Teaser

Two men went to Venus, but only one came back. An investigation is inevitable, but the only surviving witness is entirely mad. Did he truly murder his beloved Captain, or were other, more sinister, forces at work . . ?

Review

Good science fiction asks questions. What if humanity encountered aliens? What if every household had a robotic servant? What if we could read each other’s thoughts? Beyond Apollo asks a very different question. What if astronauts were sex-obsessed maniacs?

How much you enjoy this book will depend largely on your tolerance for unreliable narrators. You see, the actual events of the story are quite simple. Two men go into space. One man comes back. But everything else is up for debate. The only surviving witness tells several different versions of what happened up in space, and by the end of the book we’re still no closer to finding out what the truth is. Personally, I did struggle with this aspect of the book. Maybe the astronaut was killed in an accident. Maybe he was murdered. Maybe he committed suicide. Maybe it was all the result of the Venusians manipulating our fragile human minds. Any one of these could make for an interesting story. The problem lies in the fact that they can’t all be true. So we spend a lot of this book – which is only a very short book – reading about things that didn’t happen. It’s a bit of a waste of time.

But then, that’s the way of the New Wave, isn’t it? Beyond Apollo is a New Wave novel through and through. It’s more concerned with the way the story is told than the story that it is telling. There’s also a strong inclination towards shock value. To be honest, I don’t have a problem with shock value in and of itself. Doing something purely to shock is no different to doing something purely to make them laugh, or to cry, or to elicit any other emotional reaction. In many ways, book should seek to provoke the reader. No, the problem is not shock value, but the passage of time. There is a lot of gratuitous and explicit sex in Beyond Apollo, but it’s not as ground-breaking and transgressive today as it was fifty years ago.

My experience with Beyond Apollo is therefore largely one of frustration. There’s a story in here that I would have enjoyed reading. I would have enjoyed a tense confrontation between two astronauts. I would have been thrilled by Venusiuan mental manipulation. I might not have enjoyed the love triangles between astronauts and their wives, but it could have been an interesting story for the right audience. Instead, I read a jumbled mix of all of the above. There’s not enough of any one story to fully latch onto, and anytime I started getting into the narrative, the rug was pulled from beneath my feet. ‘Oh no,’ says Malzberg, ‘we’re not doing that anymore.’

However, I cannot deny that Malzberg is a talented writer. The reason there are so many stories jumbled together is because we only have one madman’s account of what happened. This might be a narrative built on shaky foundations, but it’s a brilliant depiction of a madman’s psyche. Not knowing the truth is an infuriating ending, but it is a plausible one. And even if I was frequently frustrated by choices made in the narrative, I still enjoyed reading the book on a prose level.

This was my first Malzberg, and I doubt it will be my last. A difficult novel to love, but an easy one to appreciate.

Book Stats

• A Standalone Novel
• First Published in 1972
• 138 Pages