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A Voyage to Arcturus

David Lindsay

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A Voyage to Arcturus | David Lindsay

A Voyage to Arcturus

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A Voyage to Arcturus is a novel by Scottish writer David Lindsay. 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. (Introduction from Wikipedia)
as the fact that, as far as he could see, scarcely any two plants belonged to the same species.

"Won't you help Maskull out of his difficulty?" said Joiwind, pulling her husband's arm.

He smiled. "If he'll forgive me for again trespassing in his brain. But the difficulty is small. Life on a new planet, Maskull, is necessarily energetic and lawless, and not sedate and imitative. Nature is still fluid—not yet rigid—and matter is plastic. The will forks and sports incessantly, and thus no two creatures are alike."

"Well, I understand all that," replied Maskull, after listening attentively. "But what I don't grasp is this—if living creatures here sport so energetically, how does it come about that human beings wear much the same shape as in my world?"

"I'll explain that too," said Panawe. "All creatures that resemble Shaping must of necessity resemble one another."

"Then sporting is the blind will to become like Shaping?"

"Exactly."

"It is most wonderful," said Maskull. "Then the brotherhood of man is not a fable invented by idealists, but a solid fact."

Joiwind looked at him, and changed colour. Panawe relapsed into sternness.

Maskull became interested in a new phenomenon. The jale-coloured blossoms of a crystal bush were emitting mental waves, which with his breve he could clearly distinguish. They cried out silently, "To me To me!" While he looked, a flying worm guided itself through the air to one of these blossoms and began to suck its nectar. The floral cry immediately ceased.

They now gained the crest of the mountain, and looked down beyond. A lake occupied its crater-like cavity. A fringe of trees partly intercepted the view, but Maskull was able to perceive that this mountain lake was nearly circular and perhaps a quarter of a mile across. Its shore stood a hundred feet below them.

Observing t

Manny 11/03/2022
[Original review, Dec 10 2008]

Apparently David Lindsay said once that he would never be famous, but that as long as our civilisation endured, at least one person a year would read him. I think he was probably right. This is not a well-written book, and there is very little character development - bu
Juho 02/16/2021
My mind feels like a thin sieve, and this book is gold dust being sifted through it. I understood very little of it but from what I did gather - the few larger gold nuggets sticking into the sieve - I had in my hands a remarkable work of faith and spirit and alien worlds. Some day I'll figure out th
Erik 07/06/2014
This is one of the most incredibly eccentric, surprising and challenging philosophical fantasy novels ever written!

The Scottish writer David Lindsay died in 1945. He is usually regarded as a fantasy writer. While he wrote a great deal, most of his works have been hard to find, out-of-print, neglecte
Jim 11/29/2012
How I first came to learn about David Lindsay's A Voyage to Arcturus was in a strange cookbook I saw in the early 1970s written by a hippie who decided to use as the heading of each page a recommended book title. One of the books was this one, but it took me over forty years to get around to reading

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