Teaser

A pilot is more a part of the ship than of the crew, and certainly has no business engaging in an affair with the captain. If such an affair were to occur, the results could be disastrous . . .

Review

I don’t normally do content warnings, but this review isn’t going to be suitable for children. You just can’t talk about The Void Captain’s Tale without talking a lot about sex.

If there’s one gap in my sci-fi knowledge, it’s the New Wave. Championed by editors such as Michael Moorcock and Harlan Ellison, this movement came out of the counter-culture of the sixties and ran through much of the seventies. In essence, it was an attempt to push science fiction in a new direction, with an emphasis on formal experimentalism, rich prose, and boundary-pushing content. It was analogous to the punk movement in music, eager to shake up a genre that was already settling into familiar rhythms.

Norman Spinrad is one of the forerunners of the New Wave, and embodies some of the more controversial aspects of the movement. In particular, he shows an eagerness to poke people, confronting them with the uncomfortable in order to make them think. He is, after all, the man who wrote a fake science fiction novel and attributed its authorship to a man by the name of Adolf Hitler. The Void Captain’s Tale arrived at the tail-end of the New Wave, but shows Spinrad at his most aggressively confrontational. This time it’s not a political taboo he’s tackling, but a social one.

One simple statement can be used to judge how you’re going to feel about this book. In Spinrad’s futuristic adventure, hyperdrives are powered by female orgasms. If that makes you roll your eyes, you’re in good company here. It’s hard not to read this book and not think of an author smugly grinning at how brave and daring he is. It’s this self-satisfaction that turns me right off the New Wave as a whole. The idea that they are somehow superior just because they’re writing about weird topics in weird ways. The same sort of smugness that radiates off artists who claim that they’re dark and edgy material is better simply because it is dark and edgy.

Forgive me, I digress.

As you can expect, there is a lot of sex in this book. Much of quite graphic. It’s certainly a long way from the prim and proper science fiction of old, but by itself it achieves very little. I’ll be honest, I don’t care for sex scenes. Ink on a page doesn’t titillate me, I learn nothing about the characters beyond the fact that they’re a pair of absolute horndogs. I am impressed that Spinrad isn’t using female orgasmic hyperdrives to make a feminist argument, but significantly less impressed that one solution to a hyperdive malfunction is to have sex with as many people as possible to see if any woman on board can replicate these weird powers. If Spinrad’s intention was to make my skin crawl, then he’s succeeded.

All of this is a shame, because once you filter through the bizarreness of the story, Spinrad is actually a very good writer. He has an odd habit of throwing in foreign words, but most of them can be grasped from context. On a sentence by sentence level, he is incredibly readable. Leaving aside orgasm hyperdives, his worldbuilding is very interesting. It’s a new take on the ship’s crew dynamic, and I honestly would have like to see more of it.

There’s a test I can’t remember the name of that determines a woman’s relevance to the plot. It suggests replacing the woman with an attractive lamp, and seeing if the plot could still work. By and large, The Void Captain’s Tale would work just as well if, instead of a woman, the titular captain fell in love with an inanimate object. It might even be a more interesting tale. This is the New Wave, however, and we must throw sex into the equation to share how daring we are.

Le sigh.

Deep down, I think The Void Captain’s Tale is fine example of a good book trapped in a bad literary movement. There is a lot to like here, but just like it’s protagonist, it looses itself in a sea of meaningless sex.

Book Stats

• A Standalone Novel
• Published by Timescape in 1983
• 250 Pages