Utopia as Dystopia: R.A. Lafferty's "Past Master"

Past Master by R.A. Lafferty
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

A bit like Brave New World and 1984 on steroids.

Astrobe is the new Earth, and a paradise where poverty is unknown, and wealth and comfort are freely available to all. The paradise is marred, however, when increasing numbers of people, like the savage in Brave New World, reject this, and opt for a life of voluntary poverty, deprivation and disease.

A group of leading citizens decide to bring Sir Thomas More, the English lawyer and martyr who wrote the original Utopia from the past, as the eponymous "Past Master" to help them to solve this problem. More arrives, and discovers that the paradise is not all that it seems. Those who doubt the vision become the target of programmed killing beasts and are eliminated from the society, rather as More was eliminated from his own English society back in 1535.

The Astrobian Utopia has a far better surveillance system than 1984 and can detect treasonous thoughts before even the thinker is aware of them. This seems to be significant for the role of so-called "AI" in our current society, and it is worth reading for that reason. R.A. Lafferty raises the kind of questions we should be asking about "AI".

There are more interesting parallels with out society. In South Africa there is a widening gap between rich and poor, though in Astrobe it is large still yet entirely voluntary. Thomas More, after first encountering the contrast, remarks:

I was never an advocate of wealth and fineness. I believe fully in holy poverty. But I say that poverty is like drink: a little of it is stimulating and creative; too much of it is depraved and horrifying.

And More has a better name for what we misleadingly call "AI" -- eloquence machines.

At this one thing for which Astrobe has a hunger now, high oratory, we were the professionals and you are the amateurs. I know that you have analyzed the thing and broken the personal aura down into its elements. It is like chopping up a bird, but can you make a bird? Perhaps you can, since you made the Programmed Persons, but we recognize them as artificial. I know you have built intricate eloquence machines, man, but they ring false. The laughter of the people at them like autumn leaves blowing is evidence of this. I've heard the eloquence machines, and I've heard the people's response. I've heard human and programmed orators who have studied under the eloquence machines. I've heard a lot of things in one week on Astrobe. People are hungry for the real thing...

And then there was the tantalising hint of more: "Evita had been battling principalities and powers for a long time, and it showed on her. And yet she didn't appear more than seventeen."