The Reefs of Earth

The Reefs of Earth is one of three separate science fiction novels by R. A. Lafferty published in 1968. (The others were Past Master and Space Chantey.) Of the three, it has the closest ties to his 1969 book Fourth Mansions. It is focused on otherworldly people in contemporary terrestrial human society. In fact, it reminded me significantly of Theodore Sturgeon's first novel, The Dreaming Jewels (1950, a.k.a. The Synthetic Man). It also has a strong resonance with Lafferty's own The Devil Is Dead (1970), which might serve as its sequel, but unlike that later book it includes specific allusions to the Four (or Five) Planets setting that extends through various Lafferty works.

Two generations of non-human Puca work out solutions to their show more persecuted state over the course of the compact novel of sixteen chapters. Chapter titles are the individual lines of a rhyming quatern, which makes the table of contents into a dramatic prologue in verse. The Puca have supernatural capacities, and they are often called goblin-like and once specified as kobolds. They exercise magic through two genres of verbal composition, the Bagarthach verse and the Aorach story.

Another important feature of the book is its involvement of Indians with sympathies for the Puca who are beleaguered by the denizens of remote, coal-depressed Lost Haven. There is thus even a connection to Lafferty's "non-genre" work Okla Hannali. I happened to read The Reefs of Earth while traveling in a city in the US Southwest where Native Americans and their legacies are conspicuous.

Having read quite a bit of Lafferty--although only a fraction of his total oeuvre--this volume struck me as paradigmatic of his style and subject matter. The prose has a numinous orality, and the story concerns powerful outsiders with unconventional ethics. show less