Past Master

by R.A. Lafferty

The golden planet of Astrobe, made in the image of Utopia, now faced a crisis which could destroy it forever; & yet, no one could understand it:
In a world where wealth & comfort were free to everyone, why did so many desert the golden cities for the slums of Cathead & the Barrio? Why did they turn away from the Astrobe dream & seek lives of bone-crushing work, squalor & disease?
The rulers of Astrobe didn't know, so they sought in humankind's past for a leader who could give them the answers. They brought to life the one man out of history who would most want to destroy Astrobe!

Genres: Science Fiction, Fiction, Time Travel, Fantasy, Speculative Fiction, Science Fiction Fantasy, Novels

256 pages, Mass Market Paperback

First published January 1, 1968

About the author

Raphael Aloysius Lafferty, published under the name R.A. Lafferty, was an American science fiction and fantasy writer known for his original use of language, metaphor, and narrative structure, as well as for his etymological wit. He also wrote a set of four autobiographical novels, a history book, and a number of novels that could be loosely called historical fiction.

Reviews

[Bradley · Rating 5 out of 5]

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 writer of Utopia, being turned into a front-man for far-future utopians to fix their broken world, the novel only *appears* to fit in the standard SF mold.

I mean, it's not like SF novels haven't tackled utopias before. Nor have they ignored Thomas Moore's own SF *SATIRE* from back in King Henry VIII's time. It's almost like Thomas Moore's own character was being used as a reasonable foil for his own satirical vision, flip-flopping back and forth between Hope and Disgust.

And it is. But there is something else that goes on this book that kinda blew my mind. I can totally get that most people might not see or care about it, but this particular book turned the popular medium of satire SF into a treatise on MYSTERY RELIGIONS.

I honestly laughed out loud as I read point after point. Right below the surface of the adventure, Lafferty was laying out something rather fundamental and somewhat universal. Okay. So. What the F am I talking about?

Hey! All you fans of The Golden Bough, Chymical Wedding of Christian Rosenkreuz: Digest, or The Secret Teachings of All Ages! Lafferty OUTLINES in his plots the basic foundations of these mystery religions!

Being familiar with them, myself, I really enjoyed the deeper mysteries within THIS ONE.

And that's kinda the whole idea isn't it?

Past Masters refers to actual PAST MASTERS. Giants of thought. And it's funny, too, when we consider the Chemical Wedding of Christian Rosenkreuz, one of the original subversive literary ALCHEMICAL masterworks of the day, that it should feature under the surface of a completely transformed social society, only to be fixed (or turned into a Rosecrutian allegory) BY one of the great minds that dabbled IN alchemy back in the day!

But what, you ask, would an Average Joe get out of this book?

Probably a great deal, assuming you know it's a clear and easy blueprint for the Greater Mysteries and not simply a light, easy SF tale from the '60s.

[Printable Tire · Rating 5 out of 5]

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 piece of a shadow of it. And, just when I believe I am starting to understand, the rug is pulled again and I am once more the fool, grasping for meaning, looking at the other side of the tapestry.

This book was in some ways the opposite of the first Lafferty novel I read, Not to Mention Camels. It tells the story of Thomas More being confronted by his own parodied Utopia and his falling in love with it, and his one moment of honesty or courage, a moment most of us can never achieve. It is also about many other things, and as a Lafferty story also requires many tangents. There are mechanical men and great conspiracies and mythologies and characters and topics from his other books and legends and tall tales. It was probably the most overtly Catholic of his stories I have read so far, and the most lucid and plot-structured (though still not altogether a tightly-woven story), includes one of his most fulfilling endings, and I enjoyed and admired it very much.

[Megan Baxter · Rating 3 out of 5]

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, archetypes of myth and Christian legend occur, but Lafferty tells these stories in much more prosy prose, and having read and loved The Einstein Intersection earlier, I couldn't help but be disappointed by the story told here.

Note: The rest of this review has been withdrawn due to the changes in Goodreads policy and enforcement. You can read why I came to this decision here.

In the meantime, you can read the entire review at Smorgasbook

[Jamie · Rating 1 out of 5]

“I’m a stranger from another time who was brought here to give testimony to a great thing. I do so. I am in love with the Dream of Engineered Humanity.”

Lafferty's fast and loose style here may work for some authors and stories, but it most certainly does not for Past Master. While there may be some interesting underlying ideas relating to humanity's quest for ultimate perfection, they get bandied about in a plot that is untethered and cryptic from one moment to the next, hopelessly lost in esoteric attempts at symbolism and allegory. Occasional attempts at humor become just another perplexing aspect. Perhaps Lafferty could have pulled this off as a novella or short story, but even as a short novel it's thoroughly frustrating and tedious.

[Theo Logos · Rating 3 out of 5]

Past Master was R.A. Lafferty’s first published novel (1968), but it’s not the best place to begin if you’ve never read him before. It is packed full of legends, tall tales, unconventional (unbelievable?) things masquerading as sentient characters, philosophy, humor, and layers of meaning deep as a cosmic onion. These things are all typical Lafferty. What is missing is the madcap, slipstream feel of constant mind flipping unreality that characterizes his short stories and some of his other novels (Fourth Mansions, Arrive at Easterwine: The Autobiography of a Ktistec Machine, etc.). Instead, Past Master takes the shape of a more conventional SF novel. While this difference might make Past Master more accessible than some of his later writings, it does so by limiting the full, magical, Lafferty experience.

[Frederick Heimbach]

Unfinished, unrated. Roger Zelazny blurbed, "he's good." No he isn't. The book ought to be a blast, a gonzo time travel dream where Saint Thomas Moore attempts to save a future planet from its decadence. The result is an unreadable mess, a jumble of self-indulgence that never coheres into a compelling narrative.

Of the many bad tendencies in Lafferty's writing, here's one. He never follows through on consequences. A couple of times in the early pages, a main character is attacked as suffers serious injuries. His pain, medical treatment, and the time needed for healing, all pass without remark. This leaves the reader profoundly disconnected from the character. This book is not populated by personalities, but by weird, off-putting stick figures performing weird, off-putting actions that don't even move the plot along so much as illustrated the author's muddled philosophical points.

I gave up a third of the way through. A quick scan of the last 6 pages proved the author had not reformed by the end. I only regret spending what time I did on this failed experiment of a novel.

[prcardi · Rating 1 out of 5]

Storyline: 1/5
Characters: 1/5
Writing Style: 2/5
World: 1/5

It starts with chaos and ends in a babble; there's a bit of nonsense in the middle, a lot of purposeful incomprehensibility, several nested allegories conveying who-knows-what, some feints at apprehension for what was almost a plot, nemeses that disappear from the tale, and a carefully chosen historical protagonist who could just as easily have been nameless.

There seem to be those that charge Past Master with having been thoughtful, but those thoughts did not follow from the logic or reason of man. The wordplay was never beautiful, and the moments of humor were too far apart. Something like this is to be appreciated, I think, because it a) experimented with form and/or b) had a greater meaning. I found the form painful and never figured out what it meant. So postmodernism's arrival in science fiction was, for me, a disaster.

[Perry Whitford · Rating 4 out of 5]

The planet Astrobe was almost Utopia, yet now it was being pulled apart by marauding machines and threatened by Holy Ouden - utter nothingness.

A time for desperate measures, the three Masters of the Inner Circle decide that they need a different kind of World President to rally and rebirth humanity, a figure from Old Earth, a Past Master.

The list of candidates contains one name: Thomas More.

Why chose to go back in time to fetch More, the author of Utopia and defier of Henry VIII, from 16th century England? Simple: "He had one completely honest moment right at the end. I can't think of anyone else who ever had one."

Selected to be a front, the Masters overlooked the fact that Thomas More had a mind of his own. He immerses himself in the perfection of the Astrobe Dream, his own Utopia realized in actuality, as well as in the filth and misery of the Cathead region, a place where individuals who reject the sameness of perfection reside in squalor.

More gathers a colorful cast of followers such as Adam and Evita, an amphibian creature named Rimrock the ansel, a necromancer called Copperhead and various other unique beings. As the Masters and their enemies the Programmed Persons try to manipulate him, Thomas More proves that he can be just as stubborn as he once was.

Past Master is probably Lafferty's most popular novel, and though not a personal favorite I can see why. The plot is certainly more coherent than many of his other books, though it's still far from easy to tell where allegory stops and joshing takes over, or vice-versa.

The theme is a lofty one, though the humor, violence and tone appear to bely it. If humanity achieves perfection, why would life after death be needed, and if life after death is rejected, doesn't that just leave us with nothing?

As More himself remarks on the parallels between Astrobe and Utopia:
"there is something very slack about a future that will take a biting satire for a vapid dream."

[Gabi · Rating 4 out of 5]

3.5 stars

A quite unconventional, weird, sometimes disjointed book written in a humorous prose (and a bit too much exposition for my taste). Thomas Morus is brought forth in time to act as head of a society created after his work Utopia which is falling apart. Heavy on religious philosophical discussions and allegories. Not an easy read, no conventional plot, but highly enjoyable. I'm sure it gains a lot if the reader is familiar with Thomas Morus.

[Ira (SF Words of Wonder) · Rating 4 out of 5]

Check out my full, spoiler free, video review HERE.

On the planet Astrobe around the year 2500, humanities attempt at a utopia is showing signs of failure. The leaders of Astrobe retrieve Thomas More from Earth, 1000 years in the past, to help try and save their utopian world. Thomas teams up with a group of very interesting characters to try and understand what this utopia looks like, if it really is a utopia and how to possibly save it. Lafferty’s wit throughout the novel kept me very entertained. The plot is fairly straightforward and becomes an adventure novel at times. There are a lot of biblical retellings, philosophy and allegory so be warned. I really enjoyed this overall and can’t wait to read more from Lafferty.

[Katie Daniels · Rating 4 out of 5]

My second Lafferty novel--Past Master is as similar as it is different from Fourth Mansions. Fourth Mansions is a psychological thriller--Past Master is straight up scifi. Both plots a battle for which the fate of the world is the ultimate prize. Both novels end in a semi-satisfactory manner in which a twist ending has a twist ending...

Past Master is set in the future when men have colonized a distant planet and achieved perfect unity. Called the Astrobe Dream, it is the ultimate achievement of mankind. But something is ailing it, and no one can determine what. They need a new leader, someone with a new perspective, so they go back to the past to retrieve a perfect candidate for Astrobe planet--Thomas More.

Thomas More is chosen because of all the men in history, despite his other flaws, he is the only one to experience a truly honest moment. But Thomas himself doesn't understand this moment he supposedly experiencing at the death he is being rescued from, and only reluctantly agrees to undertake the role of saving Astrobe. Through his explorations we discover more of the world Lafferty has created, and the disease that ails it. We learn about the lack of privacy, forbidding of religion and, eventually, the robot uprising, which is being funded by the devil.

What makes Lafferty's work so unfathomably complex and delightfully weird is how he can take well known and rational genre conventions, and completely turn them on their heads. Where else will you find a novel that includes: Time travel, hyperspace travel, perfectly created androids, perfect democracy, and the ability to live forever side by side with the mystical elements such as prophetic dreams, reincarnation, demonic plots, mental control, and sacrificial death?

And if you expect it to follow a logical pattern, all things being explained in their place, then you will be sorely disappointed. Lafferty follows no rules but his own, yet his writing has a strange sort of coherancy not usually found in absurdist fiction. I believe it is because he is not only absurd, he is profound. His work is deeply spiritual, but presented in a ludicrous manner. It would be difficult, if not impossible, to appreciate Lafferty if you do not have an equal appereciation for the existence of the devil, and that he works every day to upset mankind and send them on a darker road.

Not for the faint of heart.

[Maxwell Foley · Rating 2 out of 5]

I continue to be impressed by the synchronicities that manage to arise between the books that I end up reading. Just a few days ago, I finished CS Lewis' "Out of the Silent Planet", a fantastical outer space story involving an expedition to a utopian planet, serving as a Catholic allegory. I then decided to read this book not knowing anything about its contents, simply because I liked its cover (not the one on this page, this one), and it turned out to be a book that could be described using the exact same terms. In my review for Lewis's book, I described it as "trippy". As it turns out, I was highly naive in using that word, because it applies vastly more to Lafferty's book. In fact - I don't really know what to make of it at all. This is probably one of the strangest books I have read.

For a few chapters, the book tricks you into thinking that you are reading a pretty standard sci-fi action story, albeit one where a wide variety of futuristic concepts are thrown at the reader in quick succession from the very beginning. A grizzled renegade starfighter pilot is initially presented as the protagonist, only to be more or less abandoned as the hero in favor of, bizarrely enough, the fifteenth century author Thomas More. Very quickly after this, the narrative begins to be almost entirely taken over by lengthy philosophical conversations between wise, demigod-like characters, who spend the novel exchanging cryptic, witty metaphysical statements back and forth.

Despite ostensibly describing a futuristic sci-fi setting, the book seems to more accurately take place in a totally psychological reality, like a dreamtime that could be accessed by some shaman. For example, at one point we are introduced to an army of mechanically programed men, i.e. robots. A bit later, we are introduced to a character who is part-mechanical, given that his grandfather was a robot. Obviously there is no attempt here to depict a remotely plausible future, scientifically or otherwise. Instead, it seems like the existence of these robots are meant to stand in for the philosophical notion of someone without free will, and justifying this in narrative terms is unimportant to Lafferty.

Similarly, we are informed that on our alien planet, everything is perfect, and that all distinctions between separate individuals have been removed. This is more-or-less told, not shown, and we are left to speculate as to exactly what this entails. Is this just a metaphor for a new social code, or are we somehow on a metaphysically altered plane in which souls are allowed to merge? It is left unclear. At one point about a hundred pages later, we are filled in with just one of the details - a device was built that allows anyone using it to view any room in the world aside from certain government rooms, allowing people to watch whoever they want have sex and etc.

Many characters are introduced out of nowhere who occupy some sort of territory between concrete entity and vague metaphysical presence. All of these appear to be allegorical, but I confess that I was unable to figure out what any of these allegories meant. One such example is the character Adam, who is a boy who is present at every battle, and dies again each time. His sister is Evita, the most beautiful woman on the planet who is also some sort of confusingly ephemeral ghost. It seems as if these characters are meant to represent Adam and Eve, although the importance of this was somewhat lost on me.

Overall this book resembles science fiction far less than some sort of traditional mythic epic, in which gods tear the sky in two, and animal spirit guides die and are reborn, and eternal warrior wisdom is dispensed, and etc. It also gave me a strong "Paradise Lost" connection, a book that I have not read but I imagine reads very similarly to this, as well as deals with very similar themes.

What I managed to extract from this is a sort of Brave New World reinterpreted as lucid dream, a recapitulation of the narrative of escaping a society which exchanges freedom for comfort, but with any attempt at creating a realistic world removed and replaced with a world of pure allegory. I am not really sure that this was successful, but I also am not sure I understood this book well enough to judge it. It all remains very mysterious to me.

[SLIGHT WATER DAMAGE · Rating 3 out of 5]

On first read:

A surreal allegory with no clear referent. A novel of scattered but abundant ideas. More focused and less irritating than Robert Anton Wilson, and episodic, feeling like Don Quixote or Gulliver's Travels, but more cryptic and eccentric, and without dated colloquialisms.

Rebellion against convention is the theme. In the 2500s, on the exoplanet Astrobe, a utopian colony called Civilized Astrobe or Golden Astrobe. The so-called third chance for human beings to get it right, after the Old World and the New World. A utopia in which there perfect harmony, perfect pleasure, a single spirit, the living cosmos, but therefore no unconscious, no afterlife, no mystery, nothing concealed, nothing to strive for, no meaning.

It is revealed as an aside that most of the inhabitants of this perfect utopia elect to live oustide the utopia. They choose to live in brutal, nightmare-libertarian, polluted, diseased, poverty-stricken Cathead where thousands of rats prowl the streets at night, overrun people, cover them like blankets, and rend all the flesh from their bodies, leaving a trail of skeletons in their wake like the movie Critters. But at least in Cathead, life has some meaning.

The prose is unusual. Lyrical, competent, and atypical. Seemingly determined to avoid hack phrases and familiar rhythms. The voice is noticeably odd but never incomprehensible.
Like the main theme, perhaps? Avoiding utopic and meaningless convention?

The rulers of this world send to retrieve Thomas More from 1000 years ago to rule their current world. For me, the best part of this book is the reckless, soft-sf style. The disjointed, almost punk-rock, matter of factness, as Paul runs the minor errand of traveling back in time to retrieve a major historical figure. The law of conservation of psychic totality states that one who travels faster than the speed of light must still experience the same amount of psychic awareness during space travel as they would at sub-light speeds. And so, intense surreal dreams, hints of madness. Bizarre and lovely choices by the author.

But ultimately, apparently, plotless and diffuse. Nothing to hold on to. In finishing this novel, one senses the tension between plot and idea struggling for dominance in the text, just as the text itself represents a struggle between the emptiness of utopia and the worthwhileness of dystopia.

This may or may not be a device. A feeling of emptiness upon finishing. I became less and less interested the longer I read. There was a perfect peak of surreal, fuck-you worldbuilding in Act 1, followed by a not-too-long slide into bizarre plot points, ungrounded political conversations, and playfully ambiguous characters that feel like placeholders. It's unclear.

Cool ending. Cosmos-engulfing. An ending that unexpectedly impacts Being itself. That grandiosity, and the unpredictability of the prose, are the best parts.

The worst part: there are no stakes and no development.

It was nominated for the 1969 Nebula Award and the 1969 Hugo Award. It lost to Alexei Panshin's Rite of Passage and John Brunner's Stand on Zanzibar, respectively.

[Charles Dee Mitchell · Rating 1 out of 5]

Past Master was R. J. Lafferty’s first novel. I hope that has something to do with why I found it unreadable. After several years of short story publications, he issued Past Master in 1968. That same year he published The Reefs of Earth, a book I thoroughly enjoyed. But Reefs is almost a novella, and it has the sparkle of Lafferty’s short stories. Past Master was a chore I was not up to.

In a distant galaxy on the planet Astrobe, The Masters are witnessing the collapse of their fourth attempt at making humanity a viable project. As both humans and programmed men attack their citadel, The Masters argue among themselves about which of the four should take on the hapless job of leadership. The decision is to go back in time and get a worthy human from their previous earth-based experiments. They settle on Sir Thomas More, the 16th century catholic saint and Renaissance humanist. His authorship of Utopia recommends him for the job.

Sir Thomas is fetched from the past, but what The Masters do not realize is that he wrote Utopia as a “sour joke;” and, that although he often feels the stirring of faith in the morning, they have usually dissipated by the afternoon. Once on Astrobe, he puts together a ragtag group of followers, and they set off to climb some mountain, and yes this all sound like fun, but about this point in the story I just wanted everyone to shut up. Pages of declamatory dialogue did me in. Lafferty’s recondite vocabulary was irritating rather than fun, his jagged, syncopated prose stilted and awkward. Once I realized I dreaded returning to the story for a third day, I admitted it was time to bail.

[Leelas · Rating 4 out of 5]

In truth, this is a four-and-a-half star book.

This is a magnificent, mind-bending, hallucinatory book, full of intricate plotting (that is not immediately apparent if you don't pay close attention) and powerful, haunting, and deeply symbolic imagery. It was Lafferty's first novel, but is an acknowledged science fiction classic. It's more difficult than Lafferty's short stories, but I understand it's easier than the rest of his novels.

The only thing that's detracting half a point, for me, is that Lafferty's conservative politics come through a bit too strong. This is not an issue for me in his other works, for some reason, but it grated on me somewhat in this one. However, this is an entirely personal issue, and I hope it won't discourage anyone from picking up this wild and wonderful book.

Keep in mind, however, that Lafferty's short stories are a much better starting point than his novels, and that one should generally read a few of them to get a feel for his style before tackling even this, his most accessible novel.

[Jim · Rating 1 out of 5]

A great profusion of characters, none of whom have any clearly defined character, and a great profusion of incidents of no particular importance that seem to multiply like rabbits. Consequently, I stopped reading this book after hurling it at the wall.

[Thomas · Rating 4 out of 5]

it's wild that this was lafferty's first published novel given that he is if anything even more oblique and hard to understand here than in many of his other novels. if you're familiar with his preoccupations, particularly his esoteric catholicism, then some of this will be clear to you, but even having read a few of those other works myself i couldn't always parse all of the symbolism here. nevertheless like most of his novels this is a totally singular only superficially sci fi book that doesn't really invite comparison with much else.

[Thomas · Rating 4 out of 5]

Lafferty, R. A. Past Master. 1968. Orion, 2016.
R. A. Lafferty is known as a master of the short story, but Past Master, his first novel, earned him nominations for both the Hugo and Nebula awards. At the time, the novel’s style was compared to that of Alfred Bester and Cordwainer Smith, but Roger Zelazny’s This Immortal was published two years before Past Master, and the books have a similar mythopoeic scope. While Zelazny often draws on Asian religious imagery, Lafferty is firmly rooted in Christian mythos, so firmly, in fact, that I wondered if he wasn’t reversing some of the elements in James Blish’s A Case of Conscience (1958). In any case, it is New Wave stuff from a time when New Wave was really new, though I doubt that Lafferty would have seen it that way. His style was sui generis, and he knew it.
Here’s the setup. The leaders of a stagnant utopian society on the planet Astrobe are facing a machine-led revolt and feel they need a spiritual seed to inspire a new historical cycle. Their solution is to travel to the past, grab Thomas More just before he gets the chop, replace him with a doppelganger and put the creator of the original Utopia in charge of their high-tech utopia. It does not work out according to plan. Lafferty has fun debunking the masterminds who think they can run things and making us wonder whether sentient machines are better or worse than programmed people. Thomas More comes off as a character who gradually becomes aware of his on myth and does not approve. He is irascible and ultimately indomitable.
One cannot overestimate the influence of Lafferty on later writers. One wonders whether works like David Mitchell’s Cloud Atlas, Neil Gaiman’s American Gods, or Dan Simmons’ Hyperion would exist without him. As for the novel, it has some first novel structural issues but still—4.5 stars from me.

[Zacki Kino · Rating 5 out of 5]

Superb ! i did not expect it to be this enjoyable ! it had no right to ! at least i thought so lol
never have i thought that a catholic themed scifi would be this fun
i originally intercepted Lafferty when i was researching Gene wolfe (a favorite of mine) and going in i expected heavy allegories and references and to be fair i'm sure there are a lot that went above my head but the world that the writer created and the interactions that happen and their fluidity and at times their hilarities make missing a reference here and there seem less and less of a problem
This is one of them rereadable books i enjoy a lot
The old argument between individuality and the hive between the perfection and the perfectly imperfect is shown in a fresh setting
make no mistake the author is not afraid of being wacky
also can i be the first one to point out the similarities between this book and the matrix movies ? it's insane why this book isn't more known
but don't let my sweet review fool you , it's a scifi book and as with genre books sometimes characters get scarified to the altar of premise and plot
being a short read i think the shortcomings won't be much of a problem
i can't wait to revisit this one after i get caught up more on Catholicism :P

[Derek · Rating 2 out of 5]

This was for the most part, a little jarring and surreal. After a while, I lost the thread of the narrative. Everything came on interesting, but somewhat jumbled. The concept of Utopianism is thoroughly well played out in this book. We encounter Astrobe, the Golden Planet. A haven of comfort, health and wealth, but with a growing number of its citizens rejecting this perfect life to go and dwell in the slums of Cathead. The masters cannot stop this tide of people, neither can they figure out what the cause is. With revolt on their hands they look back into the past and bring to Astrobe Thomas Moore. They intend him to be a kind of patsy, someone to take the fall for how bad things have gotten and in a way reverse the negative tide towards dystopia.

That's as much I could divine of the plot, I was lost after Thomas stepped on Astrobe, the rest of the book was just me trying to play catch up.

[Neil · Rating 4 out of 5]

This was an intriguing piece of late 1960s science fiction to discover, in which a future human civilization on a distant planet, which is both seriously dysfunctional and also utopian, sends a representative to go back to the past to have Thomas More, the author of _Utopia_, removed from his time stream so that he can become the civilization's governing leader. The novel wears its strangeness on its sleeve, frequently commenting about the overlap between civilization and religion as well as the existence of the "beyond" in a world almost entirely determined by technology. I'm glad I had the chance to read this, but at times it felt like a joke for which I was missing the punchline. Lafferty is certainly a unique and thought-provoking writer, and I might be interested in exploring more of his work in the future. I recommend this for the hard core SF people, but I'm not sure what others (except for scholars of the Renaissance?) would find of interest.

[Oleksandr Zholud · Rating 2 out of 5]

This is the debut SF novel by the author more known for his short stories. Even this book is an extension of a shorter SF work. I read it as a part of the monthly reading for December 2025 at Hugo & Nebula Awards: Best Novels group. The novel was published in 1968 and was nominated for both Hugo and Nebula in 1969. Lost Nebula to Rite of Passage and Hugo to Stand on Zanzibar. It is interesting to note that this was the first nomination of the author to either of awards (correction: two Nebula nominees for short stories both in 1966), so despite printing a lot of short SF since 1959 and being known as “the authors’ author” he wasn't much acclaimed with awards

The book starts with “three big men” locked in a room that is besieged from outside by mechanical assassins. They decide that their world, Astrobe, needs and change and a man who can introduce such a change. So, after some minor adventures, Sir Thomas More, the author of Utopia is delievered. The rest of the story is the life and struggles of Moore in a utopian future.

From the start, Thomas highlights that he wrote a satire and not a work about how to build a perfect society. In this future, he witnesses that under a veneer of perfection, there is so much rut, that people are preferring short, miserable lives in slums to the uniformity of actions and thought. This is partially a response to both President Johnson’s Great Society and Hippie pro-socialist rhetoric. Additionally, because the author is a Catholic and it was an important part of his identity, the sublime theme of this novel has Christian tones and protests against forced secularism.

Lefferty’s writing style doesn’t work for all; one of the fellow members of my reading group said that he cannot think of a worse book he has ever read over the course of his entire life. My attitude is way less negative, I tasted worse prose this month, but yeah, the book doesn’t stick to the plot, there are seemingly aimless wanderings (at least some alluding to the original Utopia) and expositions with inconsequential dialogues. I actually liked some pieces here and there, but for me the book hasn’t ended up as a completed puzzle, but as a confetti of senses (most of them are additionally light as paper).

[Kevin Price · Rating 4 out of 5]

Took me a while to actually finish it. I think the writing style is beautiful, the thing is deeply strange, and I love the freaky and often very funny tangents and anecdotes. I have never read R.A before and I will definitely be trying him out again. It’s a weird mixture of heady and pulpy that I can always get behind

[Su · Rating 1 out of 5]

I'm obviously missing the point, because all I see is an incomprehensible, pointless morass of disjoint, unfocussed dialogue, unsophisticated social commentary drawn out over hundred of pages of tiresome, pointless and obtuse writing, with obvious red herrings littered throughout.

The dream/not dream sequences, the parallel timelines, the constant non-sequiturs that pile up (making literally about two-thirds of the book), the non-events that didn't happen, (or maybe did, who knows?) that didn't matter and had no impact on the plot, the almost-complete lack of any description, pace, plot, character development or investigation all meant this was an unhappy read for me. I kind of get what Lafferty was doing, but I think 90% of the book could have been culled by an editor and the story told in short format.

I only finished it because I was camping and had, literally, nothing else to read. It receives the singular honour of being a book I am happy to toss in the bin, so that no other poor innocent has to endure what I did. ...this will be only the first or second time I have done so in my entire reading career.

[Robert Wigard · Rating 5 out of 5]

How the heck did this get any one star reviews? But even among Lafferty fans I have heard it said that this book misses the mark. I think the book hits its mark a perfect bullseye. However if you approach this book with no knowledge of Thomas More the man, his most famous work, Utopia, no knowledge of Catholicism nor Christology, this work will be almost impenetrable to you (although you may enjoy the style). Even certain scenes, although funny in themselves, will remain simply nutty if one doesn't have knowledge of Vatican II - some of the jokes in the book are Lafferty's disapproval over Vatican II.

Another important piece of the puzzle of this book is Lafferty's view of world-building. Not the world-building of the author in a book, but of actually writing the world we live in. Which ties in to an important aspect of the book, it is not merely a tale about utopia, but of death and resurrection - not of a man, but of a world.

I highly recommend this - but it is not an easy read. Although, of his works, it is one of the easier ones!

[Bbrown · Rating 3 out of 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.

[Ashutosh Sahu · Rating 2 out of 5]

Unreadable... I sensed that it was well written, loaded with symbolism, etc and so I'll give it a bonus star, but the basic premise/plot was so awkward and so contrived that I lost interest.

As an interesting note, this novel is part of the Library of America Browsing Collection, in the volume entitled "American Science Fiction -- Four Classic Novels 1968-1969"

This particular volume is, by leaps and bounds, the WORST of the LABC American Sci-Fi collections I have ever read. I don't know if the editor/selection committee went full stop stupid or if they deliberately picked obscure and unreadable garbage or if '68-'69 were just bad years.

[Tom · Rating 4 out of 5]

sort of a satire/ riff on Moore's Utopia- starring Sir Thomas himself. My limited reading of Lafferty so far shows him to be a hallucinatory world-builder with a taste for cruelty matched only by Gene Wolfe. ...and speaking of Wolfe, this book shares a certain fractured disconnect with "5th Head"... at least at the end, which is surely one of the weirdest I've read in a long time. Tripped out 60s vibe without seeming dated- will definitely hunt down more.

[Tim · Rating 2 out of 5]

The weirdness was certainly entertaining at points, but I like my stories with at least a little plot.

This book felt more like high-minded surrealism with the merest semblance of a story frame on which to hang. I like surrealism, and even high-mindedness, in reasonable doses. But not unmoored from any characters, circumstances, or consequences the reader could possibly care about.

[Joshua · Rating 3 out of 5]

Best read to paranoid schizophrenics backwards. Pages can be skipped and glanced at as the names which produced are random and made to confuse or was it the snakes. Good book i give it a 3 out of 5