The novel “Past Master” by Raphael A. Lafferty was published for the first time in 1968. It was a finalist for the Hugo and Nebula awards.

On the planet Astrobe humanity has maybe reached perfection yet something has gone wrong and a dangerous decline started. Some leaders decide that the only person who could save the planet is the “past master” Thomas More, the old philosopher and politician known among the other things for his high moral sense.

An agent is sent back in time to 1535 to pick up Thomas More shortly before his death. More is brought to the future but on Astrobe he soon start realizing that different forces are at work. Some leaders want to use him as a puppet, others have different agendas and there are also programmed assassins who want to kill him.

“Past Master” is the first novel by Raphael A. Lafferty and shows the style of this author. The plot isn’t easy to follow because it contains side stories that tend to appear and disappear quickly with many characters. Lafferty started writing at the time of the New Wave movement and his novels are also focused much more  on characters than on scientific consistency, the best choice to develop his own ideas.

Reading a novel by Raphael A. Lafferty isn’t easy and usually you should reread it to grasp the meaning of elements such as allegories and symbolisms that initially seemed placed at random but actually have their own meaning as a part of the story. Sometimes readers may have the impression of being in a maze where every page can take them to the exit but also towards a dead end.

In “Past Master”, exactly one thousand years after Thomas More’s death, the utopia built on the planet Astrobe  is declining. Who better than the author of the novel “Utopia” to understand what’s the problem and restore that perfect society?

Thomas More has to understand why so many people leave a society where everyone can have access the wealth and luxuries to live in a place where they struggle to survive with the prospect of having a short life.

“Past Master” is in part a quest in which Thomas More travels on the planet Astrobe meeting many people to try to understand why what seems to him a utopia is failing. Together with him there’s a series of colorful characters and others and except for an alien the others ar at least in appearance humans.

The Thomas More depicted in “Past Master” isn’t particularly consistent with the historical character. This fact is even curious when More repeatedly says throughout the novel that has no faith, except sometimes in the morning. To our knowledge, the historic More had great faith, which is one of the reasons why he was made a saint. Raphael A. Lafferty was also a man of faith and this influenced his novels, something that makes them more complex but for someone less interesting.

In “Past Master”, the examination of utopia includes the existence of a faction whose aim is the void as in the destruction of humanity. In Christian theology the void is another way to call evil and this is important to understand the full meaning of the novel.

The utopia built on the planet Astrobe is flawed and one of its problems for Raphael A. Lafferty is the overcoming of religion. The author creates a parallel between the modern world, which he sees more and more secular, and the utopia on Astrobe. In his opinion there’s a collapse of values which in the novel is shown as a growing nihilism that makes people leave an empty utopia for a short and hard life which however has a purpose.

In “Past Master”, Thomas More says that his novel “Utopia” was a satire and is surprised that it was taken seriously. This element has no parallel in More’s real history, however Lafferty’s novel is in some ways a satire of utopia in which the obsession with material progress leads to the abandonment of spirituality.

Raphael A. Lafferty is an author not everybody likes and even among science fiction fans there are clashing opinions on his works. Honestly, as an author he isn’t my cup of tea but I recognize his great imagination and the richness of elements contained in “Past Master”. However, this is a type of novel I can recommend only to people who appreciate the kind of issues explored in it.