Back Past Master (paperback & LOA eBook Classic)

R. A. Lafferty: Past Master (paperback & LOA eBook Classic)

Introduction by Andrew Ferguson

“A great galloping madman of a novel, drenched in sound and color.”—Harlan Ellison

“Lafferty has the power which sets fires behind your eyeballs. There is warmth, illumination, and a certain joy attendant upon the experience.”—Roger Zelazny

Overview

Overview

News (Re)Introducing R. A. Lafferty, a “Master” for the past, present, and future
November 20, 2019

Time-traveling Renaissance philosopher Sir Thomas More arrives on the Earth colony of Astrobe in the year 2535, where there is trouble in utopia and the survival of the faith is at stake: Can he and his motley followers save this golden world from the Programmed Persons and the soulless perfection they have engineered? Like Philip K. Dick and other visionaries of the 1960s new wave, Lafferty turned the conventions of space-opera science fiction upside-down and inside-out, and today he is hailed as “a genius, an oddball, a madman” (Neil Gaiman) and “our most original writer” (Gene Wolfe).

Now available in an authoritative new edition with an introduction by Lafferty biographer Andrew Ferguson and with never-before-published deleted passages included in the notes, Past Master returns to perplex and delight a new generation of readers.

Born in Neola, Iowa, and raised in Oklahoma, R(aphael) A(loysius) Lafferty (1914-2002) left the University of Tulsa after two years, working as an electrical engineer and occasional newspaperman. He served in the U.S. Army in the Pacific during World War II. Publishing his first story in his mid-forties, he went on to write more than a dozen science fiction novels, as well as Okla Hannali (1972), a historical novel about the Choctaw Nation.

Andrew Ferguson, a leading Lafferty scholar, is currently at work on a biography of this neglected master. He serves as visiting assistant professor of English and Digital Studies at the University of Maryland.

This paperback edition has been printed on acid-free paper.

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ISBN: 978-1-59853-646-1 247 pages

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