Past Master

by R a Lafferty

Andrew Ferguson (Introduction)

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Wolf Hall meets The Man in the High Castle in this mind-bending science fiction classic, now presented in an authoritative new edition from Library of America

Plucked from time, Sir Thomas More arrives on the human colony of Astrobe in the year 2535 A.D., 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 “a genius, an oddball, a madman”; Gene Wolfe calls him “our most original writer." Long-hailed by insiders and now with an introduction by Andrew Ferguson as well as unpublished omitted passages included in the notes, Past Master deserves to perplex and delight a wider audience.
  • ISBN10 159853646X
  • ISBN13 9781598536461
  • Publish Date 24 September 2019 (first published 1 December 1968)
  • Publish Status Active
  • Publish Country US
  • Imprint Library of America