A Voyage to Arcturus (Dodo Press) Book

David Lindsay (1876-1945) was a Scottish author now most famous for the philosophical science fiction novel A Voyage to Arcturus. It was published in 1920 but it was not a success, selling fewer than six hundred copies. Later it has been described as the major "underground" novel of the 20th century. The secret of Lindsay's apparent strangeness as a novelist lies in his metaphysical assumptions. Like the gnostics he seems to have viewed the "real" world as an illusion, which must be rejected in order to perceive genuine "truth". He attempted to write a more "commercial" novel with his next work The Haunted Woman (1922), but this was barely more successful than A Voyage to Arcturus. He continued to write novels, including the humourous potboiler The Adventures of Monsieur de Mailly, but after Devil's Tor in 1932 he found it increasingly difficult to get published, and spent much of his time on his last work The Witch (1976) which was unpublished in his lifetime.