A Voyage to Arcturus

'**A Voyage to Arcturus'** is a 1920 novel by David Lindsay. It combines fantasy, philosophy, and science fiction in an exploration of the nature of good and evil and their relationship with existence. Described by critic, novelist, and philosopher Colin Wilson as the "greatest novel of the twentieth century", it was a central influence on C. S. Lewis' *Space Trilogy*,and through him on J. R. R. Tolkien, who said he read the book "with avidity". Clive Barker called it "a masterpiece" and "an extraordinary work ... quite magnificent."

An interstellar voyage is the framework for a narrative of a journey through fantastic landscapes. The story is set at Tormance, an imaginary planet orbiting Arcturus, which in the novel (but not in reality) is a double star system, consisting of stars Branchspell and Alppain. The lands through which the characters travel represent philosophical systems or states of mind, through which the main character, Maskull, passes on his search for the meaning of life.

Lewis wrote:

"*I know the geography of Tormance better than that of Tellus […] Though I saw the trenches before Arras I could not now lecture on them so tactically as on the Greek wall, and Scamander and the Scaean Gate. As a social historian I am sounder on Toad Hall and the Wild Wood or the cave-dwelling Selenites [in Wells’s the First Men in the Moon] or Hrothgar’s court [in Beowulf] […] than on London, Oxford, and Belfast.*
The book sold poorly during Lindsay's lifetime, but was republished in 1946 and many times thereafter. It has been translated into at least ten languages. Critics such as the novelist Michael Moorcock have noted that the book is unusual, but has been highly influential with its qualities of "commitment to the Absolute" and "God-questioning genius"; Moorcock also noted that while the book had influenced C. S. Lewis's science fiction trilogy, Lewis had "refused Lindsay's commitment to the Absolute and lacked his God-questioning genius, the very qualities which give this strange book its compelling, almost mesmerising influence."

C.S.Lewis called *A Voyage to Arcturus* "shattering, intolerable, and irresistible Lewis also mentioned the "sorbing" (aggressive absorption of another's personality into one's own, fatal to the other person) as an influence on his 1942 book *The Screwtape Letters*. Lewis in turn recommended the book to J. R. R. Tolkien, who said he read it "with avidity", finding it more powerful, more mythical but less of a story than Lewis's *Out of the Silent Planet*; he commented that "no one could read it merely as a thriller and without interest in philosophy[,] religion[,] and morals". Tolkien used frame stories in his novels, but did not approve of the frame story machinery that Lindsay had used – the back-rays and the crystal torpedo ship; in his unfinished novel *The Notion Club Papers*, Tolkien makes one of the protagonists, Guildford, criticise those kinds of "contraptions".

## External links

* A Voyage to Arcturus, C. S. Lewis, and The Dark Tower
* Perelandra by C S Lewis and Arcturus

## References

1. ↑ |*A Voyage to Arcturus*, C. S. Lewis, and *The Dark Tower*
2. ↑ Lewis, C.S. *Of This and Other Worlds* 29 (1940)
3. ↑ 3.0 3.1 Moorcock, Michael. "A Voyage to Arcturus by David Lindsay", *The Guardian*, 31 August 2002.
4. ↑ Wilson, Frank (2008){{
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5. ↑ Lewis, C. S. (1961). .
6. ↑ "Letter to Stanley Unwin, 4 March 1938", *The Letters of J. R. R. Tolkien*, George Allen and Unwin, 1981.
7. ↑ Flieger, Verlyn (2005). pp. 87–118. Kent State University Press.
8. ↑ Template:Cite encyclopedia