Okla Hannali, Serpent's Egg, Past Master

A brief update today. My preliminary map of the sources Lafferty mined for Okla Hannali is now live under Resources. Exploring Choctaw history has proved fascinating and humbling. I've also expanded the Serpent's Egg glossary and will continue refining it.

With that housekeeping done, I want to revisit Past Master within the context of our AlphaFold era, a moment when, according to recent analyses, AI capability doubles roughly every five months.

Past Master touches many themes, but it increasingly reads as a prescient Catholic meditation on transhumanism, the lure of what the novel calls "Utopia," or, in Eric Voegelin's notorious phrase, the attempt to "immanentize the eschaton." In discussing The Elliptical Grave as a Lost Race novel, I focused on Lafferty's recurring exploration of humanity's exile from Eden: cut off from grace and the preternatural gifts that once completed our nature.

When Past Master first appeared, it baffled readers. Today's Lafferty enthusiasts find it more approachable, yet a quick survey of YouTube reviews still reflects confusion. One camp views the novel as an eccentric rollercoaster ride; another interprets it as a reactionary jab at post-WWII politics. Both are correct, but you won't find anyone calling it prophetic on YouTube. This is a mistake.

Lafferty's intuition about artificial intelligence's moral and spiritual dilemmas is remarkable. Although "AI" never appears in Past Master, the programmed persons, machine men, and "precis machines" raise questions we now confront directly: radical bodily augmentation, governance by algorithms, and technophilic aspirations of enhancing humanity through reason alone.

As our society edges toward the twin futures of Cosmopolis and Catshead, the rise of pervasive surveillance, CRISPR-based genetic editing, and neural implants forces us to confront urgent questions about power, economics, personal freedom, and the our understanding of humanity and its potentials, themes at the heart of R. A. Lafferty’s Past Master. Many futurists anticipate a clash between biological neo-puritans who reject enhancements and technophiles who embrace them. Capital and authority could concentrate inside fortified enclaves that echo Lafferty’s Cosmopolis, while dissenters are left to pursue simpler, poorer lives beyond their walls if they opt out.

I feel the gravity of this prospect most because of my only child, Henry, who is profoundly autistic and non-verbal. Much of my life is spent caring for him. If I live long enough, I know I will one day have to decide whether to allow emerging technologies to be used on him, and that prospect both compels and bothers me. Whatever happens, I know Catshead will be on my mind.

Though Lafferty said that Past Master depicted the era in which he wrote, his era was continuous with our post-industrial, digitally dominated epoch. Like Jonathan Swift, a similarly keen-eyed, politically skeptical, and personally flawed moralist who witnessed seismic societal transformations, Lafferty anticipated the far-reaching consequences of our technological ambitions. His novel is shatteringly relevant: can a species largely estranged from grace trust its creations to perfect itself? Do we still have the resources to respond responsibly, and does the transhumanist desire conceal other desires?