A Voyage to Arcturus

Scottish novelist David Lindsay was born to a middle-class Calvinist family, forced by poverty to work as an insurance clerk instead of attending university, and at the age of forty took up the cause and worked his way to Corporal of the Royal Army Pay Corps in World War I. After the war he moved to Cornwall with his wife and began writing full-time, publishing his first novel, “A Voyage to Arcturus”, in 1920. Although the science fiction novel initially sold less than six hundred copies, it has come to be known as a major “underground” novel of the 20th century, and heavily influenced C. S. Lewis’s “Out of the Silent Planet”. The story is set at Tormance, an imaginary planet orbiting Arcturus, where an adventurous Scot named Muskall has traveled following a séance at an Observatory. While there he encounters myriad characters and lands which Lindsay employs as a critique of various philosophical systems. A fascinating combination of fantasy and philosophical reflection, “A Voyage to Arcturus” remains as a hugely influential novel for other writers of the genre ever since its initial publication. This edition includes a biographical afterword.