Start gifting
Libro.fm for Business
Start a membership, get two free audiobooks
Bookseller Created
Postmarked from the Stars 2023 Reading Challenge
Celebrate indie bookstores with our limited-time sale!
Shop the sale
Send as gift
Add to Wish List
Almost ready!
In order to save audiobooks to your Wish List you must be signed in to your account.
Log in Create account
Shop the sale
In celebration of Independent Bookstore Day, shop our limited-time sale on bestselling audiobooks from April 22nd-28th. Don’t miss out—purchases support your local bookstore!
Shop nowPast Master
Narrator
Matthew Waterson
This audiobook uses AI narration.
We’re taking steps to make sure AI narration is transparent.
Learn more
Length
6 hours 56 minutes
Language
English
Wolf Hall meets The Man in the High Castle in this mind-bending science fiction classic.
Plucked from time, Sir Thomas More arrives on the human colony of Astrobe in the year 2535 AD, 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 as "a genius, an oddball, a madman"; Gene Wolfe calls him "our most original writer." Past Master, long-hailed by insiders and now with an introduction by Andrew Ferguson, deserves to perplex and delight a wider audience.
Born in Neola, Iowa, and raised in Oklahoma, R. A. Lafferty (1914-2002) left the University of Tulsa after two years, working as an electrical engineer and occasional newspaperman. He served in the US 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, a historical novel about the Choctaw Nation.
Matthew Waterson was born in Los Angeles and grew up in Britain. After finishing his BA at Tufts University in Boston, graduate study at LAMDA in London, and eight years in New York, he returned to LA. He has been fortunate enough to narrate books on subjects as varied as the history of South Africa, the current state of FIFA, and mysteries and dramas. He can also be heard on many video games, the Netflix series Trollhunters, and on the radio for companies such as Twinings Tea and Frank's Red Hot Sauce.