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When you look at the back cover of Norman Spinrad's ‘The Void Captain's Tale’ and see, in big letters, “Welcome aboard the sex-driven void ship…” and read that it is about a spaceship powered by “cosmic orgasms,” you might be forgiven for thinking that it follows, shall we say, a certain format, but it is for a good reason that your mother always told you not to judge a book by its cover. Indeed, the tale therein is set in a future society where everyone is familiar with the tantric arts, and it is true that this practice is observed more than once during the course of the book. Further, even when our captain and narrator is not enjoying the intimate company of his leading ladies but is carrying out his mundane duties, even these passages are charged with a certain spirit of language, a choice of words that perhaps could be said to have secondary meanings, meanings made more explicit as the book goes on.

Yet, in a very real sense, ‘The Void Captain's Tale’ contains no sex whatsoever. It achieves this paradox by approaching the issue with a contrast of its own: on one hand, intercourse considered in that word's other sense, as an everyday social interaction no different in kind to tactful and passionless flirting with colleagues or other acquaintances; on the other, an act of reciprocal stimulation and fulfilment that, while it has the same physical conclusion, lacks the very co-occurrence and mutuality that define the relationship as we understand it.

But I am jumping the gun. Let me start over. From the very first page, Spinrad makes the details of the plot quite clear. The spaceships of the future run on a jumping-through-hyperspace–type technology. The jump is navigated by a woman, a biological component in the mechanism, whose function is to be brought to a momentary and fleeting ecstatic state at the moment of translation. But every once in a million voyages, when the ship jumps, the pilot jumps somewhere else, leaving the ship stranded in the middle of nowhere with no hope of rescue.

Our narrator captains one of these ships. He happens to meet his pilot, and makes the mistake of getting to know her as a human, not just as a component. He starts to reflect on the relationship between captain and pilot. One thing leads to another. Eventually the ship makes a “Blind Jump,” and it is when the ship is marooned that the captain writes his tale.

The situation has one other important point. Void-ships only need a crew of six people, excluding the pilot. The passengers are kept in “electrocoma” for the whole voyage, which takes some time. This might cause some boredom and the attendant performance degradation. In the fifties, the usual sf way of dealing with that issue was to ensure the crew was well-supplied with books, films (invariably on microfilm or some futuristic magnetic tape), and maybe even a chess board or two. But by 1983 (the copyright date; it was not published until the following year), Spinrad could conceive a much more elaborate means of entertainment.

So, in addition to the regular passengers, the ship carries an extra complement of Honoured Passengers: the wealthy and their companions, artists, the great and the good. These spend the voyage in non-suspended animation, feasting, revelling, partying, discussing the great questions of philosophy and art, and making use of the “dream chambers,” usually in pairs. The crew is expected to join in with and be diverted by this floating festival, and to carry on dalliances with one or two of the Honoured Passengers.

This situation allows Spinrad to bring out the traditional image of the lonely hero, surrounded by frolicking, happy people, but brooding on his troubles, troubles he has in part brought onto himself.

The language he uses to describe this is almost as extravagant as the activities of the Honoured Passengers themselves. The language of the future is a kind of patois of English sprinkled with loan-words from every language, with each character having a different blend of linguistic influences depending on their upbringing. You might accuse Spinrad of having had his nose in his thesaurus while writing, but his cross-linguistic extemporisation is its own guarantee, for no thesaurus covers as many languages as he threads together. It sounds on the surface like the talk of poncy pseudo-intellectuals, borrowing from many languages as if to say that their thoughts are far too refined to be expressed by English alone, but the effect is not of exclusion, of being made to feel that one is not educated enough to read this piece; rather of luxury, that the prose envelops and warms you in a quilt of sumptuous excess, almost the same feeling as when reading Bester.

But this work lacks the urgency of Bester, the mad dash from chapter to chapter. Instead, the book ambles along in a civilised, almost stately, straight line from beginning to end. The literary foreshadowings, the parallel repetitions for emphasis, the climax and anticlimax, even those occasions when the narrator steps out of the thread of his tale to speak with hindsight, are not trying to be subtle and clever like the twists of a thriller, but are reassuring. They remind the reader that he is a reader, not a participant. Unlike the close identification, the very personal involvement, that erotica tries to achieve, this book pushes the reader further away, a work of art providing its own white rope.

Like many works of its time, this book felt the influence of Buddhist philosophy. There's use of certain Eastern sexual practices I have already mentioned, and there are also a few loan-words from Sanskrit like karma and maya. In addition, the very plot has a Buddhist flavour. The captain muses quite often on the illusory nature of the observed universe, and part of the plot hinges on some characters trying to ascend to some higher plane of existence, described in a way that is strongly suggestive of the extinction of nirvana, though the method is somewhat different.

In all, this is a pretty odd book. It's entertaining to read, the plot is easy-going but still has a slight sting in the tail, and the prose is warm and engaging, if a little idiosyncratic. It's by no means a great work of literature, but I'd recommend it to anyone; well, I might be embarrassed to recommend it to my mother, but apart from that. But what I want to know is this: how does Spinrad manage to get through the whole book without once referring to the ship's odd propulsion mechanism as the ‘sex drive’?