples of the essays an excerpt from "Great Awkward Gold" caught my
attention.  Lafferty is talking about Verne and Wells as the "binary or
double suns" of SF and says this about Wells' short stories (which I've
never heard of, much less read):  "These Science Fiction short stories of
Wells are more important than his Science Fiction novels. They are more
important than anything else that has ever been written in Science
Fiction.  And _all_ the great Science Fiction ideas are to be found in
their original form in these stories."  Anybody read these and
agrees/disagrees?

	Steve Maas