Raphael Aloysius Lafferty was born in Neola, Iowa, but moved to Oklahoma at the age of four. After some work from 1932 to 1933 at the University of Tulsa, he began in 1935 a career in electrical wholesaling which was interrupted by four years of military service (1942-1946) in the Pacific theater during World War II. He started to write science fiction in 1959; in that same year he had published the first of more than one hundred fifty short stories. His work in short fiction climaxed in 1973, when he won a Hugo Award for "Eurema's Dam" (1972). Other notable short stories were collected in Nine Hundred Grandmothers (1970), Strange Doings (1972), and Does Anyone Else Have Something Further to Add" (1974). Besides his science fiction, which has been translated into Dutch, French, Italian, Japanese, and Spanish, he has written several historical novels: The Fall of Rome (1971), The Flame is Green (1971), and Okla Hannali (1972). At present...