God bless Wildside Press. Were it not for their tireless efforts keeping long-lost SF classics in print, the books of R.A. Lafferty would still be languishing in obscurity. As it is, I've just finished devouring his 1970 collection of short stories, Nine Hundred Grandmothers, and wondering why I haven't heard of the man before. All the right names - Harlan Ellison, Roger Zelazny, and the like - rave about his work and compare him to the likes of Philip K. Dick and Jack Vance, and yet his work has remained in the shadows.

Perhaps Lafferty's grim sense of humour is to blame. Certainly, many of the situations he explores are ridiculous, and many of them are terrifying, and sometimes the ones which look funny at first turn out to be horrific and the ones which begin frighteningly end up funny. The title story, for example, is all about the secret wisdom kept by the immortal ancestors of an alien race, who are kept neatly stored on shelves in their descendants' basements. And what to make of Snuffles, the blood-soaked tale of the bear-god of a distant planet? The prose style is distinctive, and reminds me mainly of Jack Vance - the dialogue tends to be very stylised and carefully-crafted, and the characterisation is occasionally weak (often necessary in a short story). Dialogue is often used to comic effect: characters will engage in monologues while being eaten by monsters, punctuated with "Shriek! Shriek!" as they scream for mercy.

Lafferty makes frequent use of recurring characters and concepts. Gregory Smirnov's Institute is the setting for a good number of stories; Willy McGilly, the magician-scientist, turns up frequently and always understands what is going on (but nobody ever listens to him), as does the sarcastic supercomputer Epiktistes. The magical properties of the Slippery Elm and nonsense words are often important, too, and twice we go on visits to the insane utopia of the Camiroi, who operate their society on the principle that every citizen must be able to undertake any job at a moment's notice. At the same time, a good number of stories are apparently untouched by this mythos of the Slippery Elm. Take, for example, The Six Fingers of Time, one of the funny stories which turns frightening, which exists in its own world of time-shifted immortal fallen angels.

Ever-avoiding cliche, perpetually original, Nine Hundred Grandmothers is essential reading if you care at all about innovative SF and fantasy.