Voyage to Arcturus by David Lindsay

[Ray McCarthy]

As I get further in it gets more tedious to read and darker. It's feeling increasingly like a Nietzschean perversion of "Pilgrim's Progress".

Body count up to four.

 

[Zendexor]

I've read it a couple of times. It's one of those rare books that has a genuinely unique perspective, and I'm not sure it's allegory so much as the creation of a mind with very individual ideas about life/meaning/god/whatever.

Interesting you mentioned Colin Wilson, Nightspore. It's through him that I read Voyage, and for a while I tried without success to get hold on Devil's Tor. Have you read the biography Wilson wrote on Lindsay? (The Strange Genius of David Lindsay.)

Lindsay, I seem to recall, wrote that A Voyage to Arcturus was "science fiction raised to the nth power". I would go along with that. People who don't like it are, I suggest, reading it wrong. Which raises all sorts of questions about frames of mind in reading - see C S Lewis' An Experiment in Criticism for the view that "evaluative" criticism is missing the point: it's the type of reading which a book encourages that makes the difference. My fascination with Voyage stems from a sense of the numinous as I read it: is this me, or is it Lindsay's doing, or is the question meaningless?

 

[Ray McCarthy]

The body count is still rising. It's more like horror or Fantasy than SF to me.

Spoiler: SF content?

The only SF seems to have been the "back rays" used to get Maskull to Arcturus

Maybe I'm holding the Kindle wrong?

 

[HareBrain]

I think the fact that it involved space travel qualified it as science fiction when it was written, but I wouldn't place it in that category now. It's more mystical speculation than anything. Or maybe it's best just to call it "unique".

 

[Ray McCarthy]

involved space travel qualified it as science fiction when it was written

He just hadn't thought of using a wardrobe, pentangle, dolmen or stone circle. The spacecraft isn't important.

 

[HareBrain]

He just hadn't thought of using a wardrobe, pentangle, dolmen or stone circle. The spacecraft isn't important.

I'm not sure. It's possible that it was important to him that Tormance was in our galaxy, and that its metaphysical truths also applied to our own world -- if it had been a portal fantasy, that wouldn't necessarily be the case, and I think it would have felt different to read. (To me, anyway.)

 

[Ray McCarthy]

I'll agree that maybe is a reason for the spacecraft. An earlier time it might have been a voyage to an undiscovered continent on Earth. Jules Verne of course had an undiscovered country underground.

We shouldn't demand that stories fit neatly into publishers or reviewer categories.

 

[BAYLOR]

I read it a few years back. It's unlike anything ive ever read. Im not sure I really got the point Maskull's rather bizarre journey on Tormance.

 

[Zendexor]

"....one of the Top Three sf visionaries..."

Well, I love Lewis's trilogy, and I've read Arcturus more than once, and liked The Haunted Woman a lot, so Lindsay rates pretty well with me. Where should I start Stapledon?

Oops I omitted to reply to this, months ago. Moved house since then; got distracted. Um... re Stapledon, in case you haven't plunged in yet, either Last and First Men or Star Maker. The latter shows you not only the Universe but a whole cycle of them... I expect there's a Stapledon thread somewhere on this site. When all's said and done, though, I reckon A Voyage to Arcturus lights some inner ultimate mystic-science-fictional blaze that no other book can.