The Void Captain’s Tale by Norman Spinrad
I think I get what Norman Spinrad is laying down here. Often in Spinrad’s long and honored career, he has been misunderstood more than is probably fair, but let’s face it Spinrad is a provocateur as much as anyone. This novel is as interesting and underrated experiment in science fiction that is only limited by some of its out-dated and unintentional sexual politics but when you factor in that it is a space opera with an FTL drive driven by female orgasms it could’ve been much worse.
I know, I know it is a pretty cringe-inducing concept, but considering Spinrad’s very leftie political stances I wanted to at the very least give the book a more serious look. Spinrad also called it his anarchist science fiction novel. On that note, the anarchist features are more subtle than Leguin’s The Dispossessed which is the most famous science fiction exploration of anarchism in practice. TVCT has more in common with LeGuin's Always Coming Home which is about a non-hierarchal society but it is quietly expressed in a way that makes it less likely to be found on the shelf at an anarchist info-shop. That said it is no less radical.
If I am reading TVCT correctly Spinrad is doing Dune with the influences of the summer of love and late 60s radicalism. What if your far-future galaxy-spanning story was not about a Campbellian (either of them) hero’s journey and inspired by the free love and drug culture of the radical youth subculture of that era. The main characters of this story are not learning ancient warrior ways so they can free oppressed people, no it is their mind that seeks freedom and much of life in this future is about wanting to experience the wonders and joys of the universe.
Spinrad talked about this in a 2012 interview with the LA Review of Books. “Three thousand years from now, barring the usual convenient apocalyptic cultural amnesia and taking into account the enormous wealth of books, discs, chips, tapes, and so forth that we have today, the Second Starfaring Age would have total access to all previous human history and cultural legacy. This culture would have long since mastered the sciences and technologies of mass and energy. It would not wage war.”
Never one to play nice or sugar-coat opinions to fit neatly into genre canon TVCT is a delightfully subversive work of science fiction. This aspect of the novel will get overlooked and that is too bad because there are really beautiful and interesting ideas here. Spinrad as he often does is reacting to what he doesn’t like in traditional science fiction. Much of Spinrad’s career is protesting and reacting to these norms and traditions in the genre. In the Iron Dream the inherit fascism of high fantasy was his target and in this novel, it is the feudal and dystopic futures like Dune and Foundation. It is important to note that Spinrad in the above interview quote mentions all the data of history. I suspect that Spinrad is calling bullshit on Foundation, by trying to picture a universe with evolved humans in it.
“If the floating cultura contained its fair share and then some of subsidized children of fortune, wealthy sybarites, refugees from ennui, and their attendant parasitic organisms, did these not serve as a communal matrix for the merchants, artists, scientist, aesthetes, and pilgrims who travelled among the stars for higher purposes? In ancient days, the courts of monarchs served as similar distillations of the more rarefied essences of human culture; these too were gilded cages filled with self-pampered birds of paradise, but in their precincts were to be found the philosophers, artists, and mages of the age.”
Asimov saw the cycle of history as a foregone conclusion and the psycho-history as the way to TRY to combat it. In a subtle way that doesn’t require massive world-building and word counts Spinrad counts these epics in the 220 pages that don’t overstay its welcome, which is helpful because he never cheats on the first-person narrative. He expects the reader to just flow with it.
In a 1999 interview with Locus magazine, Spinrad said ''I wanted to do a society that knows human history. My two far-future novels, The Void Captain's Tale and Child of Fortune, are set in a good society that works, this galactic culture in the far future, three or four thousand years from now. They are not about changing or wrecking society; they're about what happens to people inside it. Child of Fortune is another anarchist novel because there's no government. (All right, so I'm an anarchist – but I'm a syndicalist. You have to have organized anarchy because otherwise, it doesn't work.)”
The story is not really one you can spoil as this story is more style and ideas that a real plot. There is incredible world-building. The prose is very styled and includes lots of switches between languages and straight-made-up words. This is not for everyone but I enjoyed this aspect of the book. The galaxy as it is written in this book is not one of conflict, people travel the universe in search of art, pleasure, and experience. Sounds great huh?
There is only one in-universe problem, there is one and one only exploited class. It is the icky thing here. In this the second space-faring age of humans the massive starships travel faster than like directed by a rare breed of pilot. These pilots are not the macho top guns but women who transcend space and time during moments of intense pleasure. To me, the one in-universe problem is also the one problem I have with the book.
It is impossible to not think of this story as the Orgasm drive book. I understand what Spinrad was trying to do but from the outside, without context, it seems like the idea of a horny teenager or some hippie sex guru trippin’ balls and pitching his way cool space opera. It is hard to get away from that idea.
Let’s talk about how the orgasm drive works on page 73 of the Orb trade paperback.
“Via the lightest touch of my finger upon the Jump command point, I was, in cold objective literally inducing in Dominque an orgasm far beyond anything of which I could as her fleshly lover. As long as the pilot had been mere module in the Jump Circuit, this sexual connection between Captain and Pilot, this reality which went far beyond erotic metaphor, existed not in the sphere of my awareness. But now that awareness of her as a taled name, another subjectivity, a woman had been thrust upon me, I was aware of myself as her cyborged demon lover, as electronic rapist, yet somehow also the victim of the act as I plunged into her with my phallus of pychesomic fire.
“Jump!”
One instant the stars were in configuration in one configuration, then in another. Did I imagine that I had experienced the impalpable interval between, I could feel her being flash through its unknowable ultimate ecstasy? Did we silently sigh in unison or mutually shriek our mute violation?”
Yikes, there is so much to unpack here and much of it is not pretty. Eventually, the pilot Dominque and Captain Genero develop a consensual relationship that involves a galaxy-spanning Kama-sutra thing that leads them to want to go beyond light speed jumps to transcendence. While the above quote implies that it is a violation for both the pilot and the ship Captain it feels icky just reading it and it only gets worse when the narrator spends a page and a half trying to understand how male and female orgasms evolved differently. Spinrad often narrates stories from characters' points of view that are political opposites (I mean he wrote a novel as Hitler) but this novel would have been 200% better if pages 106 and 07 were lost in the editing process.
In the LA review of books Spinrad seems to understand it is THE problematic part of his universe. “A culture far superior to our own in every aspect including the moral, but no perfected utopia, with the paradox at its core being that the Jump Drive, the faster-than-light technology based on “platform orgasm,” the very thing that makes a Second Starfaring Age possible, the legacy of the vanished aliens known as We Who Have Gone Before, and a mystery whose ultimate reality these perfect masters of mass and energy cannot fathom.”
There are many cool elements of this book, how this near utopian far future exists, the beautiful and stylistic prose that portrays a delightfully strange future. The Anarchist vision, the subversion of the genre but the book often gets reduced to the orgasm drive book. I honestly think with a little woke editing this could’ve worked but the consent of the pilot is a serious question here. While the FTL jump is not entirely sexual it is close enough.
While the last two chapters take the book straight to nirvana and do so in a beautiful way, I am left closing the book and asking ugly and hard questions. This to me is the big difference between a masterpiece and a good book that I struggled with. It is not quite to the cat-suits in Star Trek level of nerd fantasy it is something else. This is not me being politically correct, that is not my concern is being ethically correct and that is something a genre reaching to the future should always do.
OK, I interviewed Norman Spinrad for the Dickheads podcast, he was very grumpy at the start as we had a host of technological problems getting him on the phone. So you may enjoy me squirming at the start but the interview gets better I promise you.
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