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Scottish novelist David Lindsay (1876-1945) was born to a middle-class Calvinist family, forced by poverty to work as an insurance clerk instead of attending university, and at the age of forty took up the cause and worked his way to Corporal of the Royal Army Pay Corps in World War I. After the war he moved to Cornwall with his wife and began writing full-time, publishing his first novel, "A Voyage to Arcturus", in 1920. Although the science fiction novel initially sold less than six hundred copies, it has come to be known as a major "underground" novel of the 20th century, and heavily influenced C.S. Lewis's "Out of the Silent Planet". The story is set at Tormance, an imaginary planet orbiting Arcturus, where an adventurous Scot named Muskall has travelled and where he encounters myriad characters and lands that reflect Lindsay's critique of various philosophical systems.
Arcturus is the name given to the star system some thirty-seven light-years from our own. It includes at least a half dozen planetary bodies and is many times larger and much older than our own star and its system. Arcturian involvement with our system began over three million years ago when a space colony--a galactic space station--was established on Velatropa 24.4, otherwise known as Mars. With its 40,000-year warm cycles, Mars provided the perfect experimental way station. If anything went wrong, at least those on the Arcturus system would not be affected--or so it was thought. Some of those in command of the Martian project had not considered carefully enough the inexorable efficacy of karma, the law of cause and effect. By the time strange events began to transpire on Mars, little did anyone on Mars or Arcturus reckon the strange consequences of forgetting about each other's mutual existence. Thus unfolds the tale of the Arcturian experimental way station, V.24.4, otherwise known as Mars.
If you're interested in science fiction but crave something with a little more intellectual heft than your typical space opera, give David Lindsay's A Voyage to Arcturus a try. Widely praised by critics as one of the most philosophically advanced science fiction novels, the book follows two intrepid spiritual seekers through a series of remarkable interstellar adventures. As part of our mission to publish great works of literary fiction and nonfiction, Sheba Blake Publishing Corp. is extremely dedicated to bringing to the forefront the amazing works of long dead and truly talented authors.
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A Voyage to Arcturus is set at Tormance, an imaginary planet orbiting Arcturus, which, in the novel, 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.