THE DAY OF THE SPACE VOYAGER

In Walker’s SF/fantasy novel, a 102-year-old recluse in the late 21st century is rejuvenated during a visit from a space alien and then embarks on a time/space odyssey.

In late 21st-century rural Colorado, in an America that’s apparently become a police state, elderly narrator Will Henry lives alone in the forest with his faithful dog. He tells his mystery audience (named Theophilus) how he’d just typed out a final manuscript and looked forward to little but death when an extraordinary event occurred: A “wagon wheel”spacecraft descended containing a humanoid creature with translucent skin and ribbons of subcutaneous color. Contact with the entity restores Henry to his bloom of youth, but it also brings police, so Will, his dog, and the extraterrestrial flee as the cabin is riddled with gunfire. Will learns that his visitor, named Axzum, comes from a breathtaking world called Payraydayzay “boasting every imaginable hue, prompting the onlooker to explore every mountain, canyon, and crevasse.” It once orbited between Mars and Jupiter until a galactic menace corrupted its core and shattered it into pieces, some of which pelted archaic Earth (aka Gaieos), causing mass extinctions. More revelations come after Will discovers that he’s originally of Payraydayzay descent (before several reincarnations); his actual name is Oakruum, and he’s Axzum’s brother.In the wagon-wheel ship, Will zooms to Iowa for a reunion with his long-lost childhood sweetheart, Madeline, who, in truth, is Juulez—another survivor of the Payraydayzay diaspora. Axzum takes them along with him on a time/space distorting mission to recover his own missing mate and daughter. Soon, Will is left to deal with recovered memories, helpful orbs, and an Ethiopian “angel,” as well as sundry other figures and stranded wagon-wheel ships during his journey to find his cosmic selfhood.

Walker’s book is SF as mysticism, tilting heavily toward a Hindu-Buddhism philosophy (“Atman is Brahman” becomes a refrain) as it argues that everything in the outward world is an illusion and that the Universe, including God, lies within every living being. Wickedness deceives people into not knowing one’s true nature, and religion is called out as a particularly detrimental force, due to its false threats of devils and demons. However, the tale does feature a clear antagonist: a rapacious, anti-everything entity called the Nuul, whose hordes tore Payraydayzay apart at the seams. Readers may or may not absorb how it all turns out in the end, due to the narrative’s mind-addling journeys through portals, shape-shifts, and orb-hunting in extreme environments. However, Walker effectively makes scattered attempts to bring the careening voyage down to Earth at times with references to real-life people and things, such as Galileo Galilei, Vincent Van Gogh, and the historic and untranslatable museum curio called the Voynich Manuscript, which, in this story, was written in Payraydayzay. Readers who are familiar with David Lindsay’s classic of SF eschatology, A Voyage to Arcturus (1920), may know what to expect when they punch a ticket for the Payraydayzay express.

Surreal and hallucinatory spiritual SF that some readers may find baffling.