Past Master, R.A. Lafferty
Past Master, R.A. Lafferty
List: $19.99 | Sale: $13.99
Club: $9.99

Past Master

Author: R.A. Lafferty

Narrator: Matthew Waterson

Unabridged: 7 hr 23 min

Format: Digital Audiobook Download

Publisher: Tantor Media

Published: 12/03/2019

Categories: Fiction, Science Fiction


Synopsis

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.

About R.A. Lafferty

Born in Neola, Iowa, and raised in Oklahoma, R. A. Lafferty (1914-2002) left the University of Tulsa after two years, working as an electrical engineer and occasional newspaperman. He served in the US Army in the Pacific during World War II. Publishing his first story in his mid-forties, he went on to write more than a dozen science fiction novels, as well as Okla Hannali, a historical novel about the Choctaw Nation.


Reviews

Goodreads review by Bradley

It's 1967. Most SF is generally steeped in a light-adventure mythos. Some are more tech-heavy, but around this time, most are leaning toward sociological SF constructs. Let's face it -- those were the times. But when we have a fish-out-of-the-water novel that includes the famous Thomas Moore, the wr......more

Like most people, I don't like feeling like an idiot, and I usually don't like books that make me feel like an idiot. Yet Lafferty often leaves me feeling like an idiot, or a happy fool who thinks he understands the world when like some denizen of Plato's cave I really only understand a very small p......more

Goodreads review by Megan

Past Master reads like a lesser The Einstein Intersection, which was published a mere year earlier. Both are looking at future societies, and attempting to integrate myth and legend into the stories they tell. But what Past Master lacks is the lyricism of Samuel L. Delany. Similar figures, archetype......more