Fiction · 1920
A Voyage to Arcturus
Maskull travels by strange, physics-defying means to a planet orbiting the star Arcturus, and there, crossing a landscape whose colors and even his own sensory organs keep mutating beneath him, he meets a succession of beings each embodying a different philosophy of existence — pleasure, will, pity, self-annihilation — each convincing in turn, and each, in the end, revealed as insufficient.
David Lindsay published A Voyage to Arcturus in 1920, his first novel, written at forty-four after two decades as an insurance broker; it sold almost nothing and he wrote several more books without success before his death, but the novel was rediscovered decades later as a strange, singular ancestor of modern fantasy and science fiction, admired by C. S. Lewis among others.
This Bibliomancer edition presents the complete text.
Contents
- Chapter 1 — The Séance
- Chapter 2 — In the Street
- Chapter 3 — Starkness
- Chapter 4 — The Voice
- Chapter 5 — The Night of Departure
- Chapter 6 — Joiwind
- Chapter 7 — Panawe
- Chapter 8 — The Lusion Plain
- Chapter 9 — Oceaxe
- Chapter 10 — Tydomin
- Chapter 11 — On Disscourn
- Chapter 12 — Spadevil
- Chapter 13 — The Wombflash Forest
- Chapter 14 — Polecrab
- Chapter 15 — Swaylone’s Island
- Chapter 16 — Leehallfae
- Chapter 17 — Corpang
- Chapter 18 — Haunte
- Chapter 19 — Sullenbode
- Chapter 20 — Barey
- Chapter 21 — Muspel
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About this edition
The text is free of copyright. This edition was prepared from an authoritative digitisation, processed by Bibliomancer under its own review protocol; every automated correction is recorded in its transformation log. Rights assessed for CA, EU, GB, US.
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About the author
1876–1945 · Modern
David Lindsay (1876–1945) was born in London to Scottish parents and worked for two decades as an insurance broker before publishing his first and best-known novel, A Voyage to Arcturus (1920), at forty-four. A philosophical fantasy following a man transported to a distant planet where he meets a succession of alien beings, each embodying a different and ultimately inadequate philosophy of existence, it sold poorly and was largely ignored in his lifetime; decades later it was rediscovered as a major influence on later fantasy and science-fiction writers, C. S. Lewis among them. He wrote several further novels without commercial success and died in Sussex, England, at sixty-eight.
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