A Voyage to Arcturus (review)

10 May, 2026

I sometimes imagine Weirdness as a form of radiation. It can be emitted, reflected, and absorbed. Many works going under the label "weird" are reflectors. China Mieville, for example, knows he's being weird; whatever his other merits, he's reflecting rays that come from somewhere else.

So it's always a pleasure to find a bona fide weird-ray emitter, which brings me to the topic of the post, David Lindsay's disquieting Voyage to Arcturus. (Spoilers ahead).

At the novel's beginning, a man named "Krag" crashes a seance and invites two of the guests, "Maskull" and "Nightspore" on a trip to the planet Tormance, orbiting the binary star Arcturus.

Maskull wakes up in a desert, alone. He has new sense organs on his head and a tentacle protruding from his heart. The landscape is bizarre and psychedelic. There are two new primary colors, and water moves in ways it's not supposed to. Life is malleable -- Maskull sprouts a variety of new organs, most of which open or close various Doors of Perception.¹ Gender and sex are always slightly in flux; the new organs have sexed associations that situate Maskull in a variety of orientations toward masculinity and femininity. One character even uses neopronouns.

She got up again on her elbow. “Instead of making plans for other people, I would do a very necessary thing.”

“Pray, tell me.”

“Well, there’s no reason why I should, but I will. I would try to convert my women’s organs into men’s organs. It is a man’s country.”

“Speak more plainly.”

“Oh, it’s plain enough. If you attempt to pass through Ifdawn without a sorb, you are simply committing suicide. And that magn too is worse than useless.”

“You probably know what you are talking about, Oceaxe. But what do you advise me to do?”

She negligently pointed to the light-emitting stone lying on the ground.

“There is the solution. If you hold that drude to your organs for a good while, perhaps it will start the change, and perhaps nature will do the rest during the night. I promise nothing.”

Maskull is sort of a feckless cipher; we know nothing about his past life on Earth, and his sole motivation is to discover the source of a mysterious light (the "muspel-light") and drumming sound that he occasionally perceives.

The narrative moves between dyads and triads. Aside from the seance at the start, there are never more than three characters in play at once (it would make an interesting stage play; you'd only need three actors).

The characters are archetypes and mouthpieces for philosophical/mystical attitudes. An obscure dialectic unfolds as Maskull encounters them, often ending in sudden and upsetting acts of violence. Each encounter interrogates how one should relate to the world and to Tormance's creator God, "Shaping" or "Crystalman". Early characters see him as a benevolent creator. Others reject him as a demiurge, but fail to articulate a suitable negation. Asserting individual will is deemed inadequate, as is subsuming individual will through asceticism ore agape.

Ultimately, Maskull blunders his way into enlightenment, leaving a trail of destruction in his wake. The concluding imagery is vaguely reminiscent of 2001: A Space Odyssey, but especially of End of Evangelion,² at least in how uneasy it made me feel.

The shadow form of Crystalman had drawn much closer to him, and filled the whole sky, but it was not a shadow of darkness, but a bright shadow. It had neither shape, nor colour, yet it in some way suggested the delicate tints of early morning. It was so nebulous that the sphere could be clearly distinguished through it; in extension, however, it was thick. The sweet smell emanating from it was strong, loathsome, and terrible; it seemed to spring from a sort of loose, mocking slime inexpressibly vulgar and ignorant.

The spirit stream from Muspel flashed with complexity and variety. It was not below individuality, but above it. It was not the One, or the Many, but something else far beyond either. It approached Crystalman, and entered his body—if that bright mist could be called a body. It passed right through him, and the passage caused him the most exquisite pleasure. The Muspel-stream was Crystalman’s food. The stream emerged from the other side on to the sphere, in a double condition. Part of it reappeared intrinsically unaltered, but shivered into a million fragments. These were the green corpuscles. In passing through Crystalman they had escaped absorption by reason of their extreme minuteness. The other part of the stream had not escaped. Its fire had been abstracted, its cement was withdrawn, and, after being fouled and softened by the horrible sweetness of the host, it broke into individuals, which were the whirls of living will.

Nightspore shuddered. He comprehended at last how the whole world of will was doomed to eternal anguish in order that one Being might feel joy.

The book ends with a revelation, an utterly uncompromising denial of a false world:

Fire flashed in his heart.... Millions upon millions of grotesque, vulgar, ridiculous, sweetened individuals—once Spirit—were calling out from their degradation and agony for salvation from Muspel.... To answer that cry there was only himself... and Krag waiting below... and Surtur—But where was Surtur?

The truth forced itself on him in all its cold, brutal reality. Muspel was no all-powerful Universe, tolerating from pure indifference the existence side by side with it of another false world, which had no right to be. Muspel was fighting for its life—against all that is most shameful and frightful—against sin masquerading as eternal beauty, against baseness masquerading as Nature, against the Devil masquerading as God....

One could argue that Lindsay's imagination works against him; Tormance is rich and enchanting to a degree that could be said to undermine the idea that material reality is a prison, like the sentiment in this meme:

But that's exactly the point, Lindsay's vision is so austere that any form of pleasure, including what we typically think of as religious ecstasy, compassion, or bliss, is part of the prison. Whatever is outside is such a radical alterity that it cannot be expressed in words and does not incorporate anything we associate with "life" or "existence".

I've had a very superficial interest in Gnosticism for a long time, but this is the first presentation of gnostic ideas I've encountered that feels truly heretical. I was left with an uneasy feeling for several days after finishing. I don't think I liked this book, but I understand why people like C.S. Lewis and even Harold Bloom felt like they had to write their own response.

Voyage occupies a place in my head next to two of its contemporaries and fellow sui generis weird-ray emitters: William Hope Hodgson's The Night Land (1912) and E.R. Eddison's The Worm Ouroboros (1922). Though wildly different, all three articulate a highly idiosyncratic philosophy through a fantastical, harrowing adventure. Moreover, all three have a radical, uncompromising quality -- The Night Land's setting is one utterly without hope; The Worm Ouroboros concludes with the main characters choosing to rewind time and relive a harrowing war; Arcturus posits the hopeless cosmic war quoted above. All three begin with a clumsy frame story that is almost immediately overwhelmed by a rich invented world. And those invented worlds all feel oddly vivid and concrete despite utterly lacking any of the pedantic post-Tolkien "worldbuilding" we've come to associate with fantasy and sci-fi. Perhaps these weird rays were reflected after all, with a common source yet to be found?

#reviews