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    A Voyage to Arcturus
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    A Voyage to Arcturus
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    A Voyage to Arcturus
    Ebook368 pages5 hours

    A Voyage to Arcturus

    By David Lindsay

    3.5/5

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    About this ebook

    A Voyage to Arcturus is a novel by Scottish writer David Lindsay, first published in 1920. It combines fantasy, philosophy, and science fiction in an exploration of the nature of good and evil and their relationship with existence. It has been described by critic and philosopher Colin Wilson as the "greatest novel of the twentieth century" and was a central influence on C. S. Lewis's Space Trilogy. 


    "A book which is difficult if not impossible to lay down once one has entered the observator tower where the journey starts and glimpsed the dread blue sun which revolves by far-off Tormance." --Loren Eiseley

    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherSheba Blake Publishing
    Release dateMay 18, 2015
    ISBN9781304042590
    Author

    David Lindsay

    David Lindsay is a senior security consultant with Cigital Inc., where he works with industry-leading financial, healthcare, and software companies helping to secure their critical applications. He provides professional assessments and remediation assistance in the form of penetration tests, architecture risk analysis, code review, and security training. He researches Web application security vulnerabilities focusing on emerging security issues related to new standards, frameworks, and architectures. He has spoken at many leading security events over the past few years, including the Microsoft BlueHat, BlackHat, and OWASP conferences. David graduated from the University of Utah with a master's degree in mathematics.

    Read more from David Lindsay

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    Reviews for A Voyage to Arcturus

    3.5/5

    176 ratings16 reviews

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    • 5/5
      This book is the most meaningful thing to ever happen to me. If anyone knows of other books similar to it, please
      Let me know
    • 3/5
      I am not sure what to make of it - it was more a philosophical metaphor than the space travel adventure story that I had hoped for. I don't think that I understood what Lindsay was trying to say.
    • 1/5
      Unreadable.
    • 1/5
      There's nothing wrong with science fiction as religious allegory, Gene Wolfe's Book of the New Sun does the same thing. The difference is that Book of the New Sun also tells an interesting story, with actual characters, beautiful writing, and can be revisited time and time again to discover new things. A Voyage to Arcturus is just a religious allegory for Gnosticism. It opens like a regular piece of sci-fi pulp, but once the main character makes the titular journey all semblance of a plot is thrown out the window. The main character undergoes numerous transformations and interact with characters one or two at a time all for the purpose of illustrating different aspects of Gnosticism, and none of the characters are any more than the lightest of sketches. The book wraps up in a completely unsatisfying way.

      Maybe if you're really into gnosticism this book will appeal, but if you're not then honestly I can't see this book doing anything for you (unless you like reading science fiction just to have one strange thing happen after another). I don't buy into gnosticism, so I found this book a complete waste of my time and thus one of the absolute worst books I read in 2013.
    • 4/5
      This book is far from perfect. The writing is clumsy, the character development is implausible and often non-existent (leading to confusion over their motives and occasional disinterest), and the character and place names are ridiculous to the point of distraction. That said, the story is so utterly inventive and unique (especially considering that it was written post-WWI), and the ending so powerful that it will remain with me for a long time. Lindsay crafted what on first glance appears to be a straightforward Fantasy/SciFi novel but is really a metaphysical/mystical treatise on the nature of reality and the path to salvation. It recalls Dick's VALIS in this respect, in that it is an important mystical statement masquerading as cheap fiction.
    • 5/5
      This has been a novel which has always been surrounded in mystery and speculation as to what its true meaning is. It's worth bearing in mind that Lindsay was bitter about the world after the events of the Great War shattered his faith in humanity and this is perhaps a reflection of this. Characters pop in and out of the story at whim, seemingly only to exist to put Maskull's faith to the test. Whether this can be seen as the ultimate atheist novel also remains unclear, as the ending can be left open to interpretation. However, these inclarities are the strength of the story, as Lindsay allows no barrier for his imagination. The result is a beautiful, terrifying world, richly imagined. Voyage to Arcturus remains a surreal and breathtaking metaphysical journey.
    • 3/5
      Having seen the madness of WWI, David Lindsay wrote this novel, which is a fantasy rather than Science fiction. The book delves into some serious questions of identity and what makes behaviour, and information. In conclusion, I found this book rather creepy to my Western European mind. It was originally published by Methuen in 1920, but maintains its tone rather well to this day.
    • 5/5
      Strange and at times beautiful. Highly philosophical and puzzling. A precursor to Vance and Wolfe. Five stars for imagination.
    • 5/5
      Everyone seems to hate the prose style in this book. C.S. Lewis called it 'appalling.' This is not my experience. To the contrary, I found Lindsay's style a match to the strangeness of the book, the fearsomeness of his vision. There is nothing quite like it. Oceaxe gave a beautiful sneer as she took a step toward the river. "Better men than you—better in every sense of the word—are walking about with foreign wills inside them. You may be as moral as you like, Maskull, but the fact remains, animals were made to be eaten, and simple natures were made to be absorbed.""And human rights count for nothing!"She had bent over the river's edge, to wash her arms and hands, but glanced up over her shoulder to answer his remark. "They do count. But we only regard a man as human for just as long as he's able to hold his own with others."
    • 3/5
      A guy named Maskull travels, through some mysterious means, to a planet of the star Arcturus. As he wanders around, he finds his body and his perceptions changing with his surroundings. He first comes to a place whose inhabitants are full of empathy, self-sacrifice and pacifism, then a land of selfishness, impulsiveness and violence. From there things get stranger and more complicated, as he encounters surreal landscapes, random characters who show up to offer cryptic bits of philosophy, and visions of something that might or might not be God. Taken on a literal level, none of it makes the slightest bit of sense, but it's clearly not intended to be taken literally, but rather as some sort of extended, obscure philosophical/theological meditation.There's obviously a lot of thought and imagination that's gone into this novel, and it does have its moments: a vivid metaphor here and a bit of interesting commentary there, as well as an intriguingly dreamlike atmosphere and a bizarre yet weirdly compelling ending. On the whole, though, I found it not so much profound as tedious and overly abstract, and to the extent that I actually understand the concepts and viewpoints it's exploring, I don't personally see a lot of truth or value in them. There's also a persistent obsession with gender stereotypes through the whole thing that I find deeply annoying. By halfway through the book, I was already tired of it all. I really just am not sufficiently mystically-minded to find this sort of thing appealing.
    • 4/5
      I've read "Voyage" several times since I bought it, and I still don't get it--particularly what the "meaning", if any, of the final scenes. As you can see, I've given it a rank of 3.5. That's really an average of the 2 and the 5 I think it deserves.I love and am yet repelled by some of the macabre imagery. On the other hand, certain scenes/tableaux stand out clearly in my memory as if I had just read them. Speaking of which, I doubt that I'll try this one again.From the back cover, "... The message is uncompromising in its purity. The achievement of the book exactly balances the ambition of its intention. This, surely, is rare." ---London Times.You know, I wonder if the person who wrote that had themselves a clear idea of the "message" or of the "intention". If so, I wish they had divulged them.
    • 4/5
      A Voyage to Arcturus was enjoyed by both C. S. Lewis and Philip Pullman, so its appeal obviously spans a wide range. Nominally science fiction, it is more accurately described as a metaphysical fantasy. The author's opinions are, to put it mildly, eccentric, as is his command of English prose. It is best to treat the former as an exotic part of the fantasy and to deal with the latter by imagining that the book has been carelessly translated from an obscure Middle European language. An effort to suspend disbelief and exercise aesthetic tolerance will be well rewarded.One caveat: The Macmillan paperback edition (the one readers are most likely to encounter, I think) includes an introduction by Loren Eiseley. Mr. Eiseley was distinguished in many fields, but not as a literary critic. Not only is his piece unenlightening, but he gets basic facts wrong, telling us (as an excuse for the book's literary deficiencies) that, "David Lindsay died young." Granted that youth is in the eye of the beholder, nonetheless Mr. Lindsay was 44 when he finished A Voyage and died 25 years later.
    • 5/5
      I cannot tell you how thrilled I was to find this beautiful little gem! Maskull's adventure is quite the subjective experience, leaving only a hint of what Lindsay's theology and philosophy were. Arcturus is the brightest star in the constellation Bootes and is mentioned in the book of Job alongside the Pleiades. Published in 1920, this book, which tell's of one man's journey to Arcturus, is indeed a little known classic of Science Fiction. One of the most memorable places in the book for me was when Maskull encountered Earthrid, the musician who played a lake. Lindsay's story is filled with unforgettable imagery and strange characters. It is my opinion that this book and it's author are among the few who stand utterly alone and do it sucessfully. David Lindsay's life was both tragic and amazingly creative. Perhaps this is a well known formula for genius. Join the Seance and take off for Tormance immediately!
    • 4/5
      A very strange novel, utterly weird and eccentric and inventive. We start off with a seance, but that's gritty realism compared to the goings-on related after, on the planet Tormance. The author would have us imagine two new colors: Jale and ulfire. New body parts grow. At death, corpses grin hideously, and this is called the Mask of the Crystalman. There's some sort of strange Jungian theme lurking at the ending. But this was written before Jung did most of his work, no?I've never read anything else quite like it. It's one of those odd fantasy novels that remain sui generis. It's as far from Tolkien as Cabell is from C.S. Lewis . . . perhaps much farther. Still, it is fantasy, and it should be read by all who love myth for its own sake, for the thrill down the back of the spine.
    • 5/5
      Lindsay shows an excellent grasp of the fact that man does not find it easy to relate to things he cannot perceive with his physical senses. He uses his exceptional imagination to physicalise some of the ideas that men are ruled by.Admittedly though, it is probable that you only have a chance of understanding Arcturus if you have hung around on Earth for a while.
    • 5/5
      This has been a novel which has always been surrounded in mystery and speculation as to what its true meaning is. It's worth bearing in mind that Lindsay was bitter about the world after the events of the Great War shattered his faith in humanity and this is perhaps a reflection of this. Characters pop in and out of the story at whim, seemingly only to exist to put Maskull's faith to the test. Whether this can be seen as the ultimate atheist novel also remains unclear, as the ending can be left open to interpretation. However, these inclarities are the strength of the story, as Lindsay allows no barrier for his imagination. The result is a beautiful, terrifying world, richly imagined. Voyage to Arcturus remains a surreal and breathtaking metaphysical journey.