THE VOID CAPTAIN'S TALE

by Norman Spinrad ‧ RELEASE DATE: Jan. 3, 1982

In search of Nirvana: suffocating psychobabble, heavy-breathing sex, and karma-massage from the author of Songs from the Stars (1980). Because the human psyche can't bear to contemplate the awful realities of space, voidships are distractive, sybaritic floating palaces. The ships are driven by an electronic psychosexual device (legacy of an alien race now vanished into an ineffable higher realm), into which a human female pilot must be wired; her job, you see, is to reach this higher dimension by achieving an ultimate orgasm--thus jumping the ship through hyperspace! And the story here involves pilot Dominique Alia Wu, who seduces void captain Genro Kane Gupta into thirsting for this transcendent experience himself, in order to goad him into executing an unvectored blind jump. . . which will result in Dominique's permanent promotion to the ecstatic higher cosmos. Only for those wildly titillated, then, by the notion of an sf orgone box (a notion already parodied with panache in Woody Allen's Sleeper)--and for those who'll embrace such comically fulsome prose as: ""the fibers of my body contracting in a coldly glorious final tsunami of formless, modeless, emotionless ecstasy pouring my spirit through my phallus into the vulval void!

Pub Date: Jan. 3, 1982

ISBN: 0011812400

Page Count: -

Publisher: Timescape/Pocket Books--dist. by Simon & Schuster

Review Posted Online: N/A

Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 1, 1982

Categories: FICTION