Book Review: Beyond Apollo

Barry N. Malzberg
1972
Awards: Campbell
Rating: ★ ★ – – –

Do not expect a tidy, traditional science fiction novel when reading Beyond Apollo.

For one thing, it is a metafiction. Which is, as the study questions explain at the end of the 2015 paperback edition, “a narrative about narratives that is conscious of itself as a narrative.” It is a novel about a man—our main character—who is writing notes in preparation for writing a novel about a traumatic event that happened to him. And, since our main character is insane (at least at the time he is writing about writing his novel), this leads to quite a bit of surreal twisting of points of reference.

Beyond Apollo is also a story of mental exploration, rather than a story about concrete events. It is ostensibly about the death of another man, but the circumstances surrounding the other man’s death are only described after the fact by our main character, who is either this other man’s murderer or the only witness to his suicide. And our main character’s descriptions are so schizophrenic it makes you question which parts of his story are real—or if any of it is.

Our main character is Harry M. Evans, an astronaut in the early 21st century, who is the co-pilot on the first manned mission to Venus. At some point during the voyage, Harry and the Captain appear to have both gone insane. The Captain eventually ended up somehow getting into the toilet disposal module and then being ejected into space with the refuse, headed straight for the sun. It is unclear if the Captain ejected himself or if Harry did it, and, if the latter, whether Harry did it in a murderous state himself, or in self-defense against a murderous Captain.

After the Captain was ejected (or ejected himself), Harry was able to pilot the capsule back to Earth by himself, alone, and is now being held in a mental institution while the therapists try to get him to tell them what happened. They are growing increasingly frustrated because Harry tells them a wildly different version of events each time.

During his stay in the institution, Harry is taking notes and planning to write a novel about his voyage to Venus. He keeps saying in his notes—which make up many of the chapters—that once his novel is complete, it will set the record completely straight. But after so many tales, you don’t really believe it.

Some of the chapters are written in the first person, as if Harry is telling us his memories from the capsule. Some are written in the third person, as if he is telling a fiction story about some other astronaut. Some chapters are about the asylum and the experiences he is having there; some are about the voyage; and some are flashbacks to the weeks just before the voyage, when he and the Captain were going through training and still (relatively) sane (although it becomes clear that the seeds for insanity were clearly planted in both of them before they even stepped into their ship). It all gives the novel a jumbled, disjointed feeling, paralleling what is going on in Harry’s brain.

There are definitely parts of the novel that are enjoyable. The alternate versions of the Captain’s death, as told by Harry to his therapist, are usually the best parts. Malzberg also write some funny “histories” of the solar system (which usually present the solar system as coming into being at some point in the 20th century) sprinkled throughout the book. And when he is at his best, Malzberg has a cynical, absurdist sense of humor along the lines of his chronological compatriots Kurt Vonnegut and Joseph Heller. For example, at one point during their mission training, the Captain tells Harry that he has discovered that their charted course will cause the ship to miss the orbit of Venus and head directly into the sun. But he is not going to tell the technicians, because “there’s no point in making complications for them.”

For the most part, however, the book feels like frustratingly pointless, overly clever free association at the expense of the reader’s mental energy. The book sets out tantalizing mysteries—both the Captain’s murder and allusions to a similar Mars mission disaster—but never really tells us what happened in either one. Nothing ever really changes or resolves throughout the storyline; we are told one kooky version of the Captain’s death after another, and we live through flashbacks in Harry’s life that do provide us with clues as to why he might have gone mad in such a crazy-making environment, but neither he nor the plot ever really change or develop from beginning to end.

All of this would be perfectly okay if the writing was rivetingly descriptive, or funny, or artful… or if the characters were likeable, or clever, or in the least bit appealing. But unfortunately it is not, and they are not. It’s all about what is going on in Harry’s mind, and we find that it’s draining to be hitched to the mind of a psychotic.

I also found it a bit grade-schoolish that Harry (or perhaps Malzberg) seemed obsessed with the effects of various stimuli on his genitalia. We constantly had to hear how heat, cold, G-forces, fear, anger, or desire were affecting Harry’s private parts. And, in a similar vein, there are what seemed like dozens of flashback scenes of depressing, unromantic, unsexy sex between Harry and his wife, which his wife has absolutely no interest in or response to. Each incident is completely non-sensual and impersonal, with her just waiting him out. She often keeps up a running commentary the whole time about how he needs to quit the space program, and he tries to ignore her. It’s pretty repellent.

Harry obsesses about games and puzzles—crosswords, cryptograms, chess problems, anagrams, bridge hands—in an effort to find the code, the clue, the combination of logic that will help him regain his sanity. None of them work, of course, and Malzberg has Harry jump from one to another type of puzzle haphazardly, so they end up seeming just like fun games that the writer wanted to play with for a time, rather than anything meaningful to the story line.

The whole book, in fact, feels very much like a mental exercise for the benefit of the writer. And it is perhaps an exercise that is most enjoyed by other writers, who understand and appreciate the games Malzberg is playing, rather than the science fiction reader who is probably just in it for a fun story.

Beyond Apollo was written in the early 1970s, at a time when dramatic scientific discoveries were being made in outer space in real life. According to author James Reich, who wrote the introduction to the 2015 paperback edition, many writers of the time felt that real scientific discovery was killing traditional science fiction. Once we found out that Venus was utterly uninhabitable, for example, it made it impossible and pointless to write an exciting novel about discovering life on Venus. The only solution, Malzberg and other like-minded authors felt, was to turn inwards, and to write stories about adventures of the mind, rather than the physical world.

I wouldn’t go so far as to say that this theory is a complete cop-out. There definitely are good novels from this era that are largely journeys of the mind (like much of Roger Zelazny’s work, or Frederick Pohl’s Man Plus). Some of these good novels are even about a similar sort of post-traumatic-space-journey therapeutic recovery, like Pohl’s Gateway.

But I beg to differ with the conclusion that this kind of inner-mind focus is the only way to write science fiction in an age of scientific discovery. Kim Stanley Robinson and Arthur C. Clarke are just two stellar examples of how increased scientific knowledge actually can provide even more fodder for beauty and inspiration in science fiction.

And, at its worst, Malzberg’s variety of inner-directed storytelling can all too often descend into self-indulgent noodling. Which is what most of Beyond Apollo felt like to me.