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    Past Master
    Past Master
    Past Master
    Audiobook6 hours

    Past Master

    Written by R.A. Lafferty

    Narrated by Matthew Waterson

    3.5/5

    ()

    About this audiobook

    Wolf Hall meets The Man in the High Castle in this mind-bending science fiction classic.

    Plucked from time, Sir Thomas More arrives on the human colony of Astrobe in the year 2535 AD, where there is trouble in utopia: can he and his motley followers save this golden world from the Programmed Persons, and the soulless perfection they have engineered? The survival of faith itself is at stake in this thrilling, uncategorizable, wildly inventive first novel-but the adventure is more than one of ideas. As astonishingly as Philip K. Dick and other visionaries of the 1960s new wave, Lafferty turns the conventions of space-opera science fiction upside-down and inside-out. Here are fractured allegories, tales-within-tales, twinkle-in-the-eye surprises, fantastic byways, and alien subjectivities that take one's breath away. Neil Gaiman has described Lafferty as "a genius, an oddball, a madman"; Gene Wolfe calls him "our most original writer." Past Master, long-hailed by insiders and now with an introduction by Andrew Ferguson, deserves to perplex and delight a wider audience.
    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherTantor Media, Inc
    Release dateDec 3, 2019
    ISBN9781977364548
    Past Master
    Author

    R.A. Lafferty

    R. A. Lafferty (1914-2002) lived almost his entire life in Tulsa, Oklahoma. After service in the South Pacific during World War II, he worked as an electrical engineer. He began selling fiction regularly in the early 1960s, and went full-time as a writer in 1971. His work draws on many influences, ranging from Irish and Native American tales to the writings of St. Teresa of Avila. His novels include Past Master (1968), Fourth Mansions (1969), and the Native American historical Okla Hannali (1972).

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    Reviews for Past Master

    3.5/5

    58 ratings4 reviews

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    • 3/5
      Is a Perfect World Possible, or Even Wanted?

      Speculative and science fiction have proven fine places to explore many large topics, such as the perfectibility or imperfectability of humanity, the commodiousness of utopian society or the brutality of dystopian ones. Thinkers have pondered on these and other topics like them all the way back to the ancient Greeks. But more to the point of R. A. Lafferty’s first novel, so did the English lawyer and devout Catholic Sir Thomas More. In 1516, More published Utopia, his satirical exploration of what people of that time might consider a perfect society, and thus launched a sub industry of speculation on what perfect societies might look like and what might be the fatal flaws that would ultimately destroy them.

      And it is this that Lafferty, a writer, by evidence of this novel, given to extravagant language and imagery, focuses on. He places More on a utopian world with features of his own creation from Utopia. Called Astrobe, or Golden Astrobe in tribute to its magnificence, it is coming apart at its seams owing to its own inherent flaws, among them a lack of faith in a higher power, a life of ease without challenge and purpose, and most disturbing, a life without individuality that perhaps only a Borg would cherish. The three contentious leaders of this world pluck More from history, citing his credentials as a man who had at least one honest moment in his life (his refusal, along with Cardinal John Fisher, to sign onto Henry VIII’s Act of Supremacy laws and all that flowed from them). Readers will recognize how highly ironic the choice of the leaders from the beginning, because their intention was to use More as a likable figurehead while pursuing their own designs and imposing their own wills, failing, of course, to reckon More a man of iron will. In short, he lost his head once to principle and belief and he would happily do so again.

      Intellectually, patient readers will find Lafferty’s novel rich and quite rewarding, though perhaps more in the afterglow of contemplation than in the present act of cutting through it. Saying above that Lafferty employs elaborate language and imagery is no elaboration. These pages are thick with encounters, battles, and long dialogues. They bounce from the golden pleasures of Astrobe the ideal, to the squalid worlds populated by those fleeing its sterility and banality. Better to toil until your lungs spout blood and your life ends in puddles of muck, because at least you feel something of what life could be. Thinking of Golden Astrobe you would be justified in thinking of anesthetized life in Brave New World, to give you a marker. Here, in fact, so alien is the ideal of Astrobe that the leaders had to create programmed killers to seek out and destroy dissenters. Astrobe’s core problem will be very clear to readers, so clear they surely will find it hard to believe that the Astrobian’s can’t detect it for themselves. But, then, when you are encapsulated in an illusion, or the fog of a situation, it’s hard to penetrate beyond its boundaries.

      In the end, More loses his head in two worlds, and Astrobe, the third iteration of humankind’s quest for the perfect society, ceases. Yet, that’s the thing about humans, they are forever hopeful, and so Lafferty pulls down the curtain on Astrobe and More with hope of a better new world.

      If you are up for a bit of challenging reading, if you find pleasure in intellectualizing about perfect worlds, if you enjoy reading text that sometimes takes lefts and loses you for a while, if you like any of this stuff, give Past Master a try. Otherwise, avoid it, unless you also love frustrating yourself to no end.
    • 3/5
      Due to his fame as creator of "Utopia", Sir Thomas More is recreated in the year 2535, when the government thinks he could contribute to the progress and better prospects of their time. It doesn't work out so very well.
    • 3/5
      Lafferty's books always have a breakneck pace in my experience- while this worked wonderfully in Fourth Mansions when all the pieces came together at the end, here the rushed nature was too much. Some of the fun of science fiction is the world it creates, and while The Past Master has an interesting world, the narrative never slows down enough to let the world soak in. Every page there's a fight or a speech or a revelation about a character or a move to another location or a death, and with everything happening in such quick succession the narrative impact of each thing was weakened. Still better than most pulp in the genre, but I wish Lafferty had stopped to let us smell the roses.
    • 2/5
      I consider R. A. Lafferty one of the great science fiction short story writers. He brings a bizarre, twisted, and magical look at each scenario he approaches. Because of my appreciation for his skills in short story writing, I try to read his novels. This is the second novel I’ve attempted. And it only reinforces my belief that the skills that serve him so well in his stories (that ability to turn things on their heads), does not serve as well in the novel form. It is almost as though that constant effort for the absurd drives any sense from the narrative of the novel.In this case, people from the future go back in time to retrieve Thomas More with the idea that he can save their too perfect society. He goes on a quest to find why this “utopia” is failing. And, in the end…well, I can’t even tell what really happened in the end. My fault or Lafferty’s? I can’t say.What I can say is what I’ve already said. The Lafferty style doesn’t translate to the novel. Yes, I will probably try again, but I do not hold up great hope. What I can always hold up is the quality of the short stories which I read to remember why I keep trying to understand the novels.