PAST MASTER
Introduction and notes copyright © 2019 by Literary Classics of the
United States, Inc., New York, N.Y. All rights reserved.
Past Master copyright © 1968 by R. A. Lafferty.
Reprinted by arrangement with JABberwocky Literary Agency, Inc.
No part of this book may be reproduced in any manner whatsoever
without the permission of the publisher, except in the case of brief
quotations embodied in critical articles and reviews.
Published in the United States by Library of America.
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eISBN 978-1-59853-647-8
Introduction by Andrew Ferguson
At the Twenty-Fifth Hour
My Grave, and I in It
At the Naked Sailor
On Happy Astrobe
The Shape of Things to Come
Sting in the Tail
On Thunder Mountain
Black Cathead
King-Maker
The Deformity of Things to Come
Nine Day King
The Ultimate People
Apocephalon
Note on the Text
Notes
About the Author and Editor
by Andrew Ferguson
In this essay I am tasked with something at once simple and impossible. That task: to introduce Lafferty’s Past Master, a work that does not brook introduction. So I say, go read Past Master! And for those of you who do so immediately, the simple part of my task is done. Only for the rest of you does the impossible remain.
Well then, if Past Master is impossible to introduce, R. A. Lafferty is somewhat less so; let us start there. Lafferty’s was a remarkably unremarkable life. Vacations and military service aside, he spent almost all his days in Tulsa, Oklahoma, working more or less the same job at the same store counter, selling parts to electrical engineers and contractors. He never married, never had kids, never earned a college degree. During the Second World War, he saw action in the South Pacific, but apart from a few oblique references in obscure stories, he left no record of those years. Every day he went to mass, took a walk round his neighborhood, and settled in to read, watch TV, or work a little bit on his foremost hobby, the learning of languages. And then he also wrote some of the wildest, funniest, most outlandish stories ever seen in science fiction, fantasy, or whatever other genre category you’re brave enough to place him in. (Far better writers than I have thrown up their hands at this task: Theodore Sturgeon once imagined that future literary historians would simply label his works “lafferties.”)1
Though Lafferty is best known today—when he is known at all—as an author of science fiction, this was as much historical accident as purposeful career choice. When he picked up writing as a hobby in the late 1950s, ostensibly as a way to fill the hours while “cutting down on drinking and fooling around,”2 he experimented with a variety of genres then popular on newsstands: hard-boiled detective fiction, men’s own adventures, slice-of-life domestic tales. Though he placed a handful with small-circulation literary magazines—starting with “The Wagons” in the New Mexico Quarterly—they sold poorly enough that he shelved most of them to concentrate on the one area in which he had more consistent success: science fiction. Perhaps if that field hadn’t been on the verge of its own stylistic revolution—the “New Wave,” as it was called largely in retrospect, borrowing not just the name but also the attitude, the techniques, and a host of preoccupations from French cinema—then Lafferty would have struck out there as well. But he met science fiction at a time when it was desperate for new voices and new directions, and his style—equal parts carnival barker, barstool raconteur, and apocalyptic prophet—was met with an eager embrace.
By the time he began publishing in SF, he was already in his mid-forties, unusual in a field where many writers cut their teeth in their teens. His tales, by turns philosophical and playful, humorous and horrific, often all within the same piece, sold steadily: he featured in many of the best outlets in science fiction, including Frederik Pohl’s (and later Ejler Jakobsson’s) Galaxy, Robert Silverberg’s New Dimensions, Terry Carr’s Universe, Damon Knight’s Orbit, and of course Harlan Ellison’s Dangerous Visions. At one time or another he counted among his admirers Ursula K. Le Guin, Samuel Delany, Roger Zelazny, Judith Merril, and Gene Wolfe. Lafferty’s stories won him, in addition to an audience, the 1973 Hugo Award for Best Short Story; many of his best were collected in the volumes Nine Hundred Grandmothers, Strange Doings, Does Anybody Else Have Something Further to Add?, and others that may be found in this book’s biographical note (they will, however, be much tougher to find on the shelves of your local bookstore). A rather easier-to-find volume, the thick Best Of compilation published in early 2019 by Gollancz, offers twenty selections handpicked by authors who love them; the complete stories are being gathered for collectors by Centipede Press with an eye toward wider distribution down the line. While far from common commodities, Lafferty’s stories do still circulate, likely more today than over the past few decades. To read any of them is to at least consider the possibility that he did become, as he once asserted, “the best short story writer in the world.”3
The novels are a rather different matter. Although several of them were also nominated for genre awards, they have always appealed to an even more niche audience, a niche within a niche. If the stories break many of the “rules” of writing—and they do, departing sharply at times from conventions of characterization, pacing, and plot—then they do so at a manageable length. The novels tend to sprawl, binding together episodes less through elegant plot mechanics than via other logics that are not always immediately evident. But though the novels ask much more of a reader, the rewards are consequently greater: a series of windows opened on one of the most idiosyncratic imaginations American fiction has ever seen.
The novel you hold in your hand, Past Master, was the first Lafferty saw in print, and also the first science-fiction novel he completed, back at the end of 1964—though by then he had written a handful of novels in other genres, some of which would go on to be published, and others of which still exist only as typewritten manuscripts in his archive, souvenirs of his early dalliances in less welcoming fields. Like many of his works, Past Master has a complicated composition history. It began as a novel the text of which is now lost. He then rewrote it as a short story, one that contains many of the published work’s essential elements: the meeting of the three leading men of Astrobe (Cosmos Kingmaker, Peter Proctor, and Fabian Foreman) to settle on a new president who could right a failing utopia; the decision to fetch the original Utopian author, Thomas More, from a thousand years in the past to be that president; the travel by Hopp-Equation Space, as well as some of the effects of that mode of transit; Cathead, the Barrio, and the desperate residents who choose short lives and bloody deaths over utopian serenity; the pursuit of the Programmed Killers and the threats of their leaders; and the innocuous point of law over which More is once again condemned to die. The story had an intriguing and highly original premise and it was packed full of disparate elements no other writer would think to bring together. But it was a lot to fit into 11,000 words, and the story suffers as a result.
After rejections from four magazines, including his two steadiest customers (Pohl’s Galaxy and Knight’s Orbit), he rewrote the story at novel length and submitted it to Ace Books, the most ambitious of the SF paperback publishing houses. At the time, Ace was run by two editors, Donald A. Wollheim and Terry Carr, who collaborated on the yearly World’s Best Science Fiction anthology. Senior partner Wollheim oversaw the tête-bêche Ace Double
series, which later that year would feature Lafferty’s Space Chantey. Carr, meanwhile, was just beginning the line known as the Ace Specials, which would go on to publish Fourth Mansions and the Nine Hundred Grandmothers collection as well as the likes of Joanna Russ’s Picnic on Paradise, Alexei Panshin’s Rite of Passage, and Ursula K. Le Guin’s The Left Hand of Darkness. To Lafferty’s great and lasting benefit, it was Carr who picked up Past Master, Carr who sent back a three-page letter that must stand as one of the best “good rejections” of all time, and Carr whose suggestions for revision greatly shaped a novel that would help establish Lafferty as one of the preeminent voices in the field.
In particular, Carr impressed upon Lafferty the importance of starting off a novel with a bang—in this case, literally: adding urgency and, where warranted, explosions to the meeting of Kingmaker, Proctor, and Foreman, making the reader feel the fury of the Programmed Persons seeking the latter’s life. At all stages of his career, Lafferty’s characters are prone to having lengthy philosophical conversations as life and death hang in the balance, but it was Carr who convinced him early on of the importance of interspersed action and tempered his occasional didacticism. “You can lose a reader, completely and forever, in fifteen seconds,” Carr warned him (as Lafferty remembered in a later interview). “Never leave him even a fifteen-second interval without a hook to jerk him back.”4
Another of Carr’s editorial insights proved invaluable in the reshaping of the book. While many of Lafferty’s longer works feature some sort of stylistic element that serves to organize the whole—in that same year, for instance, the doggerel verse of Space Chantey ties the novel’s episodes together and links it to oral poetry traditions, and likewise the “Bagarthach verses” in Reefs of Earth are reflected in the ballad-quatrain chapter titles—Past Master lacked such unifying through-lines or motifs. So when Carr gently chides Lafferty for “throw[ing] away the hallucinations suffered by pilots in Hopp-Equation travel,” and notes further,
That is a beautiful idea, but you do so little with it! I think it’s worth several pages of dramatization; show us some of these dreams, throw them at us as they’re striking Paul, so that we’ll get the feeling of them. And, of course, they offer a perfect opportunity for portents of doom and rich symbolisms . . . in emotional terms, not just intellectual ones.5
Lafferty takes the opportunity not only to supply the requisite pages and dreams, but also to recalibrate the concept and, with it, the entire book. What had been a means, in time-tested science-fictional fashion, of papering over the impossibility of faster-than-light travel becomes a discontinuity that permeates the entire narrative: “It breaks here. It isn’t like other space. And persons and things in it aren’t the same persons and things they were before.” Journeys of five years may be compressed into a single month, but the “Law of Conservation of Psychic Totality” dictates that the dreams of the same five years will also be thus compressed, and experienced in deeply weird bursts of ninety seconds apiece, including symbolisms both intellectually and emotionally rich as well as a great many portents of doom. But that isn’t all—the residue of strong experiences lingers still in particular regions of space, so that certain stories or dream-personages become associated with certain regions: “Every poignant thing that ever happened, every comic or horrifying or exalting episode that ever took place, is still drifting somewhere in space. One runs into fragments (and concentrations) of billions of minds there; it is never lost, it is only spread out.” In particular, deep space holds “every tall tale ever told,” such that Lafferty then, with no more intro than “Hey, here’s one,” launches into a story of an entirely separate character, John Sourwine or Sour John, who plays a role in stories such as “The Ugly Sea” and “One at a Time.” As he explains elsewhere, this trick of “having stories connected by a common minor character” is one he borrowed from the French novelist Honoré de Balzac. “Several sets of my people will know each other, even if they may not be on quite the same fictional or reality level.”6
Thus he maps the navigation of Hopp-Equation Space onto the navigation of Laffertian space; the journey becomes a metaphor for reading, well, any of his novels really, but for Past Master in particular. We as readers accompany pilot Paul on his straightforward mission to bring a historical personage into the future, but we also share with him (and later, Thomas) these compressed dreams—and we also experience these dreams as they bubble up again periodically after, often enough that the entire narrative could be considered as an ongoing series of passage dreams, incredibly vivid and suffused with archetypal power. So many of the characters that populate this novel—Rimrock the ansel, the oceanic man; Evita the girl-witch, “who was at the same time Succubus, Eve, Lilith, Judith, Mary, and Valkryie”; even in fragmentary form Ouden itself, the god of nothingness, the god of the Programmed Persons—are encountered first, and perhaps most approachably, in Hopp-Equation dreams. The interview with Ouden is given as “a mere passage dream, one that was somehow left over”—though the effects of it stay with the characters, and likely the reader, for long after that dream fades. And many of the most memorably pungent of the later episodes, from the clockwork “burlesque” mass to the frantic mountaintop escape lit by astonishing lightning to the spontaneous carnival on the eve of Thomas’s execution, follow their own logics not usually accessible to our waking minds. “Why, this is allegory acted out before my very eyes,” says Thomas after watching Paul, Evita, and a green-robed priest bait, catch, and kill the Devil in hydra form, after they hack open the giant skull of the still-writhing, still-deadly creature to get at its succulent brains. “Hysterical battle, hooting challenge, high screaming triumph,” says the impersonal narration, and if the unseen narrator is so caught up that it can’t distance itself from the spectacle, then what hope have we as readers? “Enjoy it, enjoy it,” says the priest as much to the wider audience of the book as to Thomas himself. “Give it accolade. You were a London play-goer, but you never saw so high and roaring a comedy as this.”
If, fifty years on, this high and roaring comedy was all Past Master had for us, it would be sufficient. As its major points of action are five hundred years on either side of the present moment, the novel doesn’t date in the manner of much science fiction; its only falsifiable near-future element is optimistic speculation, amid mid-sixties space race fervor, that off-world colonization would begin sometime around the year 2000. In most ways, it will be as weird and compelling a read in another fifty years’ time as it was when it was first released.
But in another sense, we are justified in expecting more from the book; any science fiction that ceases to speak to the present moment, no matter the year of its publication, is already on the way to becoming the province of genre hounds and antiquarians. Past Master is unavoidably a product and reflection of its times: a response to what Lafferty perceives—likely in the wake of LBJ’s Great Society initiatives—as renewed support in society and popular culture for the idea of Utopia; this he considered as bad as dystopia, if it were possible even to tell the two apart. Lafferty’s Thomas More is wise to this fact, which is why his Utopia can only be construed as searing satire: an image of a world pleasant enough on its surface, but hellish to endure even if (perhaps especially if) one is a member of the privileged class with the full rights of citizenship, rather than one of the numerous slaves or nearby foreigners whose lives the Utopians “improve” by force.
As you might imagine, Lafferty’s own politics were in a class of their own; he referred to himself at times as the lone member of the “Centrist Party” without meaning anything like what we mean by that term today. But the thrust of this book is nonetheless a conservative one (even as he would, on etymological grounds, reject that term “conservative”): the revolutionary energies here are intent on preserving the Church and overthrowing an order that promises material equality, even luxury, at the cost of the soul (“the only one of the four-letter Anglo-Saxon words really out of fashion on Astrobe
,” as Lafferty has Thomas say in the short-story draft). Lafferty’s targets are so diffuse as to include basically everyone; as the clockwork mass shows, the Church itself—still finding its shape after the changes of the Second Vatican Council, which Lafferty deplored—is certainly not exempt. But in the decades since, all those targets have shifted: today’s pre-Vatican II Catholics have an entirely different set of axes to grind, and I suspect Lafferty would not care for the SF to which they are drawn. Similarly, today’s most strident conservatives espouse a gospel of material prosperity for its own sake that is closer to the soulless Astrobe Dream than any of the revolutionary platforms aiming to blunt the edges of our society’s prevailing inequalities. At one point in the book, Kingmaker warns Thomas not to try to set policy because “Politics on Astrobe has become an intricate science.” To Thomas’s rejoinder that politics was intricate in his own time, Kingmaker can only laugh; fifty years on, our sympathies might well now be with him.
Still, if the foregoing decades of cultural shifts mean that Lafferty’s occasional political satire no longer cuts as deep as it once might, there are other elements in Past Master that have come more strongly to the fore—in particular, the ecocritical or even “ecomonstrous” aspects of the work. The latter term, a coinage by Lafferty scholar Daniel Otto Jack Petersen, describes the ways in which monstrosity is mapped onto the environment—not merely as compensation for and irruption of repressed psychological factors, though there’s plenty of that here too (see for instance the nightmare banned from the cities by group therapy that reappears as physical fact and, later, stock animal in the Feral Lands), but also in the wider sense of an encounter with the natural world and the nonhuman more generally “as aesthetically evoked in fiction through such monstrous modes.”7
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