I don't normally consider myself a fan of anything ... I'm just someone for whom the question 'who is your favourite author?' will usually get 'Lafferty' as an answer (OK, I also gave my first son the middle name 'Lafferty', but I don't think that makes me any kind of obsessive).

But, for purposes of this discussion, I'd like to define 'fan' as someone who would be willing to buy a book, based on the author, at a few multiples of the normal cost/effort needed to buy a best seller.

The recent limited edition short story collection 'The Man Who Made Models' was a print run of 300 and sold out.
The 1987 limited edition print of the novel 'Serpent's Egg' was a print run of 750 and copies can be found readily on the internet (for as little as £5.50).

To me that suggests that the number of Lafferty fans in the world is somewhere between 300 and 750 ... call it 500 for a nice round number.

That's not a lot ... and yet I find that I actually met the owner of this forum at a free software convention several years ago (nothing to do with Lafferty) ... quite a coincidence!

My wife suggests that free software developers tend to be anarchists at heart, and Lafferty's writing is anarchistic/irreverant (though from what I've read about him, I think he was very far from being an anarchist himself).

What do other people think? Is there a common characteristic of the people who like Lafferty's works? Or is the free software link just a wild coincidence?