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A Voyage to Arcturus: Review/Meta
A Voyage to Arcturus (1920) by David Lindsay is the best book I have read in a long time (sci fi or otherwise). It’s an odd duck: never a huge success but never out of print, influential for many, apparently including C. S. Lewis in his Space Trilogy, but often absent from the Great Works of Science Fiction lists. Until I happened on a YouTube video about it, I had never heard of it or Lindsay.
Perhaps all this isn’t surprising because the book really is odd; it may be a quintessential example a very well-written “niche” work, destined to be admired by a few and passed by by most.
Like The Space Trilogy, A Voyage to Arcturus uses a science fiction setting to stage a philosophical exploration of the meaning of life, morality, and so on. This staging is so similar, in fact, that I initially expected the book to be an allegory or thought experiment on Christian cosmology. It is not. In fact, while it echoes themes from real-world religions and philosophies, the cosmology it seems to settle on is not quite like anything else I’ve encountered. (I won’t say more here due to spoilers.)
I find this book hard to understand. I could not predict where it was going, even up to the last page. And while I found the ending a bit anti-climactic (maybe I just didn’t get it), I like all that. I like being surprised; I like being perplexed. I would take that a hundred times over being bored by sameness. I am also in awe of Lindsay’s worldbuilding. Overall this book is immensely ahead of its time. It was published in 1920, but I would have readily believed it came from the 1950s, or even a less gender-progressive corner of the ‘60’s or ‘70s. It’s that far-thinking. Spoilers below the cut
Worldbuilding
This is not a work of hard science fiction, and its settings are certainly intended to be more symbolic than realistic. Yet its creativity is the product of an expansive mind and shows attention to the strangeness and possibility of the cosmos. Even by the standards of SF a hundred years later, it’s far more creative than most SF settings I’ve read.
It’s set in a binary solar system, where each star has unique characteristics and influences. It makes the both symbolic and plausible move of the having the dominant sun be hotter than Earth life can really tolerate. It is also too hot for its own inhabitants’ comfort, and this is realistically built into the culture in the form of a long midday siesta (though, in practice, characters often work/hike right through this). Side note: I initially found it an inconsistency in worldbuilding that the heat of this midday period is described early on as intolerable yet proves manageable for many. But on reflection, I think our hero’s first interlocuter simply has a different view of what’s “tolerable.”
The smaller star emits light that includes two new colors, jale and ulfire, which the narrative skillfully weaves throughout the text. No, this doesn’t make electromagnetic sense, but that’s not the point.
The planet’s day (or the daylight at this season) is twice as long as Earth’s, and the book maintains this difference very well, with each of our hero’s days feeling excruciatingly long and eventful.
The settings themselves involve a dizzying array of unusual colors, creatures, and landscape features. Most of the water is green, and much of it can be walked on. There’s a sort of “tumble weed,” which instead of tumbling rotates slowly around using its roots for locomotion. There are mountains with vast, inverted mountains perched on their peaks. And the people have additional organs that alter their sensations and thought processes. The organs themselves can be transformed, replacing one type of perception with another.
It’s interesting that the longer our hero’s journey continues, the less alien and more Earthlike both the people and places become—though never so much that the planet morphs into Earth. I might guess there’s a certain amount of worldbuilding fatigue in this, but I’ll put the bulk of it down as intentional; it’s certainly intentional that the aliens cease to have extra organs and begin to just look like humans. I won’t attempt a particular reading of what means though.
The People and Plot
I’m going to say “people” rather than “characters” because a lot of them aren’t really “characterized”; they’re more symbolic. Our hero is an ostensibly British person named Maskull (not a British name), who takes up on offer from a couple of weird people to go the alien planet, Tormance, in the system of Arcturus, including suns Branchspell and Allpain. (I love the names in this book!). Long story short, Maskull leaves with his companions on a spaceship, falls unconscious, and wakes up alone on a Tormance beach. From there on, he travels along, having a series of encounters with people who represent different philosophical and cosmological positions. Eventually, he re-encounters his companions (keeping it vague here) and seems to learn something about the “true” nature of Tormance and, by extension, Earth and our universe.
Maskull himself seems to me a symbol. His name suggests “mask,” “skull,” and “masculine,” advertising him as more a Tormancian archetype than a British person. This is further evidenced by his complete lack of a life in Britain: he explicitly has no wife, no job, and no ties to keep him on Earth; no shred of backstory is ever mentioned. How he’s financially supporting himself is unclear, and I think the upshot is, he’s not. He really represents something else, something more universally human than a particular character who lives in Britain.
In any case, I’m not going to recapitulate the whole book, but the upshot (spoilers) seems to be, as many have observed, a Gnostic or somewhat Manichean universe in which the physical universe has been created by the forces of “evil”(?)/pleasure in order to revel in consuming the fundamental energy of “good”(?)/”Muspel.” By this process, the physical world fractures and drains Muspel. All life has some Muspel in it and is trying to get back to its wholeness with it but is stopped by the other force, which includes embodiment, that just seeks pleasure: hence, the horrors of life.
These two forces are characterized by the overwhelming major sun, Branchspell (which causes “branching” in Muspel?) and the small, blue/jale/ulfire sun, Allpain, struggling to maintain its integrity, but failing, which has the effect of creating a dizzying, disintegrating feeling when touched by its rays. Now, it will be noted that “Allpain” breaks down to “all pain,” and pain is introduced as a defense mechanism against the reign of pleasure, not as a “good” in itself, but as an armor to be donned in order to keep out the spell of pleasure and strive to free others so that Muspel can be protected and perhaps, eventually, more fully integrated again.
These two “deities” in contention have multiple, slippery names that lead to some conflation with each other, but I can most clearly distinguish them as Krag (Muspel and the being that brings Maskull to Tormance) and Crystalman (the force of pleasure that fractures Muspel as a crystal fractures light). The highest deity is usually identified as Surtur, a rather elusive presence. In the beginning, Krag describes Surtur as someone who has traveled to Tormance ahead of them, but in the end, he identifies himself as Surtur. Others consider Surtur and Crystalman to be the same (but the book ultimately frames this as wrong, I think. I mean “incorrect,” which may or may not be morally “wrong” in this story).
Identity in this world is not stable, and it may be that Surtur is, indeed, an aspect of Krag, or vice versa, that sometimes describes the two as integrated whole and sometimes not. Similarly, (spoilers), Maskull, disillusioned and beginning to see the “truth” (?), dies and comes to life again as his other initial traveling companion, Nightspore, a more bleak yet unwavering person. At first, I thought we might be in some time paradox that allows Maskull and Nightspore to be talking to each other in the same room at the book’s beginning. But on reflection, I think Maskull and Nightspore are less individual people than types or roles, like “deluded man” and “undeluded man” (less deluded?), and, thus, that a succession of “Maskulls” becomes a succession of “Nightspores” who travel back to Earth with Krag to “rescue” the next “Maskull.” Krag’s goal, then, is to the turn the people of the world (which world?) into Nightspores.
Which world indeed? Tormance is a really well-developed place, but I suspect it may ultimately be something like a dreamspace for articulating an Earthly reality—or what the book characterizes as a reality. This might explain the relatively deep level of detail Lindsay provides on the Earth characters in the first couple of chapters, whose seance begins the otherworldly events. Apart from Maskull, we never see or hear from them again—and I don’t think they map onto Tormancians Maskull meets (I could be wrong), but they may, in fact, represent the motley “real people” Krag is working to liberate, our “Maskull” simply being the latest of them. (All in all, this kind of “thought experiment” reading makes me think of The Prisoner with Tormance as the Village.)
Random Ruminations
It’s hard for me to accept Krag’s/Nightspore’s reading of the universe as correct, even in fiction, because it runs so counter to my understandings. For example, I don’t see “Nature” as an evil distortion of some higher “good.” But I like that because it makes me puzzle over it all the more.
One of the things I puzzle over is that the very first people Maskull meets on Tormance seem to be the best by any typical standard: they are kind, compassionate, altruistic, and largely happy. They also very much worship Crystalman: they see the physical world as good; they identify “Krag” as the devil. Yet they explicitly do not shirk pain; they court pain/sacrifice in the cause of helping others and very much understand this as a source of pleasure. So they are Crystalman’s people in a rather complex way, incorporating some of Krag’s “pain” defense, but not in a “pure” way that would reject pleasure.
This is an odd place to start. They do seem to have the best, happiest, kindest lives we ever encounter, which frames the whole journey to find a deeper “truth” as a little suspect. Even if Krag is correct, maybe a degree of delusion is better (plus or minus if Muspel is really in danger of being drained to destruction by Crystalman)? In a story like this, I would also tend to expect the “starting point” to represent some kind of extreme: wisest, stupidest, etc. But if these folks represent any extreme, it’s conventional goodness/happiness—yet laboring under both more and less delusion than some others, which I don’t know how to resolve.
So I’ll end there for now. This is one of the only books I’ve ever finished just to pick up reread large parts of at once. It’s very deep, and I’m certain I’ll come back to it. I’m also glad it’s now in public domain and hope to see more free play with it. There’s an Australian musical play of it that seems both weird and interesting!
Perhaps all this isn’t surprising because the book really is odd; it may be a quintessential example a very well-written “niche” work, destined to be admired by a few and passed by by most.
Like The Space Trilogy, A Voyage to Arcturus uses a science fiction setting to stage a philosophical exploration of the meaning of life, morality, and so on. This staging is so similar, in fact, that I initially expected the book to be an allegory or thought experiment on Christian cosmology. It is not. In fact, while it echoes themes from real-world religions and philosophies, the cosmology it seems to settle on is not quite like anything else I’ve encountered. (I won’t say more here due to spoilers.)
I find this book hard to understand. I could not predict where it was going, even up to the last page. And while I found the ending a bit anti-climactic (maybe I just didn’t get it), I like all that. I like being surprised; I like being perplexed. I would take that a hundred times over being bored by sameness. I am also in awe of Lindsay’s worldbuilding. Overall this book is immensely ahead of its time. It was published in 1920, but I would have readily believed it came from the 1950s, or even a less gender-progressive corner of the ‘60’s or ‘70s. It’s that far-thinking. Spoilers below the cut
Worldbuilding
This is not a work of hard science fiction, and its settings are certainly intended to be more symbolic than realistic. Yet its creativity is the product of an expansive mind and shows attention to the strangeness and possibility of the cosmos. Even by the standards of SF a hundred years later, it’s far more creative than most SF settings I’ve read.
It’s set in a binary solar system, where each star has unique characteristics and influences. It makes the both symbolic and plausible move of the having the dominant sun be hotter than Earth life can really tolerate. It is also too hot for its own inhabitants’ comfort, and this is realistically built into the culture in the form of a long midday siesta (though, in practice, characters often work/hike right through this). Side note: I initially found it an inconsistency in worldbuilding that the heat of this midday period is described early on as intolerable yet proves manageable for many. But on reflection, I think our hero’s first interlocuter simply has a different view of what’s “tolerable.”
The smaller star emits light that includes two new colors, jale and ulfire, which the narrative skillfully weaves throughout the text. No, this doesn’t make electromagnetic sense, but that’s not the point.
The planet’s day (or the daylight at this season) is twice as long as Earth’s, and the book maintains this difference very well, with each of our hero’s days feeling excruciatingly long and eventful.
The settings themselves involve a dizzying array of unusual colors, creatures, and landscape features. Most of the water is green, and much of it can be walked on. There’s a sort of “tumble weed,” which instead of tumbling rotates slowly around using its roots for locomotion. There are mountains with vast, inverted mountains perched on their peaks. And the people have additional organs that alter their sensations and thought processes. The organs themselves can be transformed, replacing one type of perception with another.
It’s interesting that the longer our hero’s journey continues, the less alien and more Earthlike both the people and places become—though never so much that the planet morphs into Earth. I might guess there’s a certain amount of worldbuilding fatigue in this, but I’ll put the bulk of it down as intentional; it’s certainly intentional that the aliens cease to have extra organs and begin to just look like humans. I won’t attempt a particular reading of what means though.
The People and Plot
I’m going to say “people” rather than “characters” because a lot of them aren’t really “characterized”; they’re more symbolic. Our hero is an ostensibly British person named Maskull (not a British name), who takes up on offer from a couple of weird people to go the alien planet, Tormance, in the system of Arcturus, including suns Branchspell and Allpain. (I love the names in this book!). Long story short, Maskull leaves with his companions on a spaceship, falls unconscious, and wakes up alone on a Tormance beach. From there on, he travels along, having a series of encounters with people who represent different philosophical and cosmological positions. Eventually, he re-encounters his companions (keeping it vague here) and seems to learn something about the “true” nature of Tormance and, by extension, Earth and our universe.
Maskull himself seems to me a symbol. His name suggests “mask,” “skull,” and “masculine,” advertising him as more a Tormancian archetype than a British person. This is further evidenced by his complete lack of a life in Britain: he explicitly has no wife, no job, and no ties to keep him on Earth; no shred of backstory is ever mentioned. How he’s financially supporting himself is unclear, and I think the upshot is, he’s not. He really represents something else, something more universally human than a particular character who lives in Britain.
In any case, I’m not going to recapitulate the whole book, but the upshot (spoilers) seems to be, as many have observed, a Gnostic or somewhat Manichean universe in which the physical universe has been created by the forces of “evil”(?)/pleasure in order to revel in consuming the fundamental energy of “good”(?)/”Muspel.” By this process, the physical world fractures and drains Muspel. All life has some Muspel in it and is trying to get back to its wholeness with it but is stopped by the other force, which includes embodiment, that just seeks pleasure: hence, the horrors of life.
These two forces are characterized by the overwhelming major sun, Branchspell (which causes “branching” in Muspel?) and the small, blue/jale/ulfire sun, Allpain, struggling to maintain its integrity, but failing, which has the effect of creating a dizzying, disintegrating feeling when touched by its rays. Now, it will be noted that “Allpain” breaks down to “all pain,” and pain is introduced as a defense mechanism against the reign of pleasure, not as a “good” in itself, but as an armor to be donned in order to keep out the spell of pleasure and strive to free others so that Muspel can be protected and perhaps, eventually, more fully integrated again.
These two “deities” in contention have multiple, slippery names that lead to some conflation with each other, but I can most clearly distinguish them as Krag (Muspel and the being that brings Maskull to Tormance) and Crystalman (the force of pleasure that fractures Muspel as a crystal fractures light). The highest deity is usually identified as Surtur, a rather elusive presence. In the beginning, Krag describes Surtur as someone who has traveled to Tormance ahead of them, but in the end, he identifies himself as Surtur. Others consider Surtur and Crystalman to be the same (but the book ultimately frames this as wrong, I think. I mean “incorrect,” which may or may not be morally “wrong” in this story).
Identity in this world is not stable, and it may be that Surtur is, indeed, an aspect of Krag, or vice versa, that sometimes describes the two as integrated whole and sometimes not. Similarly, (spoilers), Maskull, disillusioned and beginning to see the “truth” (?), dies and comes to life again as his other initial traveling companion, Nightspore, a more bleak yet unwavering person. At first, I thought we might be in some time paradox that allows Maskull and Nightspore to be talking to each other in the same room at the book’s beginning. But on reflection, I think Maskull and Nightspore are less individual people than types or roles, like “deluded man” and “undeluded man” (less deluded?), and, thus, that a succession of “Maskulls” becomes a succession of “Nightspores” who travel back to Earth with Krag to “rescue” the next “Maskull.” Krag’s goal, then, is to the turn the people of the world (which world?) into Nightspores.
Which world indeed? Tormance is a really well-developed place, but I suspect it may ultimately be something like a dreamspace for articulating an Earthly reality—or what the book characterizes as a reality. This might explain the relatively deep level of detail Lindsay provides on the Earth characters in the first couple of chapters, whose seance begins the otherworldly events. Apart from Maskull, we never see or hear from them again—and I don’t think they map onto Tormancians Maskull meets (I could be wrong), but they may, in fact, represent the motley “real people” Krag is working to liberate, our “Maskull” simply being the latest of them. (All in all, this kind of “thought experiment” reading makes me think of The Prisoner with Tormance as the Village.)
Random Ruminations
It’s hard for me to accept Krag’s/Nightspore’s reading of the universe as correct, even in fiction, because it runs so counter to my understandings. For example, I don’t see “Nature” as an evil distortion of some higher “good.” But I like that because it makes me puzzle over it all the more.
One of the things I puzzle over is that the very first people Maskull meets on Tormance seem to be the best by any typical standard: they are kind, compassionate, altruistic, and largely happy. They also very much worship Crystalman: they see the physical world as good; they identify “Krag” as the devil. Yet they explicitly do not shirk pain; they court pain/sacrifice in the cause of helping others and very much understand this as a source of pleasure. So they are Crystalman’s people in a rather complex way, incorporating some of Krag’s “pain” defense, but not in a “pure” way that would reject pleasure.
This is an odd place to start. They do seem to have the best, happiest, kindest lives we ever encounter, which frames the whole journey to find a deeper “truth” as a little suspect. Even if Krag is correct, maybe a degree of delusion is better (plus or minus if Muspel is really in danger of being drained to destruction by Crystalman)? In a story like this, I would also tend to expect the “starting point” to represent some kind of extreme: wisest, stupidest, etc. But if these folks represent any extreme, it’s conventional goodness/happiness—yet laboring under both more and less delusion than some others, which I don’t know how to resolve.
So I’ll end there for now. This is one of the only books I’ve ever finished just to pick up reread large parts of at once. It’s very deep, and I’m certain I’ll come back to it. I’m also glad it’s now in public domain and hope to see more free play with it. There’s an Australian musical play of it that seems both weird and interesting!