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Past Master

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Format: Mass Market Paperback

Condition: Good

$6.39
Almost Gone, Only 4 Left!

Book Overview

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 Long-hailed by insiders and now with an introduction by Andrew Ferguson as well as unpublished omitted passages included in the notes, Past Master deserves to perplex and delight a wider audience. This description may be from another edition of this product.
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Customer Reviews

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Rated 5 stars
Not to mention Snakes!

I made the mistake of actually trying to read one of Lafferty's more difficult novels, NOT TO MENTION CAMELS. A more logical place to start would be either LAFFERTY IN ORBIT and NINE-HUNDRED GRANDMOTHERS. Both are good places to start begin to fathom what Lafferty is all about. However, both are short-story compilations, and if you don't like short stories and feel you want to experience a novel, then you should try PAST MASTER,...

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Rated 5 stars
Future Tense

My favorite Lafferty novel is Fourth Mansions, but this is a close second. Indelible images and ideas from these two books have forever penetrated my brain. I didn't have any good idea of who Thomas More was when I first read Past Master, other than that he had written Utopia and had perhaps meant it to be ironic. Since then, every bright idea for the future is tagged "utopian" (dark visions like Blade Runner are called dystopias)...

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Rated 4 stars
Lafferty discusses the meaning of existence, with jokes

Past Master takes a rejuvenated Thomas More and places him in a future community which corresponds to his own Utopia. This is a novel full of heavy ideas; perhaps more than it can support; but there is a huge amount here to reward somebody who gives the book the attention it demands.

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