There was a writer from Tulsa, Oklahoma (he died in 2002), who was, for a little while in the late 1960s and early 1970s, the best short story writer in the world. His name was R. A. Lafferty, and his stories were unclassifiable and odd and inimitable — you knew you were reading a Lafferty story within a sentence. When I was young I wrote to him, and he wrote back.

"Sunbird" was my attempt to write a Lafferty story, and it taught me a number of things, mostly how much harder they are than they look....

 —Neil Gaiman
from the Introduction to Fragile Things: Short Fictions and Wonders (2006, William Morrow. page xxvii)

"Sunbird" was one of my fave fantasy short stories of 2006. I've read it four times since I first happened upon it, most recently a couple days ago. It'a funny and weird and, well, delightful.

But it's been a while since I read Lafferty. (Well, okay, I think I reread "Narrow Valley" for the third time about a year or so ago, but that was  by accident. It wasn't an, "Oh, I want to read some classic R.A. today. Let me get him off the shelf.")

Today, I intentionally sought out a particular story by the late, great (and if you've ever read the man's prose, I do mean GREAT) R.A. Lafferty.

Heard of him?  Probably not.

He was nominated for Hugos (won one) and Nebulas. He received other awards, as well. Plus, notable SF writers have praised him and, like Gaiman, attempted imitations (the sincerest form of flattery, they do say).  Arthur C. Clarke said R.A.L was "one of the few writers who has made me laugh aloud!"  Alan Dean foster attempted a "Lafferty story" and ending up, as he says,  "snarling my syntax so badly it threatened to strangle me." (Previous quotes from "The Crankly Old Man of Tulsa"article.

 More praise—Roger Zelazny :"Lafferty has the power which sets fires behind your eyeballs. There is warmth, illumination and a certain joy attendant upon the experience. He's good."  Terry Carr: "R.A. Lafferty is one of the most original writers in science fiction. He bends or breaks normal story restrictions apparently at will, pokes fun at serious matters and breaks into a kind of folk-lyricism over grotesqueries. All this, plus the most unfettered imagination we've enjoyed in many years.” (Quotes found atR.A. Lafferty Devotional Page site.)

OK. So, now you have the general idea. The guy was respected for his talent. He was also a Catholic. And it shows in the story I read today: "And Now Walk Gently Through The Fire"

Let me encapsulate my reaction: Holy Flames of the Great Martyrs! Why can't I write like this?

I may have wept from  joy and envy. I laughed a bit, too.

Here's the deal: It would take a long, long time to go through and say, "Oh, this is a Christian image and it's used here to; and this is one also, and here it' means this." The story is chock-a-block with things that will be apparent (or maybe not) to believers. Bits right out of Scripture. Images that are sacramental. Dialogue that is apologetical, even as it mocks, even as it uplifts, even as it warns, even as it startles.

My suggestion: Find a copy. Read it. All I'm gonna do is give a skimming of it, to show that even 35 years ago, Christian SF was being written within the SF community by a writer respected by secular SF authors. Before CBA SF and after Lewis, there was Lafferty.

The short story, written in 1972—and yes, the era's upheavals  clearly influenced it, I believe, but it still is timely in our post-modern (deconstructive) time where things have broken down, become disordered, lost their foundations, tumbled, and gone to ruin—begins thusly:

The ichthyans or Queer Fish are the oddest species to be found in any of the worlds. They are pseudo-human, perhaps, but not android. The sign of the fish is not easily seen on them, and they pass as human whenever they wish: a peculiarity of them is that they often do not wish to pass as human even when their lives depend on it. They have blood in their veins, but an additional serum as well. It is only when the organizational sickness is upon them (for these organizing and building proclivities they are sometimes known as the Queer Builders or the Ants of God), that they can really be told from humans.

 I don't think you have to strain your brain to figure out who these "icthyans" are representing. Don't thoughts of "a peculiar people" come to mind, or perhaps of "in this world, but not of it"?  The tone might make you think that Christians will be mocked. But no, this opening section is an excerpt of a fictional work called "Problem of the Queer Fish" by someone named "The Putty Dwarf." (Lafferty had much fun with names, and you'll discover that if you read his stuff.) The Putty Dwarf, one will later guess, is an agent of disorganization. He may despise the "Ants of God", but the story's narrative shows them as clear-sighted (as opposed to wobbly-eyed regular folk) and heroic.

The story proper (ie, the part not quotes from story texts) is about a family that is a force for order and faith and structure. Queer Fish, they are. Icthyans. The mother is one of The Twelve. (Oh, yes, no explanatory note necessary, right?) She, Judy Thatcher, and her son and daughter, Gregory and Trumpet, are in a frontier sort of setting with cattle and grasses and grains about them. They control the actions of the organized cattle. (The disordered cattle seem like zombies, dead, weird-eyed, moving without purpose. They're the bovine equivalents of the goggle-eyed "regular humans".)   The icthyans use the ordered cattle to conceal themselves from those who would destroy them. They steer the creatures by virtue of being persons of structure, a very sort of mystical and miraculous thing. Yes, they are outlaws. They are misfits. But they see...

The day the story opens is Gregory's day of temptation, a particular ritual the icthyans undergo. A demon comes and goes through the routine, and we get some of the philosophical underpinning of the story—order versus disorder, hedonism versus holiness, light versus darkness— with a generous dose of Twain-like humor. Gregory doesn't yield. 

(In the temptation, we also sense a condemnation of the drug culture that erupted in the sixties and was well-entrenched by 1972.)

And yet we sense a bad thing is coming toward this family, something worse than a demon debating and attempting to "disorder" a twelve-year old boy's faith and his "orderly" mind.

After another report from the side of disorder, this time taken from a text called "The Unmaking of the Species" from ANALITIES by the Coprophilous Monkey—Oh, man, I'm sorry, I simply have to laugh again—we move back to the narrative where a stranger wanders into the camp of the Thatchers. He's been victim of torture. And he, the visitor, Brother Amphirropos,  makes a request for "a Letter." Judy, one of  The Twelve, now is duty-bound to write one. (Yes, think epistle.) And while the family uses some caution in dealing with this stranger, they are nevertheless not hateful or violent, but rather hospitable and generous. Still, Judy senses betrayal is at work. 

The Judas figure has come into the picture.

They don't send him away empty-handed. A ritual of worship (there is unleavened bread and there is a leavened loaf) and feasting (think Last Supper) takes place, which is sad and beautiful in how it's written. Humor is lightly threaded into the terrible foreboding and acceptance.

The letter is the Epistle to the Church of Omaha is Dispersal, and it's a gorgeous thing, worth reading more than once. It has multiple echoes of Paul's epistles, and perhaps that (as well as Lafferty's prose skills) is why it reads with such power:

 "To you who are scattered and broken, gather again and mend. Rebuild always, and again I say rebuild."

I don't think you can miss the sound of Philippians in that.

It goes on in words that we know will condemn Judy—and in words that make the gospel fresh for its unexpected phrasings. It is anti-entropic. It is anti-deconstruction. It is anti-excess individualism. It is a fervent call for organization, which the powers of disorder would consider the worst possible offense:

"Be steadfast. Restructure. Reinstitute. Renew."

When she hands the letter to her Judas, she says, "What thou doest do quickly."

 There is more—more writings from the demonic, a historical perspective that goes into The Great Copout (the last a word that sets this story in its era.) But what shines is Judy and her children, their courage as martyrs, and the miracle of apostleship (plus a fabulous bit of backstory about how the father passed the apostleship to the mother).

The ending is luminous—literally and figuratively. Gregory takes over his mother's place among The Twelve, and a great fire whose wax has been miraculously brought by the most ordered of lesser creatures (bees). Here are the apostles and here are some of the faithful gathered—The Twelve, The Seventy-Two, The Hundreds.

 It was the benevolent illumination and fire of reality. It was all very clear for being in the middle of a mystery. White night turned into white dawn; and the people all moved easily into the fire, their pomposities forgiven, their eyes open.

The Mysterious Master and Maker of the Worlds came again and walked upon this world in that Moment. He often does so. The moment is recurring but undivided.

No, we do not say that it was the Final Morning. We are not out of it so easily as that. But the moment is all one. Pleasantly into the fire that is the reality then! It will sustain through all the lean times of flimsiness before and after.

 The last word is not from one of the agents of disorder. It's from one of the Queer Fish who believes in the Master and Maker.

If you're a Christian and you love SF and you want to see how terrific prose styling can meld with theology and faith and a sense of humanity and humor, then I suggest you hunt down and read this story in its entire, and read some more Lafferty. (Not so easy to find. There's a reason he won the "Rediscovery" award.) And if you're studying "voice and style" as an SF writer, this is also a writer you should at least sample.

A copy of the anthology with this story  is now on ebay (ending 6/11) http://cgi.ebay.com/AND-WALK-NOW-GENTLY-THROUGH-THE-FIRE-LAFFERTY-1972-HC_W0QQitemZ330130004738QQcmdZViewItem