Brief break in Archipelago (no, really) for a news bulletin: behold The Audifaxes!
This slim volume (ok, PDF) gathers together a series of short pieces written by Lafferty for Son of GPIC, the newsletter of the Oklahoma Science Fiction Writers’ group, or OSFW. GPIC, in turn is “Great Pagoda Insurance Company,” a nod to the Godzilla films.
By this point, Lafferty had been “retired” from writing for half a decade, and mostly kept to rewrites or retypes of extant works (or to a still-voluminous correspondence, but that’s another story entirely). But clearly he had a few half-formed ideas kicking around, and missed churning out a new story now and then, so he took to the pages of “the second most obscure publication in the world” to fill that void.
Is it possible he took on the pseudonym of Audifax O’Hanlon as a way of evading his self-imposed retirement ban? Sure—though the O’Hanlon moniker does appear elsewhere in Lafferty’s works (in his own person in “Thus We Frustrate Charlemagne”—which itself is worthy of some deeper thought—but also cited as an epigraphically quoted authority in “Entire and Perfect Chrysolite,” “Ishmael Into the Barrens,” and “The Effigy Histories”), and in the Audifaxes Ray uses him to ventriloquize a piece he quite liked but never quite found a space for: “Oh Happy Double-Jointed Tongues!,” which originally was part of the third volume of the In a Green Tree series, and then turned up as “The Roots of Folklore” in the rarely encountered 2nd edition of It’s Down the Slippery Cellar Stairs. The military designation accorded Audifax in this iteration, as well as the enlisted men’s tall tales filling the story just mentioned, may also be a nod to Ray’s own service, and to his friends from his wartime battalion—his last out-of-state traveling was done not to science fiction conventions, but to reunion meetings of the 229th AAA.
Whatever his motivation, these pieces show a glimpse of a writer who was still playful and pretty damn goofy, well into his eighth decade; a writer who wouldn’t let crippling arthritis completely defeat his impulse to tell tall tales (or to answer letters—but that’s another story entirely). As a serial, one presumes Audifax’s story would never reach any sort of conclusion; the only shame is we get so few installments, and there do not seem to be any notes in his files towards more.
I’ll return to these pieces and their literary qualities in greater detail much, much further down the line, but for now: download it! The volume is a little wonder: newly typeset by John Owen, with stunning cover art by Gregorio Montejo and Anthony Rhodes and a specially commissioned introduction by longtime OSFW member and then-Son of GPIC editor Warren Brown. And, thanks to the kind permission of the Locus Foundation, this PDF version is being made available for free, following up on the print version received by all those with sufficiently good taste to have been at LaffCon 3 last year.
That download link again: http://www.laffcon.org/2019/06/the-audifaxes.html. Save a copy today!
