Past Master

Kingmaker imagines a crisis continuing beyond the last possible hour. The title also invites comparison with C. Virgil Gheorghiu’s novel about a person trapped in the classifications and machinery of modern society. The resemblance is especially apt while Astrobe’s mechanical Killers batter down the building.

C. Virgil Gheorghiu, The Twenty-Fifth Hour (1949; English translation, 1950).

Kingmaker’s lion and Proctor’s fox recall Machiavelli’s advice that a prince needs both strength and cunning. Foreman’s hawk adds a third figure to the pair. Their competing claims to control one another make government a contest among these different kinds of power.

Niccolò Machiavelli, The Prince, chap. 18.

Kingmaker’s name recalls Warwick, the magnate who made and unmade English kings. Fabian can suggest Fabius Cunctator, the Roman commander famous for delay, and the society named after him. Foreman’s waiting and carefully timed intervention suit that association, although the novel does not explain his name.

Shakespeare, 3 Henry VI, 3.3; the historical epithets Warwick the Kingmaker and Fabius Cunctator.

The phrase belongs to Macbeth’s vision of a seemingly endless succession of kings. Here the Masters argue over postponing judgment while the Killers provide the thunder outside. A familiar expression becomes a physical event in the scene.

Shakespeare, Macbeth, 4.1.

Foreman’s mechanical man belongs to the clock that threatens Astrobe. The image recalls the Doomsday Clock of Cold War public life. A manufactured president cannot save the world if he is another part of the machinery bringing about its end.

The Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists’ Doomsday Clock, introduced in 1947.

Foreman distinguishes the death of a historical world from its failure. His account develops into the five-hundred-year sequence in Chapter 13. Toynbee offers a useful comparison for the language of civilizational breakdown, especially the later phrase Time of Troubles; Foreman’s particular chronology is his own.

Arnold J. Toynbee, A Study of History; Past Master, chap. 13.

Byerly’s name appears amid doubts about whether a candidate is human and a proposal to manufacture the ideal president. This makes Asimov’s Stephen Byerley, the politician suspected of being a robot, a plausible allusion. The spelling differs, and Lafferty leaves the connection unstated.

Isaac Asimov, “Evidence” (1946) and “The Evitable Conflict” (1950).

The name combines Greek words for time and migration. It makes travel into the past sound like a change of dwelling. The embedded resemblance to anastasis, resurrection, also suits the project of bringing a long-dead man back into public life.

Greek chronos, time; metanastasis, migration; anastasis, rising or resurrection.

Foreman objects to Plato’s claim that justice makes a man happy. He wants someone who can be unhappy over an unjust situation. The discussion tests the difference between designing an ideal commonwealth and suffering with the people who inhabit an actual one.

Plato, Republic 1.354a; Thomas More, Utopia, book 1.

The candidates include rulers, counselors, a jurist, and an architect. Foreman reduces his own list to More and to one decisive act of honesty. This resembles the great-man theory of history, but the choice also makes the supposedly exemplary man dependent on those who recruit him.

Thomas Carlyle, On Heroes, Hero-Worship, and the Heroic in History (1841).

The exchange anticipates More’s execution on Tower Hill in 1535 and his second execution on Astrobe. Roper records More speaking plainly against the statute after his conviction. That episode helps illuminate Foreman’s interest in a final honest act; Lafferty’s More is a fictional reworking of the historical martyr.

William Roper, The Life of Sir Thomas More, account of the trial and execution.

Foreman needs only a very small beginning. The Gospel seed that grows into a great plant gives his political experiment a religious scale. Chapter 13 returns to the image when he explains what he expects More’s death to accomplish.

Matthew 13:31–32; Mark 4:30–32; Luke 13:18–19.

More explicitly connects the pilot with his name-saint, the apostle whose journeys fill Acts. The comparison gives Paul’s mission a spiritual possibility that its organizers do not explain to him. His confession before his own birth adds a comic reversal to that connection.

Acts 13–28.

Paul’s escape depends on bringing the mechanical guards and Killers together like bears and hounds in a baiting. The image anticipates the journey to More’s England, where bear-baiting was a familiar public spectacle. Paul and his allies arrange the encounter and exploit the confusion.

The English bear-baiting tradition.

Paul’s change of handedness recalls the mirror-reversed traveler in Wells’s “The Plattner Story.” Lafferty extends the joke to sex and voice. This bodily reversal also begins the novel’s larger pattern of left-handed actions and unexpected means of rescue.

H. G. Wells, “The Plattner Story” (1896).

The statement that ansels existed in the human unconscious before people discovered them on Astrobe invites comparison with Jung’s archetypes. The novel lets an image encountered in dreams become a creature met in waking life. It does not require that every passage dream be decoded into a single fixed meaning.

C. G. Jung, writings on the collective unconscious and archetypes.

The first man’s name belongs to a boy who repeatedly appears in scenes of battle and death. His insistence that each death belongs to another bearer of the name complicates any simple account of resurrection. The biblical association brings the deaths of individual men into the story of mankind.

Genesis 2–3; 1 Corinthians 15:22, 45.

Sour John is also a storyteller in Lafferty’s “The Ugly Sea.” His theft of an idol’s green eye recalls J. Milton Hayes’s music-hall monologue, but the replacement kidney turns the adventure into a joke about mistaken value. Paul’s objection to the port’s geography is overruled by the teller.

R. A. Lafferty, “The Ugly Sea” (1960); J. Milton Hayes, “The Green Eye of the Little Yellow God” (1911).

The paired stars borrow the names of the opposing headlands at the entrance to the Gulf of Corinth. Their linked rotation resembles a centrifugal governor regulating a machine. When the chain breaks, the dream makes a cosmic catastrophe out of a mechanical failure.

Thucydides, History of the Peloponnesian War 2.86; Strabo, Geography 8.2.3.

More calls his book a bitter joke that later readers have mistaken for a blueprint. This is the fictional More’s account of his intention. It establishes the central predicament: the author must live in, and eventually govern, a world that has taken his imagined commonwealth seriously.

Thomas More, Utopia (1516).

More’s description of Utopia reverses the familiar formula of the best of all possible worlds. The later history of that formula, especially Voltaire’s Pangloss, makes the line another deliberate-looking anachronism in the speech of a man who already knows several futures.

Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz, Theodicy (1710); Voltaire, Candide (1759).

Paul finds More free in his garden before the decision that will lead to his death. Historically, More refused the oath in April 1534 and was imprisoned until his execution in July 1535. The novel combines that situation with a journey about a thousand years back from 2535; its calendar does not resolve into an exact historical date.

Roper, The Life of Sir Thomas More; More’s imprisonment, 1534–35.

Paul recognizes More partly from Holbein’s portrait. The contrast between the short, familiar-looking man and the tall Astrobian pilot makes the historical figure physically unheroic before the narrative tests what kind of hero he can become.

Hans Holbein the Younger, Sir Thomas More (1527), Frick Collection.

The title joins a master from the past with the ordinary meaning of an expert. It also recalls an office formerly held in a guild or lodge. The later language of masters, a station, and an inner circle extends those institutional associations.

The guild and Masonic office of past master; Past Master, chap. 4.

More’s Latin plea for mercy belongs to the language of prayer. The publican’s farewell and lament for the old things likewise draw on scriptural idiom. In this scene the promise of things made new is heard by someone who fears what the religious changes will destroy.

Miserere mihi, Domine, Roman Missal, Introit for the Sixteenth Sunday after Pentecost; 2 Corinthians 5:17; Colossians 2:6; Revelation 21:4–5.

The chapter title comes from More’s visit to the grave that already contains his bones. The historical More prepared a tomb and epitaph at Chelsea, but his body was buried at St. Peter ad Vincula in the Tower. Lafferty’s scene makes the traveler confront the fact of his first death before he goes to meet a second.

More’s Chelsea epitaph (1532); Roper, The Life of Sir Thomas More.

The burial tradition separates More’s body in the Tower from his head at Canterbury. The future priest’s discovery of identifiable bones and a signet ring belongs to Lafferty’s fiction. Its purpose is to make More’s presence and his completed death equally tangible.

Thomas Stapleton, Tres Thomae (1588), account of Margaret Roper and More’s head.

The rare verb enskied recalls Lucio’s description of Isabella in Measure for Measure. Paul has just reminded More of his canonization; the flight then sends the sainted man literally into the sky. More’s enthusiasm for a newly discovered cigar keeps the ascent comic.

Shakespeare, Measure for Measure, 1.4.

Succubus, Eve, Lilith, Judith, Mary, and Valkyrie bring demonic, maternal, holy, and martial figures into one image. Judith’s beheading of Holofernes is especially pointed in a novel about More’s head. The composite anticipates Evita without reducing her to one of its names.

Genesis 2–3; Judith 13; the traditions of Lilith and the Valkyries.

More places the inn in a numbered division of Hell and consoles Paul that three worse divisions remain. The Qur’an supplies seven gates, while later commentaries arrange the inhabitants differently. The joke’s exact assignment of Christians to a fourth division should be read as More’s statement within the scene.

Qur’an 15:44; George Sale, Preliminary Discourse to The Koran (1734).

More’s outrage at starvation and punishing labor recalls Hythloday’s indictment of England in Utopia. Cathead confronts him with a further difficulty: its inhabitants have chosen to leave material abundance. His familiar political explanations cannot yet account for that choice.

Thomas More, Utopia, book 1.

More accepts voluntary religious poverty but recoils from deprivation that degrades its sufferers. The distinction matters throughout the Cathead chapters. His admiration for a modest life does not make him an advocate of the conditions he sees here.

The Franciscan tradition of holy poverty; More’s account of common life in Utopia.

Rimrock’s seal-like body and ability to move on land recall the seal-people of northern folklore. His shifting between no legs, four, and two can also suggest the Sphinx’s riddle about man. More’s decisive test, however, is intellect and spirit rather than an animal’s outward shape.

The selkie tradition; Apollodorus, Library 3.5.8.

Ouden means nothing. The name extends the learned naming games of Utopia, whose island, city, and river carry teasing Greek meanings. Here the word becomes a speaker who describes his nothingness as active, hungry, and destructive.

Greek ouden, nothing; More, Utopia.

More’s denial that Ouden has being can be read alongside Augustine and Aquinas on evil as a privation of good. Ouden answers that his nothingness is a vortex. The exchange tests what that destructive claim means; it does not by itself settle the novel’s metaphysics in Ouden’s favor.

Augustine, Confessions 7.12; Aquinas, Summa theologiae I, q. 48.

Ouden remembers a single kindling that overcame him and claims that he is extinguishing it. John’s light shining in darkness supplies a strong biblical comparison. Paul-Thomas answers with the possibility of rekindling and with a resource that Ouden does not know.

John 1:4–5.

The golden inhabitants appear to fulfill the promise associated with Huey Long’s slogan. Their magnificence makes More eager to join them. Later encounters ask whether this universal royalty has left its beneficiaries capable of thought, refusal, or spiritual life.

Huey P. Long, Every Man a King (1933) and the Share Our Wealth slogan.

More praises Astrobe through a mixture of Gospel language, classical myth, and Irish otherworld geography. The pearl of great price stands beside Iris, Great Brasil, and the Hesperides. This abundance of names reveals how much hope he brings to what he is seeing.

Matthew 13:45–46; the myths of Iris and the Hesperides; the Irish Hy-Brasil tradition.

Evita’s answer comes from Christ’s denunciation of tombs beautiful outside and full of death within. She supplies the diagnosis while More is still admiring the surface. The contrast governs both this chapter and the later discovery of Astrobe’s deformed reverse.

Matthew 23:27.

A fawney man practices a ring swindle, passing a worthless ring off as valuable. More’s compliment to Rimrock therefore associates enchantment with deceptive gold. It belongs beside the repeated question of what Golden Astrobe’s apparent wealth is worth.

The thieves’ cant terms fawney and fawney rig.

More explicitly recalls older dreams of artificial servants. Greek examples include Hephaestus’s golden attendants and the bronze Talos; the Jewish tradition supplies the golem. Pottscamp’s dream of the toy that consumes its maker gives that admiration a frightening sequel.

Homer, Iliad 18.417–20; Apollonius Rhodius, Argonautica 4; the golem tradition.

The former presidents’ extravagant names sound to More like gladiators or American wrestlers. His sponsors likewise plan to present a recognizable persona to the public. The joke makes political office resemble a staged performance whose billing matters more than its holder’s freedom to act.

The novel’s explicit comparison with gladiators and masked professional wrestlers.

Proctor’s description of Kingmaker and Foreman’s refusal to wash his hands recall Pilate. The gesture concerns responsibility for a death already being planned. Foreman’s willingness to own his part does not remove the moral question of what he is doing to his friend.

Matthew 27:24.

Proctor compares the man ready to die with a guest who has eaten enough. Lucretius and Horace use the satisfied guest as an image of leaving life without complaint. Astrobe turns that consolation into an argument for readily available termination.

Lucretius, On the Nature of Things 3.938; Horace, Satires 1.1.117–19.

Utopia allows priests and magistrates to urge a voluntary death upon someone suffering from incurable, painful illness. Astrobe makes termination a common response to weariness. The altered conditions are essential to the comparison: Lafferty’s institution is much broader than the practice described by More.

Thomas More, Utopia, book 2, “Of Their Slaves, and of Their Marriages.”

Foreman spoils the consoling proverb about darkness before dawn by inserting a false dawn. He later claims responsibility for making a particular sun rise, borrowing language ordinarily applied to God. His confidence invites scrutiny as the cost of his promised renewal becomes clear.

Matthew 5:45; the proverb about darkness before dawn.

Foreman’s counting and weeping make the shells a strong counterpart to Judas’s thirty pieces of silver. The scene anticipates the betrayal named openly in Chapter 13. The warning about Mother Carey’s chicken adds the storm petrel’s maritime associations to the threatened victim.

Matthew 26:15; 27:3–5; the sailors’ name Mother Carey’s chicken.

The school assignments in Pottscamp’s dream contain names from Lafferty’s other fiction. Treating those peoples and languages as ordinary school subjects gives the invented worlds a shared background while the toy’s effortless learning exposes the child’s dependence on it.

Lafferty, “Primary Education of the Camiroi” (1966), “Polity and Custom of the Camiroi” (1967), and The Reefs of Earth (1968).

The title names Wells’s future history, in which a world administration reorganizes civilization and suppresses religion. Astrobe’s managed happiness and its treatment of worship as an antiquity give the allusion particular force. Chapter 10 answers this title with The Deformity of Things to Come.

H. G. Wells, The Shape of Things to Come (1933), especially book 4.

Kingmaker’s praise of Astrobe’s uniformity recalls Utopia’s closely similar towns. More’s wish to travel puts the author in opposition to the commonwealth associated with his name. He insists on seeing what an account of the whole planet leaves out.

Thomas More, Utopia, book 2, “Of Their Towns, Particularly of Amaurot.”

The precis machine describes common access to goods, freedom from poverty, and a simplified legal order. These recall institutions in Utopia, although the golden world gives them a different purpose. More’s recognition is also a crisis of authorship: his joke has become a place people must inhabit.

Thomas More, Utopia, book 2.

Astrobe’s account of humanity converging into a single organism invites comparison with Teilhard de Chardin’s Omega Point. The novel’s Omega becomes Ouden and the Big O, a destination described as nothingness. This is a satirical resemblance; Teilhard’s own account gives convergence a transcendent and Christian end.

Pierre Teilhard de Chardin, The Phenomenon of Man (1955; English translation, 1959).

The Dream’s religious vocabulary makes the abolition of transcendence sound like an act of worship. It can be read against the death-of-God debates contemporary with the novel. The phrase also occurs in Richard Rubenstein’s theology, but the shared wording alone does not establish a direct source.

Richard L. Rubenstein, After Auschwitz (1966); Thomas J. J. Altizer, The Gospel of Christian Atheism (1966).

Utopia regulates travel with official permission; Astrobe’s instantaneous transport serves the civilized regions. The comparison helps explain why a walk matters here. Leaving the convenient network lets More encounter places and people that the official description does not adequately explain.

Thomas More, Utopia, book 2, “Of the Travelling of the Utopians.”

More’s delight in either end of a hunt contrasts with the Utopians’ contempt for hunting. The contrast separates the character’s appetites from the rules of the society in his book. His attraction to the wild draws him further from Astrobe’s claim that civilized life is complete.

Thomas More, Utopia, book 2, discussion of pleasure and hunting.

More imagines his joke as a tree unexpectedly bearing fruit, then judges a failing religious institution by the image of a barren tree. The Gospel language makes him apply to the Church a test that also bears on his own political invention.

Matthew 7:17–20; Luke 13:6–9.

The museum rite combines guitar, drugs, theatrical dress, and commercial sponsorship. Its details turn a religious service into a degraded exhibit. The scene can be read in relation to the liturgical and popular culture of the 1960s, but its grotesque composite is Lafferty’s fictional projection.

The novel’s account of the museumized Mass; mid-twentieth-century liturgical and popular culture.

More himself invokes Dante when he hears the instruments. Relevant passages include Barbariccia’s obscene trumpet, Master Adam’s lute-shaped body and drum-like belly, and Nimrod’s horn. The reference is comic and composite: Dante does not describe an orchestra of guitars in the lowest circle.

Dante, Inferno 21.139; 30.49–54, 103; 31.12–18.

Pottscamp’s assurance about what will be given in the hour recalls Christ’s promise of words to disciples brought before hostile authorities. The change from speaking to seeing suits More’s journey. The question is whether he can recognize what the encounters disclose.

Matthew 10:19–20.

The ansels’ ancestors climbed through what they had taken for the sky and found land above the sea. Plato imagines a sea-dweller making a similar discovery in the Phaedo. The parallel makes Rimrock’s account a challenge to the belief that one’s familiar world exhausts reality.

Plato, Phaedo 109c–110a.

More calls Evita Lilith rather than Eve; she claims both names. The exchange brings the first mother and the rebellious first wife of later Jewish legend into the same woman. It continues the composite female figure of More’s passage dream.

Genesis 2–3; Alphabet of Ben Sira, the Lilith story.

Slider questions whether Christ’s commission and promise apply beyond Earth. His argument depends on taking nations and world in a narrowly terrestrial sense. Chapter 8 gives the Metropolitan’s direct answer, making this a dispute within the novel rather than an established limit on the Promise.

Matthew 28:19–20; Past Master, chap. 8.

The closing image of a fair face and a dangerous tail recalls Dante’s Geryon, the embodiment of fraud. It also belongs to the proverbial poison reserved for the tail or end. Astrobe’s pleasing appearance has concealed what More discovers behind it.

Dante, Inferno 17.1–27; the proverb in cauda venenum.

Kastroides recalls the extinct giant beaver Castoroides, and the direwolves likewise borrow a prehistoric name. Paul warns that the resemblance lies in the names. The earthly vocabulary helps the travelers begin to describe creatures whose behavior and proportions remain unfamiliar.

The names Castoroides and dire wolf; the novel’s explanation of borrowed animal names.

The enormous predatory bird recalls the roc of travel legend. Its habit of displaying human bodies on thorns also resembles a shrike’s impaled prey, enlarged to a human scale. More’s comparison with men hanging dead wolves reverses the ordinary relation between hunter and hunted.

The roc in the Sindbad voyages and Marco Polo; the natural history of shrikes.

More names Sextus Empiricus in support of a being suited to every environment. Father Oddopter then appears as an answer to the speculation. Sextus reports arguments about living beings in different cosmic regions; the scene turns that philosophical material into a joke about the observers themselves.

Sextus Empiricus, Against the Physicists, book 1; compare Cicero, On the Nature of the Gods 2.42.

Oddopter’s grand title for a familiar story mocks the travelers’ innocence. Like the abandoned children of the ballad, they do not fully understand the danger surrounding them. His greeting is protective advice delivered as teasing.

The ballad “The Babes in the Wood” and its later theatrical versions.

The apostle asks for evidence before believing; More sees the Devil-kill and then tries to exclude what he has seen from his account of reality. Oddopter challenges the rule by which More has decided in advance that only one order of things can exist.

John 20:24–29.

The bait and hook invite comparison with the Christian interpretation of Leviathan: the Devil takes what he desires and is caught through it. Gregory the Great reads the hook as Christ’s humanity concealing divinity. Evita’s bait and Oddopter’s fishing give that theological image a violent comic form.

Job 41:1, or 40:20 in the Douay-Rheims numbering; Gregory the Great, Moralia in Job, book 33.

The name recalls the monster whose severed heads grow again in Heracles’ labor. Oddopter makes the repeated killing a daily necessity. He also says the Devil can take other forms, so the significance belongs to this encounter and its recurrence, rather than to every animal called a hydra.

The Lernaean Hydra; Apollodorus, Library 2.5.2.

Reading entrails belongs to the ancient haruspex; interpreting birds belongs to the augur. Copperhead draws on this vocabulary and practice here and on the mountain. More’s uneasiness recalls the biblical prohibition on divination and consultation with the dead.

Deuteronomy 18:10–11; the Roman traditions of haruspicy and augury.

Oddopter vows never to sleep twice in the same place. This can be set beside both Christ’s homelessness and Benedict’s criticism of wandering monks. Lafferty gives a positive discipline to a form of life that monastic rules often treated with suspicion.

Luke 9:58; Rule of St. Benedict, chap. 1.

The name recalls the German imperial city associated with the Salian dynasty. Lafferty transfers imperial ceremony to a precarious settlement with an oral history preserved through the skulls of its rulers. More treats its authority seriously even when the surrounding circumstances are comic.

The imperial palace and Salian history of Goslar.

The newly chosen ruler travels without provisions, money, or spare clothing. The instructions echo the sending of the apostles. That vulnerable arrival also makes the emperor’s office a small-scale counterpart to More’s dangerous appointment.

Luke 9:3; Matthew 10:9–10.

More’s henry and proposed charles treat the familiar john as though a privy ought to bear the reigning monarch’s name. The joke brings Henry VIII into the petty frustrations of the visit. More’s caution about crossing royalty recalls how much a confrontation with a king can cost.

Roper, The Life of Sir Thomas More, Norfolk’s warning about striving with princes and More’s advice to Cromwell.

Evita calls herself Faustina when she describes the longevity experiment as a bargain with the Devil. The Evil Scientist gives the Faust story a laboratory setting. Her return home after seeking Hell makes the discovery of Golden Astrobe’s nature the bitter result of the bargain.

The Faust tradition, especially the rejuvenation in Goethe’s Faust, part 1.

Evita’s journey around the world to recognize her own home can be compared with Chesterton’s returning yachtsman and Eliot’s end of exploration. Her discovery reverses their welcome: the home she finally recognizes is Hell.

G. K. Chesterton, Orthodoxy, chap. 1; T. S. Eliot, “Little Gidding,” section 5.

Oddopter’s over-belief has bodily consequences: it leaves marks and makes the feral regions powerful. William James’s term offers a useful comparison for belief that reaches beyond what evidence establishes. Lafferty gives that surplus of belief a creaturely presence.

William James, The Varieties of Religious Experience (1902), concluding discussion of over-beliefs.

Slider proposes electrically produced pleasure as a superior alternative to drinking. The contrast sets the ease of a manufactured sensation beside a physical, communal activity he cannot manage. It belongs to the novel’s larger dispute over whether discomfort can be removed without losing forms of life.

The chapter’s comparison of green lightning with electrical stimulation.

Trumpets, cloud, thunder, and lightning recall Sinai. The changed, shining survivors also invite the Gospel comparison that the narrator names as transfiguration. What they encounter includes the faces of Ouden, so the resemblance does not make their vision a simple repetition of a biblical revelation.

Exodus 19:16–19; 34:29–30; Matthew 17:1–9.

More’s criticism of the golden inhabitants borrows the upward movement of the psalm. He immediately imagines abandoning such impulses once he governs. His own attraction to the mountain is therefore already in conflict with the settled life he wants to administer.

Psalm 121:1, numbered 120:1 in the Douay-Rheims and Vulgate.

Scrivener gathers rulers expected to return when their people need them. The recurring legend gives More’s recruitment a wider pattern. Historical deaths, folk traditions, and invented futures mingle in the list; the list should not be treated as a set of accurate biographies.

The return-of-the-king traditions of Arthur and Frederick Barbarossa.

The diverted river and secret burial come from the account of Alaric’s death in Jordanes. The promise that he will rise and lead again belongs to the sleeping-king pattern added here. The distinction shows how historical material becomes a usable legend.

Jordanes, Getica 30.158.

Kennedy’s open automobile enters the same company as ancient and medieval kings. Roadstorm extends the catalogue into Lafferty’s own fiction and recalls Roadstrum of Space Chantey. The sequence treats very recent history and invented history as material from which legends of return are made.

John F. Kennedy’s assassination in 1963; Lafferty, Space Chantey (1968).

Oddopter says the marked ram belongs to Scripture. Abraham’s substitute sacrifice and Daniel’s two-horned ram are possible points of comparison. The scene does not choose between them or explain the double sign completely; More’s repeated appointment to death gives the image its immediate force.

Genesis 22:13; Daniel 8:3.

Paul’s words over Oddopter identify the dead man with the priesthood of Melchisedech. The verse belongs to the biblical and liturgical language of enduring priesthood. It follows a morning Mass offered for members of the party who would die that day.

Psalm 110:4, numbered 109:4 in the Douay-Rheims and Vulgate; Hebrews 5:6; 7:17.

The single point of light seems to occupy several places at once. Zeno’s arrow offers a plausible comparison for the old paradox named in the passage. Lafferty makes the apparent solution an overwhelming event through which the travelers must find a still narrower instant of escape.

Aristotle, Physics 6.9, 239b, on Zeno’s arrow.

The narrator explicitly connects astonishment with being thunderstruck. The event revives the history inside the word. The same habit of making a familiar phrase happen bodily governs many of the novel’s jokes and horrors.

The history of astonish through Old French estoner and the Latin vocabulary of thunder and stupefaction.

The possibility of light outside a false sky recalls the empyrean of medieval cosmology and Dante. The narrator poses it as a question. The view into a pit then makes the distinction between apparent height and genuine transcendence more difficult.

Aquinas, Summa theologiae I, q. 66, a. 3; Dante, Paradiso 30.

Scrivener’s choice and Slider’s reversal make personhood a matter of allegiance and action as well as origin. Scrivener dies resisting the Killers. The scene prepares the question, asked later by the Programmed Persons themselves, of whether creatures made from other materials can receive spiritual life.

Past Master, chaps. 7, 10, and 13.

Utopia limits the working day to six hours. Cathead’s twenty-hour labor makes the comparison brutal, especially because efficient machines already exist elsewhere. More must confront people who prefer this destructive work to the comfortable life offered by the golden cities.

Thomas More, Utopia, book 2, “Of Their Trades, and Manner of Life.”

Utopia includes outsiders who voluntarily enter service because its conditions are better than those at home. Cathead reverses the movement: people choose bondage and deprivation to escape the perfected society. The parallel places freedom of choice inside conditions that More finds intolerable.

Thomas More, Utopia, book 2, “Of Their Slaves, and of Their Marriages.”

The Underground Man challenges a rationally perfected society by defending the capacity to choose what is painful or disadvantageous. Cathead raises a related question: whether suffering can become proof that one is alive and capable of refusal. The comparison explains the argument without making Cathead’s misery desirable in itself.

Fyodor Dostoevsky, Notes from Underground, part 1, sections 7–9.

Barricades and gunfire give the migration a recognizable modern political setting. The Berlin Wall offers a historical comparison, but Lafferty reverses the expected economic destination: these refugees run from abundance into poverty. Their behavior exposes something that Astrobe’s measures of well-being cannot register.

The border barriers and shootings of the Cold War; the novel’s account of the exodus into Cathead.

The flag uses the traditional maritime signal of contagion. Lunger is an older American word for a consumptive. Both terms make bodily disease a constant feature of the city’s life; the weekly plague and lethal work are concrete conditions, not merely symbols of spiritual suffering.

The quarantine flag tradition; the American slang term lunger.

The district’s name recalls the Hospital of St. Mary of Bethlehem, whose name became Bedlam. Lafferty enlarges a madhouse into a large part of a city. The movement from institution to district makes the question of madness political as well as medical.

Bethlem Hospital, London; the development of the word bedlam.

More’s Dutchman is most naturally read as Holbein, his portraitist and the designer of the Dance of Death woodcuts. Older English could use Dutch broadly for German. The remark places the skeletal Metropolitan among images in which death confronts people of every social rank.

Hans Holbein the Younger, Dance of Death, published 1538; Sir Thomas More, 1527.

The ring associates the Metropolitan with Saint Peter and papal office. The novel also calls him the Pope of Astrobe. These signs give the nearly abandoned church an authority that its physical poverty and small congregation do not measure.

The papal Ring of the Fisherman; the chapter’s description of the Metropolitan.

The Metropolitan recites the prayer honoring John Fisher and Thomas More as martyrs. More recognizes Fisher and hears himself placed within a liturgical commemoration that followed his earthly life. The prayer confronts his uncertainty with the Church’s judgment about the man he became.

The collect for Saints John Fisher and Thomas More in the English proper of the Roman Missal after their canonization in 1935.

The Metropolitan applies Christ’s promise to this world and answers Slider’s attempt to exclude it. His account of Christ walking on Astrobe gives the answer a local history. The scene asks whether a new planet can be outside the reach of an apparently earthly promise.

Matthew 16:18; 28:20; Past Master, chap. 5.

The physically blind Metropolitan calls More blind because he fails to recognize what is before him. John’s account of the man born blind supplies the comparison: sight and spiritual understanding can move in opposite directions. More’s confidence in his diagnosis of Cathead is the object of the rebuke.

John 9:39–41.

The blessing and More’s answering line come from the psalm used in the prayers at the foot of the altar. His ready response shows religious memory operating beneath his professed uncertainty. The words ask for renewed life at the very moment he is confronting a church thought to be dying.

Psalm 85, numbered 84 in the Vulgate and Douay-Rheims; the Roman Mass, Deus, tu conversus vivificabis nos.

The promise that the planet itself will testify recalls the stones that cry out in Luke. The woman who touches More likewise recalls a Gospel encounter, although here she gives him a prophecy rather than receives a cure. Both episodes place knowledge outside the institutions and explanations he trusts.

Luke 19:40; Mark 5:25–34.

The title recalls the historical Kingmaker, Warwick, and brings the name Cosmos Kingmaker into the account of how a ruler is manufactured. Acclamation, publicity, party arrangements, and effective phrasing do the work once associated with a vote. The final ease of the process is part of its menace.

Richard Neville, Earl of Warwick; Shakespeare, 3 Henry VI, 3.3.

More compares Evita with his youngest daughter. Historically that daughter was Cecily, educated with her sisters in More’s household. His paternal comparison sits uneasily with Evita’s age, experience, and refusal to be treated as a child.

More’s family: Cecily More Heron; Roper, The Life of Sir Thomas More.

The Crank combines doubting Thomas with Judas. More corrects him, but the confusion reveals what Astrobe admires: it has turned the supposed betrayer of Christ into a hero. The error belongs to the characters’ damaged religious memory and should not be repeated as a description of either apostle.

John 20:24–29; the Gospel accounts of Judas’s betrayal.

The account starts with an egalitarian formula, passes through unequal voting weights, and ends by abolishing voting. Mill’s plural voting and Shute’s fictional multiple-vote scheme offer comparisons for the middle stage. The succession makes the removal of political choice appear to be one more modernization.

John Stuart Mill, Considerations on Representative Government, chap. 8; Nevil Shute, In the Wet (1953).

Demos names the people as a political body; ochlos names a crowd or mob. The Esthetics, Anesthetics, and Local Anesthetics turn disputes about taste and sensation into party labels. The catalogue mixes learned political names with jokes about feeling and its suppression.

Greek demos, people; ochlos, crowd; aisthesis, perception or sensation.

The Crank’s defense of choosing one’s occupation and unhappiness recalls John the Savage’s demand in Brave New World. More answers from the side of the administered society. The encounter therefore exposes the distance between the candidate’s public confidence and the liberty a dissenter wants.

Aldous Huxley, Brave New World, chap. 17.

More turns the Gospel image of mountain-moving faith into a political joke. The promise to move the world ahead follows his own unsettling mountain experience. Biblical words now help him sell the program whose deeper claims he has begun to forget.

Matthew 17:20; 1 Corinthians 13:2.

The speech approaches the language of Psalm 23 and then corrects itself into a more acceptable statement of progress. The interrupted phrase briefly introduces rest under a shepherd into a speech about collective advancement. It also raises the question of who is supplying More’s words.

Psalm 23:2, numbered 22:2 in the Vulgate and Douay-Rheims.

More’s happy new phrase belongs to Saint Paul. In its biblical setting it concerns winning others for the gospel; in the campaign it promises universal political appeal. The narrator’s doubt about who speaks through More turns the apparent improvisation into evidence of manipulation.

1 Corinthians 9:22.

The speech replaces a good calculated for many persons with the good of a merged singularity. Bentham’s familiar formula supplies the point of departure. The crucial change is the disappearance of distinct persons from the account of what their common good should be.

Jeremy Bentham, A Fragment on Government (1776), preface; the utilitarian formula of the greatest happiness of the greatest number.

Rooms exposed to spectators invite comparison with the glass houses of We and the telescreens of Nineteen Eighty-Four. Astrobe also extends access into thought. The Open Mind Act’s subtitle turns an expression of tolerance into a claim to enter another person’s mind.

Yevgeny Zamyatin, We (1924); George Orwell, Nineteen Eighty-Four (1949).

The title answers Chapter 5 and Wells’s The Shape of Things to Come. More now sees the claim to perfected humanity from its reverse side. The Programmed Persons explain what their completion of human history would remove.

H. G. Wells, The Shape of Things to Come (1933); Past Master, chap. 5.

The door appears where there should be none and leaves no opening afterward. Wells’s disappearing door offers a close comparison, particularly under this chapter title. Lafferty changes the destination from an alluring garden to the Nine’s room of coercion and disclosure.

H. G. Wells, “The Door in the Wall” (1906).

More invokes the seating order of a great household when he takes Ouden’s reserved place. His refusal of a lower seat becomes a refusal to acknowledge Nothing as his superior. A social expression gives his resistance a physical and ceremonial form.

The traditional distinction between seating above and below the salt.

The Nine present themselves as mankind seen from behind. Cervantes compares translation with the reverse of a tapestry, where the figures remain visible through knots and threads. The analogy helps describe a recognizable human pattern made rough or deformed, while the Nine insist that their reverse is the true side.

Miguel de Cervantes, Don Quixote, part 2, chap. 62.

The Rechabites in Jeremiah obey an ancestral command to abstain from wine and settled possessions. Northprophet names rechabitism as his trio’s specialty without defining the process. In this conversation its association with abstinence can be set beside the Programmed Persons’ desire to eliminate their appetite for life.

Jeremiah 35.

Pottscamp explicitly describes the bodies as houses entered by devils. His language comes from Christ’s account of an expelled spirit returning to an empty, ordered house with worse companions. The account distinguishes the constructed bodies from the beings that occupy them.

Matthew 12:43–45; Luke 11:24–26.

Butler’s evolving machines and Čapek’s artificial workers provide earlier versions of humanity being superseded by its creations. Lafferty joins that prospect to the language of possession. The question therefore concerns both the material construction of the Programmed Persons and what has come to live in them.

Samuel Butler, Erewhon, “The Book of the Machines”; Karel Čapek, R.U.R. (1920).

The warning about taking the lid off a box invites the comparison with Pandora. Jack-in-the-box language makes the released powers sound like unruly toys. The image grows until the box is Astrobe itself, and the dispute turns to whether hope has survived inside it.

Hesiod, Works and Days 90–105; the later Pandora’s-box tradition.

More’s preference for existence even in Hell can be compared with Milton’s Satan, while his preference for the lunger’s life over kingship recalls Achilles in the underworld. The differences matter: More is resisting annihilation, and his chosen comparison is the life of an actual suffering person.

Milton, Paradise Lost 1.263; Homer, Odyssey 11.489–91.

Swampers asks whether the spirit that came to water and clay could come to the materials of a Programmed Person. Genesis supplies the language of creation and animated earth. The question leaves open a possibility that the Nine’s general account of themselves tries to close.

Genesis 1:2; 2:7.

Northprophet and Pottscamp echo the jailer’s question to Paul and Silas. More dismisses their appeal as mockery. Pottscamp’s later penitence makes it difficult to assume that this moment has only one tone or purpose.

Acts 16:30; Past Master, chap. 13.

Revelation uses the phrase for the final condition of the condemned. More also faces the literal prospect of being beheaded twice. The overlap places his personal ordeal inside the novel’s larger questions about resurrection, extinction, and the death of a world.

Revelation 20:6, 14; 21:8.

More’s soliloquy turns three achievements of his earlier life into traps: he must inhabit his fiction, find its legality, and administer it. His political competence has helped make his captivity possible. The question of what he will refuse now becomes more urgent than what he can manage.

More’s authorship of Utopia and his legal and governmental career; the chapter’s closing soliloquy.

The title invites comparison with Lady Jane Grey, the Nine Days’ Queen, who was deposed and later executed. More also recalls the young Salic ruler as a One Day Emperor. The comparison gives his presidency the shape of a brief elevation already overshadowed by the block.

Lady Jane Grey’s reign in July 1553; the proverb of a nine days’ wonder.

More explicitly thinks of Plato’s ideal ruler. Utopia had already debated whether a philosopher could serve usefully in a prince’s council. Astrobe gives More the supreme office, but the bills and their hidden provisions reveal how little final authority that office guarantees.

Plato, Republic 5.473c–d; Thomas More, Utopia, book 1.

The year 535 A.S. corresponds to 2535 by the old count. The omitted Free Years complicate the colony’s elapsed time. The dates place More roughly a thousand years beyond his earthly death while exposing another way the official account orders and compresses history.

The chapter’s account of anno scientiae and the Free Year.

The words spoken through More recall Anaximander’s account of the sun as an opening through which fire is seen. In Astrobe’s argument the opening becomes an emblem of emptiness. The comparison is useful, but no philosopher is named in the scene.

Ancient accounts of Anaximander’s cosmology, including Hippolytus, Refutation of All Heresies 1.6.

More’s name for the measure recalls the modern slogan Ban the Bomb. The resemblance gives the abolition of transcendence the familiar language of a public campaign. The provision would prohibit considering things beyond the Dream, including the possibility that the Dream is incomplete.

The Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament slogan; the chapter’s description of the bill.

The legal heading reduces surviving religious communities to leftovers. Isaiah and Romans give remnant a different significance: a people preserved through apparent defeat. The small numbers therefore do not settle the value or future of the communities the bill would abolish.

Isaiah 10:20–22; Romans 11:5.

Kingmaker tells of creatures who leave perfection in search of something beyond and fall into the void. The account reverses the value of escape: faith in a beyond becomes the original error. More’s suspicion that the labels have been switched opens the possibility that Golden Astrobe is itself the emptiness.

Compare Genesis 3 and Revelation 12:7–9; Kingmaker’s allegory in this chapter.

More writes the Latin formula across the bill. His prohibition defends the freedom to consider what the measure would prohibit. The constitutional penalty follows three refusals of the proposal in its successive forms, so his third veto makes the act of reading and rejecting legislation a decision about his life.

Latin veto, I forbid; the chapter’s law concerning repeated vetoes.

The novel explicitly compares this refusal with the act that led to More’s first death. Historically he refused the oath in 1534 and was later convicted of treason. Lafferty changes the issue and the character’s stated certainty, while retaining the demand for assent and the fatal cost of withholding it.

Roper, The Life of Sir Thomas More, accounts of the oath and trial.

More asks who pushed him into the corner before. Roper records his judgment that Henry’s friendship would not save his head if the king could gain by taking it. Foreman’s friendship and manipulation repeat that disturbing proximity between affection and political use.

Roper, The Life of Sir Thomas More, More’s conversation with Roper after Henry’s visit to Chelsea.

The opening recalls the Gospel saying that eagles gather where the body is. Its setting in discourse about the last things fits a night described as the world’s last. The companions gather around a man whose death is expected, while their name also carries the force of a chosen company.

Matthew 24:28; Luke 17:37; compare Job 39:30.

The account of Evita’s long battle draws directly on Paul’s description of spiritual warfare. Her apparent youth and accumulated experience give that struggle an unusual embodiment. Her enemies exercise political control as well as the spiritual hostility named by the phrase.

Ephesians 6:12.

Adam retells the voyage of Saint Brendan as an early visit to Astrobe. His nineteen monks and ninety-nine days differ from the medieval Navigatio, with its smaller chosen company and seven-year voyage. Moving the Land of Promise into space gives Astrobe a sacred past earlier than its official settlement.

Navigatio Sancti Brendani; Past Master’s name for the saint is Brandon.

The companions hold the wake while More is alive. Stories, drink, and argument become forms of attendance on a death they hope to prevent. Their conversation defeats the machines’ attempt to reduce it to useful instructions or a discoverable plan.

The wake tradition; the chapter’s account of the machines listening to the stories.

Masks, mock factions, irreverence, and mingled joy and violence recall the Feast of Fools and carnival traditions. Cosmopolis begins behaving unpredictably on the night before its ceremonial execution. Its recovery of feeling is dangerous as well as hopeful.

The medieval Feast of Fools; Carnival, Halloween, and St. John’s Eve customs.

The confections invite comparison with the sugar skulls of the Mexican Day of the Dead. Here they honor an execution that has not yet happened. Death becomes something sold, eaten, mocked, and anticipated throughout the city.

The calavera tradition of the Day of the Dead.

The carnival faction turns an act of penance into a public costume and joke. Chapter 13 gives the gesture a different weight when Pottscamp pours ashes over his head. The repetition asks whether an apparently empty imitation can become an actual act of remorse.

Matthew 11:21; Job 2:12; 42:6.

The new Metropolitan invokes the Church’s power to place a territory under religious censure pending repentance. Applying it to a planet gives an old ecclesiastical action an enormous scale. His appearance also answers the earlier assumption that the dying Metropolitan would have no successor.

The historical practice of a general interdict, notably the interdict on England, 1208–14.

The narrator’s phrase for remorse recalls Lear’s pain at an ungrateful child. Cosmopolis has raised More to power and is preparing to kill him. The borrowed image makes its new emotion resemble a child’s recognition of injury done to a parent.

Shakespeare, King Lear, 1.4.

The old bells recover names and a shared purpose as they toll for More. The July Bell can suggest his execution on 6 July 1535, although the novel does not explain the name. Sound carries a religious memory that the museumized churches seemed to have lost.

The Christian passing-bell and funeral-toll traditions; More’s death in July 1535.

The chapter title joins the ideas of removal and head in a Greek-looking word that also sounds near apocalypse. Panlykonium substitutes wolves for the demons of pandemonium. The coinages bring beheading, revelation, and the crowd’s wolfish behavior into the same ending.

Greek apo, away, kephale, head, and lykos, wolf; Milton’s coinage Pandemonium.

Foreman’s victim reverses the scriptural lamb without blemish. More’s weaknesses and compromises are part of the point: the man required for the sacrifice is visibly imperfect. Foreman’s explanation of what that blood will accomplish remains an account given by the person arranging the death.

Exodus 12:5; 1 Peter 1:19.

The mustard seed of Chapter 1 returns beside the language of leaven and preserving salt. The images allow a small act or remnant to change a much greater body. Foreman uses them to explain historical renewal; the final pages test whether his planned result exhausts what has happened.

Matthew 5:13; 13:31–33; 1 Corinthians 5:6.

The rapid succession from republic to empire and through later ages is Foreman’s theory of historical death and rebirth. His first emperor is Augustus, who represented his rule as a restoration of the republic. The novel’s five-hundred-year rhythm should be read as that theory rather than as conventional historical periodization.

Augustus, Res Gestae 34; Foreman’s account in this chapter.

More distinguishes the judgment of a person after death from the final judgment of the world. Foreman rejects both and insists on explaining himself immediately. Their disagreement exposes the limit of his history: he invokes transcendence as a requirement while denying the judgment More expects beyond death.

The Christian distinction between particular judgment and Last Judgment.

More’s name for the smooth-talking Foreman recalls Barnabas, whose name Acts interprets as son of consolation. The consolation is bitterly comic because its bearer is arranging the victim’s death. The insult resists the gentleness with which the necessity is being explained.

Acts 4:36.

More explains his last meal through the belief that eating an enemy can confer the enemy’s capacities. Frazer offers a familiar account of that belief. The meal’s artificial substance and More’s doubt about acquiring wit turn the ritual into a final joke at the Programmed Persons’ expense.

J. G. Frazer, The Golden Bough, “Homoeopathic Magic of a Flesh Diet.”

Foreman advances the expected noon execution to eight. Roper records that Sir Thomas Pope brought More word that he must die before nine on the morning of his earthly execution. The historical early-morning notice becomes a means of frustrating the rescue in Lafferty’s story.

Roper, The Life of Sir Thomas More, account of 6 July 1535.

Pottscamp’s last offer recalls the repeated opportunity for the historical More to save himself by yielding. Here he argues that the successor will sign immediately anyway. More’s refusal answers the attempt to judge his act solely by whether it can stop the administration’s next step.

Roper, The Life of Sir Thomas More, accounts of the examinations and trial.

More’s discovery that he has come back late to the only thing that matters can be read beside Augustine’s late love. The comparison concerns the shape of a belated conversion. More speaks of a return to something long known, even while saying how little he understands it.

Augustine, Confessions 10.27.

The first rescuers form the small wave that precedes a larger movement. Forerunner also recalls John the Baptist, himself beheaded. The resemblance puts the failed rush into a pattern of preparation, while the narrative keeps its individual deaths painful and concrete.

Matthew 14:1–12; the Christian title of John the Baptist as Forerunner.

The narrator translates Evita’s warning and thereby identifies Foreman with Judas. Her subsequent woe recalls Christ’s judgment on the person through whom betrayal or scandal comes. The need for an event to occur does not excuse the person who brings it about.

Matthew 26:24; Luke 17:1.

Evita explains Foreman’s killing as the provision of an animal companion for a dead hero. Achilles’ sacrifice of dogs at Patroclus’s funeral is a classical comparison. Calling the planner a dog overturns the authority with which he has just interpreted More’s death.

Homer, Iliad 23.173–74.

Foreman is torn apart and a surviving piece is hung from a tree. The sequence brings together the dismembering imagery of Acts and the hanging in Matthew. The later question about the Judas tree’s fruit returns to the possible consequences of a betrayal whose guilt the scene has made explicit.

Matthew 27:5; Acts 1:18.

The novel calls its tree a carob and also a Judas Tree. Botanically, the tree usually bearing the latter name is Cercis siliquastrum, distinct from the carob, Ceratonia siliqua. The literary association with betrayal is clear even where the plant names overlap or are confused.

The Judas-tree legend; the botanical distinction between Cercis siliquastrum and Ceratonia siliqua.

The stranger is unnamed. A Christ interpretation is possible, and the invitation also recalls More’s earlier recruitment by a traveler. Rumors that an essence departed and a shadow died invite comparison with substitution accounts of the Crucifixion, but the narrator reports and unsettles the rumors rather than confirming them.

Irenaeus, Against Heresies 1.24.4, on Basilides; Past Master, chap. 2.

More begins the Latin prayer by which Christ commends his spirit to the Father. The words also belong to the psalm and to Compline. His death interrupts the prayer; the scene replaces the polished last sayings of quotation books with a remembered fragment.

Luke 23:46; Psalm 31:5, numbered 30:6 in the Vulgate and Douay-Rheims; the Compline responsory In manus tuas.

Lafferty explicitly refuses the familiar collection of More’s last jokes. The tale of a woman carrying away his head recalls Margaret Roper’s recovery of her father’s head, while its basket also suggests the Baptist’s story. The novel presents its own beautiful tale and immediately questions it.

Roper, The Life of Sir Thomas More; Edward Hall, Chronicle; Stapleton, Tres Thomae; Matthew 14:11.

The extinction of the stars invites comparison with Clarke’s famous ending. Lafferty follows that extinction with questions about duration, rebirth, and hope. The apparent end therefore opens a further problem that the narration does not settle by simply showing a new world.

Arthur C. Clarke, “The Nine Billion Names of God” (1953).

When nothing moves, the difference between a second and an immense duration cannot be measured. Aristotle’s account of time through motion provides a useful philosophical comparison. George’s earlier story and the ending both place their interval between worlds outside ordinary measures.

Aristotle, Physics 4.11; compare Augustine, Confessions 11.

The banner, Gandy’s question, and the last recollection of spirit descending on matter gather the left-handed motif into a possibility of grace for the Programmed. The ashes on a machine’s head matter because an act of penitence has occurred where feeling was said to be absent.

Genesis 1:2; 2:7; Job 2:12; 42:6; Past Master, chap. 10.

The three refrains move from watchfulness to expectation and hope. Paul’s account of hoping for what is not yet seen and the Gospel command to watch provide biblical comparisons. The final words preserve expectation without supplying a completed account of the world’s renewal.

Romans 8:24–25; Matthew 26:41.