David Lindsay (1876 1945) was a Scottish author best remembered for the philosophical science fiction novel A Voyage to Arcturus (1920).Lindsay was born into a middle-class Scottish Calvinist family in London, and was brought up partly in Jedburgh, where he had family background. He was educated at Colfe's School, Lewisham, and won a scholarship to university, but for financial reasons went into business, becoming an insurance clerk at Lloyd's of London. He was successful, but his career was interrupted by service in the First World War, starting at the age of 40. He first joined the Grenadier Guards, then the Royal Army Pay Corps, in which he was promoted to Corporal.After the war Lindsay and his young wife, Jacqueline Silver, moved to Porth near Newquay in Cornwall, and lived there from 1919 to 1929. He became a full-time writer there. His novel A Voyage to Arcturus was published in 1920, but it was not a success, selling fewer than six hundred copies. The work shows links with Scottish fantasists such as George MacDonald, whose work Lindsay was familiar with, and it had a central influence on C. S. Lewis's Out of the Silent Planet. J. R. R. Tolkien said that he had read the book "with avidity", and characterised it as a work of philosophy, religion and morality.
David Lindsay's 'A Voyage to Arcturus' is a groundbreaking work of science fiction that explores existential themes through a vivid and imaginative narrative. Written in a transcendent and symbolic style, the book challenges traditional ideas of morality and spirituality as it follows...
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