Note: • The 1984 Tor edition of "The Last Master" is an unstated expanded and revised edition of "The R-Master" • The copyright page of "The Last Master" states "Copyright © 1984 by Gordon R. Dickson"

Synopsis: The World Economic Council said the world had become Utopia. There should be no cause for dissatisfaction. But for those who were still restless, there was the new mind-stimulating drug R-47. Those who took R-47 were engaging in a sort of lottery whose rare winners would be super-geniuses and whose losers might be fit only for asylums. Etter Ho, whose brother was one of the losers, took the drug on the chance that, if he won, he could cure his brother. But what he became when he emerged from the mainlining was something none expected. For he became a menace to Utopian order, a danger to those who knew him, and the only man who might, just possibly, diagnose the real illnesses of the world. (from the back cover of the DAW Books first printing)