Episode 3.5: Of Body Horror and Back Rays

At least don't judge this book by this cover.

Welcome back to Something About Dragons, gentle readers. My rant about the frankly rage-inducing levels of racism in Tarzan of the Apes meant that the last blog post ran a little long, so I split the posts for the sake of length.

After having weathered a gross of early 20th century racism, let’s move on then to David Lindsay and A Voyage to Arcturus. The basics first: Lindsay is Scottish, this was his first book, less than 600 were sold (at full cost, the first edition’s whole 1500 print run eventually sold out, but at a discount. A bunch were remaindered.). Nevertheless, the book gained a following among influential fantasy authors and readers – including most of the Inklings (especially Tolkien and Lewis) and later folks like Michael Moorcock and Alan Moore. I’m also fairly sure that Stephen King nicked a bit of the climax of Maskull/Nightspore walking up a dark tower for the end of his series The Dark Tower. Even Harold Bloom – he of the established “Western Cannon” – was a fan and attempted to write a sequel. Lindsay was the Velvet Underground of early 20th century fantasy. Not everyone read him, but everyone who did published their own stories.

This band sounds exactly like you think it does though.

A Voyage to Arcturus was republished several times after 1920, most especially in 1968 in paperback as a precursor to the Ballantine Adult Fantasy series, a mega influential series we will be coming back to again and again. That’s where A Voyage to Arcturus’s availability and popularity really took off. I assume because the plot would make a lot more sense if you had recently participated in The Electric Kool Aid Acid Test. That 1968 edition also has a really neat picture of Maskull, the protagonist, riding the psychedelic ten-legged dragon creature. It’s cool. Copies are available cheap online.

A Voyage to Arcturus First Edition 1968 cover. Notice the Ballantine Books logo top left. Also, $0.95 is ~$8.91 in 2025 money.

That’s the basics. The details are somewhat more complicated. Honestly, similar to Tarzan, it’s hard to identify what to focus on with AVTA, though for very different reasons. First, A Voyage to Arcturus is not without various uncomfortable anachronisms. It is, for one thing, pretty sexist, though likely par for the course for early 20th century literature. And, unlike Tarzan of the Ape's foundations being built on eugenics, A Voyage to Arcturus isn’t beholden to misogyny for its entire structure. The sexism just kind of seeps in, which makes it, if not more defensible, at least marginally more tolerable.

The book does have some really interesting features, including the establishment of non-binary pronouns for a character who has a gender than is neither male nor female (ae and aer for the phean). This is often pointed to as an indication of Lindsay's progressive/modern bonafides. I think more than a cursory reading of the text makes it clear that:

• a) Lindsay is establishing the phean as a blend of stereotypically male and female traits, undercutting the forward-looking nature a bit by indulging in some gender essentialism; and,

• b) The acceptance of the phean and the third/non-binary gender is predicated on that non-binary status being inherent to the phean and separate from being assigned male/female at birth.

In other words, it’s not acceptance of a fluid state of gender or transition, but the identification of a heretofore unidentified third gender, closely tied to one of the god characters. Imaginative, especially for an early 20th century Scottish writer, but not necessarily a precursor to the LGBT movement and trans civil rights. I am, of course, a straight cis guy, so judge this interpretation accordingly.

That’s not really what I wanted to talk about with A Voyage to Arcturus anyway. I just wanted to address the bit about the pronouns and sexism because it is often, at least in the online and literary discourse, used to preemptively defend reasonable feminist critiques of Lindsay. A Voyage to Arcturus is a philosophical head-trip, and, as such, you’ll often find it a favorite of some fairly obnoxious people. Mostly dudes. Often involved in the tech industry. Largely convinced of their own superiority. Frequently libertarians.

But let’s skip all that, because, at its core, Arcturus is a portal fantasy. It’s not a portal fantasy in the style of Alice in Wonderland or The Wonderful Wizard of Oz. It’s not a portal fantasy with, say, a plot, but it is, at its heart, a portal fantasy. Maskull begins the story at a séance in our world and eventually takes a crystal spaceship to Tormance via “back rays”. A crystal spaceship, you say? That sounds like science fiction to me.

Yeah, there’s no science here. C.S. Lewis called Tormance – the planet Maskull travels to – “a region of the spirit.”[1] Which is a good way to describe it. A Voyage to Arcturus embodies pure portal fantasy to allow for various philosophical digressions, a la 75% of Star Trek filler episodes. And, while I think it’s perfectly reasonable to put A Voyage to Arcturus into a podcast about fantasy, I agree that its influence – for better or worse – was larger in the science fiction realm of speculative fiction, particularly on shows like Star Trek (and TNG, etc.) or The Twilight Zone that like to use science fiction for metaphor and philosophical exploration.

But the best way to describe AVTA might be to call it a philosopher’s Alice in Wonderland. Or an even better example might be as a cynic’s (as in the ancient Greek philosophical tradition) Gulliver’s Travels. Tormance isn’t a planet meant to be adventured upon, conquered, or incorporated into a galactic federation. It’s a tapestry upon which to play out different philosophical arguments. And grow, like, six additional eyes, a tentacle hand from the chest, and a couple of telepathic head protrusions.  That, in my opinion, is the most interesting and relevant aspect of Lindsay’s masterpiece: the creativity of the vision.

I’ll be upfront; I’m not much impressed by the philosophical aspects of Lindsay’s work. Possibly because, after a lifetime of reading speculative fiction influenced by Lindsay, a lot of these questions are “baked in” so to speak. Body horror owes a lot to A Voyage to Arcturus (though Lindsay writes Maskull as, at turns, more resigned, curious, or annoyed than horrified). The pleasure/pain dichotomy, the aimless blundering through various worldviews for about the middle half of the book, are interesting, if tedious, in my opinion.

Also, I honestly find Maskull, a somewhat passive protagonist, at least for about the first half of his stay on Tormance. He gets sucked into the prevalent worldview of his current local geography, espouses it, then is somehow snapped out of it before he’s moved along to the next one, usually following his murder of someone he just met. A Voyage to Arcturus is a fictionalized upper classman’s philosophical essay. Which is fine.

But something doesn’t last a century merely on the strength of warmed over Nietzscheanism and philosophical paradoxes. Particularly without the benefit of characterization and a plot. What keeps you reading is a strong visual sense of the world of Arcturus through which Maskull is moving. Lindsay wonderfully conveys the book's fantastic imagery. I keep seeing his landscapes and characters as Michael Whelan paintings, that vivid detail in the description and monochromatic color motifs. I’d argue that that is the largest part of Lindsay’s popularity with later fantasy authors. There’s so much creativity in the setting and so much strength in how he conveys the uncanny nature of the scenery that it leaves later authors a lot of material to nick.

If it comes down to a competition of creativity between science fiction writers and fantasy writers (and hell, throw horror in there, to complete the speculative fiction hat trick), I gotta say fantasy writers are, on the whole, going to come in a distant runner up. Post-Tolkien, of course, there’s the constant commentary on, rejection of, or slavish devotion to, Tolkien’s depictions of non-human races. Lots of ancient mythology is dredged up, a lot of Lovecraftian handwaving (“Only poetry or madness could do justice to the noises.”) is used when it leans into horror or cosmic. While the sci fi folks tend to get uber weird with their aliens and whatnot.

But Lindsay shows the expansiveness of imagination that can be brought to bear on the fantastic. Shrowks, for example: weird, multi-colored 10-legged flying dragons. At one point, Maskull rides a giant tree animal through the sea by blinding some of its eyes. He tears apart an island with his mind. He grows tentacles and weird head appendages. The scenery includes two colors only described by the feelings they impart. The landscapes are crystalline, a riot of color, unchanging grey, radically shifting mountains and valleys. There are two suns, some moons. As we go on, you might be able to pick out different instances where an author might have been inspired by something written in AVTA – and I think Terry Brooks might have been more influenced by some of Lindsay’s descriptions than has been acknowledged – but it’s the total commitment to a fantastic world that is at turns inspiring and daunting.

Which I think is part of why Lindsay and A Voyage to Arcturus will forever be influential classics, but not widely read. Lots of early fantasy is portal fantasy. Oz, Alice in Wonderland, House on the Borderlands, HG Well’s Time Machine, Journey to the Center of the Earth, John Carter, etc. I don’t believe that fantasy literature is predominantly escapist or that escapism is all genre lit is. There is, however, an undeniable strain of escapism in early fantasy of the (capital “M”) Modern Era. The Gilded Age, the Second Industrial Revolution, the First World War. At this time, there are just mind-boggling amounts of change and disruption to traditional ways of life in a very short period that absolutely affect many different literary genres, and the nascent fantasy genre is no exception.

However, A Voyage to Arcturus doesn’t offer the escapism that readers may be expecting from the portal fantasy structure of something like Oz or Alice in Wonderland. A Voyage to Arcturus doesn’t just follow a simple, easily grasped Hero’s Journey or a basic quest tale through fantastic lands (there and back again, as it were). Maskull doesn’t ride the shrouk like Falcor and pump his fist. He discusses philosophy with a woman who kills two other reptile Falcors before forcing the other to fly them to her home and mocking Maskull for not being able to mind-rape the centipede dragon (decipede?). At which point she and Maskull kill her husband.

Lindsay writes his setting like an escapist space fantasy. But his plot and story, such as they are, don’t follow the model we come to expect from later sci-fi and fantasy (or earlier hero-style quests). You’re set up for that, in a way, but Lindsay refuses to play into the expectations of Maskull being Tormance’s John Carter. I honestly think that’s why Maskull initially seems almost passive during his first several adventures on Tormance. He gets a call to adventure, supernatural aid, meets some helpers, mentors, and experiences some challenges and temptations, but I think the difference is he doesn’t so much overcome them as endure them. Maybe “move through” them. There isn’t the escapism of triumph or a Tolkienesque eucatastrophe. Only more Tormance.

Which I think is the point. In spring of 2022, a student from Eastern Illinois University published a Master’s Thesis entitled, “David Lindsay's A Voyage to Arcturus: An Anti-Fantasy”. I like the phrase “anti-fantasy”. Lindsay sets up and then dismantles a lot of expectations in this book, including a lot of the tropes that had barely even begun to codify within the fantasy genre, which isn’t even called “fantasy” yet. He’s anticipating a lot to come in the genre and deliberately eschewing it, showing another path.

It’s not, in fact, a path a lot of fantasy creators ended up taking – though, as I mentioned, I think the sci fi genre got more out of it – but the story did present a way of explicitly incorporating philosophical questions into the fantasy genre. A Voyage to Arcturus provides a potential alternative to Tolkien and an interesting “path not taken” option for the fantasy genre. What if the father of modern fantasy were a Scottish insurance salesman, rather than an Oxford Don?

Between eugenics and David Lindsay, I think we’ve covered more than enough for one point five installments. For our next installment, we’re going to break up our pattern of “beloved children’s tale” and “obscure classic”, and just go with two obscure classics. We’ll be revisiting Lord Dunsany to read The King of Elfland’s Daughter and bring E.R. Eddison’s The Worm Ouroboros out onto the stage. I honestly haven’t ever read The Worm Ouroboros, so I’m excited to read that book and place it within the development of the genre. Then, another week of influential classics, before we get to CONAN! Where I’m hoping my memory of Robert Howard isn’t quite as bad as on Burroughs.

[1] C.S. Lewis, “On Stories,” in Of Other Worlds, 12