Currently I own the first two volumes in Lafferty's Coscuin series. According to the author of greatsfandf.com (a wonderful site, by the way), the final two volumes in the series do exist, but have never been published.

A couple questions for the Lafferty experts here:

1. Does anyone have any further knowledge of "Sardinian Summer" and "First and Last Island"? As in, why they haven't been published, or when (if ever) they will be?

2. Does anyone know when the series was written? Were the books all written during the same period, or over the course of several years?

Thanks.

Browsing on the net, I found an excellent essay/review of "The Flame Is Green" by John J. Reilly. It's at pages.prodigy.net/aesir/tfig.htm (sorry, don't know how to do links). Anyone interested in the Coscuin books, or Lafferty in general, should check this out. It's one of the few times I've seen RAL discussed seriously, as a novelist and thinker, without resorting to the "he's just so weird" fallback.

The Flame Is Green first appeared around 1972 (?), but if you have a copy, you know better than I do. I didn't know he'd written anything further on the story until quite recently.

It's an interesting take on what the cats call "politics," though, Like a lot of other RAL, it doesn't fit into the usual categories. Lafferty reminds me very much of the Spanish Carlists (who show up in TFIG). The fought for Franco in the Civil War, but many of them later realized they had been sold a bill of semi-fascist goods by the bad guys because they were deep Catholics, and taken for "useful idiots" by the nutty right of the 1930s.

The Flame Is Green first appeared around 1972 (?), but if you have a copy, you know better than I do. I didn't know he'd written anything further on the story until quite recently.

It's an interesting take on what the cats call "politics," though, Like a lot of other RAL, it doesn't fit into the usual categories. Lafferty reminds me very much of the Spanish Carlists (who show up in TFIG). The fought for Franco in the Civil War, but many of them later realized they had been sold a bill of semi-fascist goods by the bad guys because they were deep Catholics, and taken for "useful idiots" by the nutty right of the 1930s.

I have The Flame is Green as 1971, and Half a Sky as 1984.

I read The Flame is Green a good while ago, at Spaced Out Library in Toronto, which is the only place I've ever found a copy. I've read a little of Half a Sky, also at Spaced Out Library, because I have little time to visit and read onsite, which is the only way you can because most of Lafferty is non-circulating. I'd assumed he never completed that sequence (or the long book chronicling the 20th century that only a few chapbook excerpts of have been printed). From what I hear on this site I'm not so sure about that anymore.