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Past Master
First Edition of Lafferty's First Novel!
Cover Artists: Leo and Diane Dillon
The golden planet of Astrobe, made in the image of Utopia, now faced a crisis which could destroy it forever; and yet, no one could understand it:
In a world where wealth and comfort were free to everyone, why did so many desert the golden cities for the slums of Cathead and the B...more
Cover Artists: Leo and Diane Dillon
The golden planet of Astrobe, made in the image of Utopia, now faced a crisis which could destroy it forever; and yet, no one could understand it:
In a world where wealth and comfort were free to everyone, why did so many desert the golden cities for the slums of Cathead and the B...more
Paperback, 256 pages
Published
December 1st 1968
by Wildside Press
(first published 1968)
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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.
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Brilliant writing, if not brilliant storytelling, which only gets going in the last third of the book. Thomas More is plucked from his life in 16th century England a few weeks before his own death and transported a thousand years into the future to another planet, Astrobe, which has been designed in similitude of his own "Utopia," but to utter disaster: when people get government-mandated perfection, they inexplicably rebel from it, for government-mandated perfection is nothing short o...more
Lafferty's been highly praised by other science fiction writers, but this book is just really crappy, and not in a fun way. The author drops Thomas More into another planet, which is apparently supposed to be some kind of parody of More's Utopia, but there's nothing interesting here thematically [SPOILER: Being a living, suffering creature is better than being a machine. I just saved you a couple of hours.] More to the point (pun inevitable), Lafferty's writing is tedious - he can't be bother...more
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.
Intense writing. Speculative fiction with mythological/magical realist elements. Everything is epic. Thought provoking twists.
What are the costs to having a society more and more controlled by machines?
What are the costs to having a society more and more controlled by machines?
On the distant future world of Golden Astrobe people are abandoning the utopian cities to live in slums. The leaders of Astrobe rescue Thomas More from his execution in the 16th century and bring him forward in time to serve as president. That sounds like a straight forward Science Fiction time-travel plot, but this is a R. A. Lafferty novel so the plot is just a point of departure for a voyage into craziness. Past Master was Lafferty's first novel and his best.
Erik Graff
rated it
·
review of another edition
·
review of another edition
Recommends it for:
R.A. Lafferty & Th. More fans
Recommended to Erik by:
Rick Strong
Shelves:
sf
This is another science fiction novel with a theological theme: Thomas More is brought to cure a dysfunctional utopia in the far future. As it turns out, appearances are deceiving. It isn't a utopia--nor, for that matter, in Lafferty's opinion, was More's Utopia.
One is reminded of a crazed Dostoevsky.
One is reminded of a crazed Dostoevsky.
A sick planet gets Thomas More to come save them. Full of interesting ideas, not quite as compelling as Lafferty's astonishing short story collection 900 Grandmothers.
Golden Astrobe. Utopia. But why is a significant minority abandoning it for life in the wastelands, where only misery awaits, and constant hounding by the mechanical programmed killers.
Anne Francia Chavez
marked it as to-read
·
review of another edition
Shelves:
sci-fi,
nebula-winners-and-nominees
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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.
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