In the Library
A Voyage to Arcturus
David Lindsay, 1920
- Form
- Form Novel
- Difficulty
- Difficulty Demanding
- Reading time
- Reading time 6.5 hours
- Chapters
- Chapters 21
- Length
- Length 92k words
£1.99
Read in the app, yours for good. Not yet by post.
The book unlocks on your account as soon as you buy it, so the 14-day right to cancel ends once it is unlocked.
Yes, you are about to cross your Rubicon, Maskull. But what a Rubicon!
What buying means
- Yours for good, on every iPhone you sign in to.
- Read in the app’s own reader, with the original beside the translation where there is one.
- Downloaded, so it reads with no signal.
- The same price as in the app. Folio already opens every book on this shelf; buying keeps this one after Folio ends. A refund takes it back.
If you like this, try
Thus Spoke Zarathustra
Friedrich Nietzsche
Thus Spoke Zarathustra preaches the same hard gospel of pain over pleasure, but Nietzsche gives it aphorisms while Lindsay gives it a planet to enact it on.
£1.99
The Divine Comedy
Dante Alighieri
The Divine Comedy sends its traveler through a landscape built entirely out of moral argument, but Dante has Virgil for a guide while Maskull only has Krag.
£1.99
The Faerie Queene
Edmund Spenser
Spenser sends his knights through the same kind of allegorical country Maskull crosses, where every stranger on the road embodies a creed to be tested and left behind.
£1.99
About the book
Two colours blaze across the skies of Tormance that no eye on Earth has ever seen: ulfire and jale, as primary and unaccountable as red or blue. Maskull wakes alone on this planet circling the twin suns of Arcturus, and as he walks new organs sprout from his flesh, tentacles and sense-limbs that let him feel the very will of every stranger he meets. Each country he crosses hands him a whole philosophy to live and die by, love, duty, pleasure, sacrifice, and each in turn is torn away as a beautiful lie. The horror at the heart of the book is that beauty itself is the deception: every creature that dies here settles into the same vulgar grin, the mark of a false god who dressed agony up as delight. What Maskull is truly climbing toward is a colder, sterner fire, one that promises no comfort and no reward, only the truth. Nothing in fiction feels quite like it, a vision so austere it makes the whole warm world look like a trick.