Past Master
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.” Past Master, long-hailed by insiders and now presented in authoritative form, with an introduction by Andrew Ferguson and unpublished omitted passages included in the notes, deserves to perplex and delight a wider audience.
Reviews
“As with everything the man writes, the wind of imagination blows strongly, with the happy difference that in a novel he can reach full gale-force. Lafferty defies categorization; his work is unlike anyone else’s. This is a great galloping madman of a novel, drenched in sound and color.”Harlan Ellison, Hugo, Nebula, and Bram Stoker award-winning author
“Marvelously inventive […] Profound wit and high adventure.”Roger Zelazny, Hugo and Nebula Award-winning author of The Chronicles of Amber series
“It is a minor miracle that a serious philosophical and speculative work should be written so colorfully and so lyrically. There is, happily, no way to categorize the book: it has elements of science fiction, of pure fantasy, of poetry, of historical fiction; it is sharply critical and marvelously gentle; very serious and irrepressibly funny; profoundly symbolic and gutsy-realistic by (unexpected) turns. A first-rank speculative work.”Judith Merril, author of Shadow on the Hearth and Future People