Lindsay, David
Entry updated 17 February 2025. Tagged: Author.

(1876-1945) UK author, younger brother of Alexander Crawford, in active service during World War One; not to be confused with David T Lindsay. He is remembered today almost entirely for his first novel, A Voyage to Arcturus (1920), a tale whose apocalyptic intensity – and whose refusal of any balm or loving-kindness as its protagonist scours an alien world in search of a savage Transcendence – marks it as a work written in the aftermath of the Great War; the last word spoken in the book, the true name of the deformed Virgil figure who goads the protagonist to the stars, is Pain (see Horror in SF). The story may be called a Scientific Romance, because there is little point in describing a tale involving a Spaceship and a Fantastic Voyage to another planet of well-described Archipelagos filled with ever-changing beings (see Evolution; Life on Other Worlds) as fantasy. However, it is superficially modelled on the fantasy novels of George MacDonald. It is of course sf of a very remote sort, and its response to Aftermath does not much resemble the Dystopian arraignments of (among others) Milo Hastings or Aldous Huxley. It does not seem that H P Lovecraft knew A Voyage to Arcturus – understandably, as the 1920 printing of the book was tiny, and it was not published in the US until long after his death – but the abyssal Gnosticism of Lindsay's work can readily be understood as being consanguinous with Lovecraft's Cosmic Horror. It is also philosophically akin to Nietzsche and Schopenhauer. For many decades the main influence of the novel on works of the fantastic seems to have been – understandably, given his early advocacy of Lindsay – upon C S Lewis, whose Cosmic Trilogy similarly treats reality as a scrim that ultimately mimes the Eschatological script (or abyss) within. There is one distinction of importance: Lindsay gives no sense that he understands the underlying purpose of the universe in Christian terms.
On Earth the protagonist, Maskull, attends a seance and witnesses the "murder" of an apparition by a figure named Krag, who entices him and his double to travel to the planet Tormance (which is to say Torment plus Romance). Here, Maskull interrogates a range of autochthones, who embody the Evolutionary possibilities of life (all inadequate), and who express various philosophies (all wrong), and brushes them aside, sometimes brutally. Slowly it becomes clear that Tormance and its inhabitants are exemplary, and that Maskull's traversal of the lures and allures offered has been part of a Godgame. The god who vastates may be Maskull himself; certainly, the torments of the physical embodiment of soul in matter are eternal. The name of this universe is Pain.
Also of sf interest is Sphinx (1923), in which the Invention of a machine capable of recording dreams engages the young Scientist responsible more deeply in the tangled social life of middle-class Britain than he can cope with; the effect of his death, soon after that of his beloved, is lessened when the machine indites a message promising Transcendence for both. The dreams of the heroine represent the sublime realm which is represented in various ways in most of Lindsay's works. The Haunted Woman (1922) is a more conventional Fantasy set in a house with the sublime realm represented by a hidden floor that exists only in an Alternate World centuries adrift from now. The Adventures of M. de Mailly (1926; vt A Blade for Sale 1927) is a historical novel; but the far more complex Devil's Tor (1932) can be read as punning Equipoise of a high order: the eponymous tor conceals the grave of a giant woman, who may simultaneously be seen as a chthonic Earth Mother figure (see She) and as an Extraterrestrial Forerunner from the stars responsible for Uplifting Earth hominids into full sentience. The plot follows the simultaneous joining together of a new Adam and Eve and the reuniting to two halves of a talisman of great power, which gives visions of an almost unfathomably life-enhancing future. The two tales assembled as The Violet Apple & The Witch (coll 1975; cut vt The Violet Apple 1978) are fantasy. [JC/LW]
see also: Conceptual Breakthrough; Dime-Novel SF; Gods and Demons; History of SF; Mythology; Perception.
David Lindsay
born Lewisham, Kent [now London]: 3 March 1876
died Hove, Sussex: 16 July 1945
works
- A Voyage to Arcturus (London: Methuen and Co, 1920) [hb/]
- A Voyage to Arcturus (London: Victor Gollancz, 1946) [with publisher's note by Gollancz and introduction by E H Visiak: hb/nonpictorial]
- A Voyage to Arcturus (New York: Ballantine Books, 1968) [rev of the above: over 2000 small textual changes: new introduction by Loren Eiseley replacing Visiak: pb/Bob Pepper]
- A Voyage to Arcturus (place not given: Bookship, 2019) [rev of the above with first edition text generally restored though with probable 1920 errors corrected: no introduction: hb/Murray Ewing]
- A Voyage to Arcturus: An Illuminated Edition (Philadelphia, Pennsylvania: Beehive Books, 2022) [vt of the above with new illustrations: illus/hb/Jim Woodring]
- A Voyage to Arcturus (London: Victor Gollancz, 1946) [with publisher's note by Gollancz and introduction by E H Visiak: hb/nonpictorial]
- The Haunted Woman (London: Methuen and Co, 1922) [hb/]
- Sphinx (London: John Long, 1923) [hb/]
- The Adventures of M. de Mailly (London: Andrew Melrose, 1926) [hb/]
- A Blade for Sale (New York: Robert M McBride, 1927) [vt of the above: hb/]
- Devil's Tor (London: G P Putnam's Sons, 1932) [hb/]
- The Violet Apple & The Witch (Chicago, Illinois: Chicago Review Press, 1975) [coll: The Violet Apple written 1924-1926; The Witch written 1932-1939; both published here for the first time: hb/]
- The Violet Apple (London: Sidgwick and Jackson, 1978) [cut vt of the above: containing the title story only: hb/uncredited]
- "A Christmas Play" in Tales before Tolkien: The Roots of Modern Fantasy edited by Douglas A Anderson (New York: Ballantine Books/Del Rey, 2003) [anth: pb/John Howe]
about the author
- J B Pick, E H Visiak and Colin Wilson. The Strange Genius of David Lindsay (London: John Baker, 1970) [nonfiction: anth: hb/nonpictorial]
- Gary K Wolfe. David Lindsay (Mercer Island, Washington: Starmont House, 1982) [nonfiction: chap: pb/]
- Robert Eldridge. "Devil's Tor: A Voyage from Arcturus" (Spring 2017 Wormwood #28) [p54 ff: mag/]
links
- Violet Apple: The Life and Works of David Lindsay
- Internet Speculative Fiction Database
- Project Gutenberg
- Picture Gallery
previous versions of this entry