3.5
Beyond Apollo
ByPublisher Description
Winner of the first John W. Campbell Memorial Award. “A mind-bending read . . . certainly entertaining, often very funny and very thought-provoking.” —Medium
A two-man mission to Venus fails and is aborted; when it returns, the Captain is missing and the other astronaut, Harry M. Evans, is unable to explain what has happened. Or, conversely, he has too many explications; his journal of the expedition—compiled in the mental institution to which NASA has embarrassedly committed him—offers contradictory stories: he murdered the Captain, mad Venusian invaders murdered the Captain, the Captain vanished, no one was murdered and the Captain has returned in Evans’s guise.
As the explanations pyramid and the supervising psychiatrist’s increasingly desperate efforts to get a straight story fail, it becomes apparent that Evans’s madness and his inability to explain what happened are expressions of humanity’s incompetence at the enormity of space exploration.
“Barry Malzberg’s dark, bleak vision of the future is one of the most terrifying ever to come out of science fiction.” —Robert Silverberg
“Beyond Apollo is a masterpiece; a multi-faceted rumination on repression; a virulent critique of the space program and America’s obsession with space.” —Science Fiction and Other Suspect Ruminations
“A light shone through a crystal. The reader never gets to see the crystal or the light, only the resulting refraction . . . a very satisfying work of post-modern science fiction.” —Speculiction
“Veins of gold . . . a beautiful and heart-breaking book.”—Fantasy and Science Fiction
“Written with wit . . . the most original and pleasing SF novel of the last five years.”—Brian Aldiss, New Review
A two-man mission to Venus fails and is aborted; when it returns, the Captain is missing and the other astronaut, Harry M. Evans, is unable to explain what has happened. Or, conversely, he has too many explications; his journal of the expedition—compiled in the mental institution to which NASA has embarrassedly committed him—offers contradictory stories: he murdered the Captain, mad Venusian invaders murdered the Captain, the Captain vanished, no one was murdered and the Captain has returned in Evans’s guise.
As the explanations pyramid and the supervising psychiatrist’s increasingly desperate efforts to get a straight story fail, it becomes apparent that Evans’s madness and his inability to explain what happened are expressions of humanity’s incompetence at the enormity of space exploration.
“Barry Malzberg’s dark, bleak vision of the future is one of the most terrifying ever to come out of science fiction.” —Robert Silverberg
“Beyond Apollo is a masterpiece; a multi-faceted rumination on repression; a virulent critique of the space program and America’s obsession with space.” —Science Fiction and Other Suspect Ruminations
“A light shone through a crystal. The reader never gets to see the crystal or the light, only the resulting refraction . . . a very satisfying work of post-modern science fiction.” —Speculiction
“Veins of gold . . . a beautiful and heart-breaking book.”—Fantasy and Science Fiction
“Written with wit . . . the most original and pleasing SF novel of the last five years.”—Brian Aldiss, New Review
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Meet readers like you in the Fable For You feed, designed to build bookish communities12 Reviews
3.5
CosmicKid
Created about 2 months agoShare
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“Overall rating: 4.5/5
I don’t really know where to begin with this book. It’s so unbelievably unconventional it makes it difficult to really summarize it.
In a nutshell, I hate this book as much as a I love it and I really love it. Weird, grotesque, sexually explicit, schizophrenic, unreliable, weird… but oh so damn good. This book both revolted me and entertained me. I’ve never experienced such duality with a book before.
It will not be a read for the faint of heart. If you are sensitive, don’t read this book, you’ll not understand it and you’ll unreasonably spend too much time on the tone of the author 50 years in the past from your life experience.
But if you are looking for a completely unconventional sci-fi book that makes you think, this is a winner.”
BYL
Created 6 months agoShare
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cody
Created 11 months agoShare
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badcoddle
Created over 1 year agoShare
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Aisreading
Created over 1 year agoShare
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“I thought the book was quite interesting, I was invested in finding out what Harry knew. I liked the ambiguity but overall a decent read”
About Barry Malzberg
Barry N. Malzberg is the author of some 40 science fiction novels and collections since his first publication in Galaxy Magazine in 1967. Some of the science fiction novels are Galaxies (noted in the book by David Pringle,The One Hundred Best Science Fiction Novels), The Men Inside, Guernica Night, Tactics of Conquest and The Remaking of Sigmund Freud. Malzberg has also written extensively on the field of science fiction itself, both in novels (Herovit's World, about a discouraged science fiction writer) and essays collected in The Engines of the Night (Locus Award, 1982). He has also written mysteries and suspense novels (some in collaboration with Bill Pronzini) and several novels for the Olympia Press USA, of which Screen (1969) is the best known.
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