Beyond Apollo

by Barry N. Malzberg

THE FIRST VENUS EXPEDITION RETURNS TO EARTH

Harry M. Evans, the lone survivor, has the shocking knowledge of its fate locked in his skull. Only he knows what deadly, mind-bending beings exist on Venus. Only he has experienced their awesome power and survived.

The world waits in mortal fear for him to speak....

Genres: Science Fiction, Fiction, Speculative Fiction, 20th Century, Mystery, Novels, Collections

153 pages, Mass Market Paperback

First published January 1, 1972

About the author

Barry Nathaniel Malzberg was an American writer and editor, most often of science fiction and fantasy.

He had also published as:
Mike Barry (thriller/suspense)
K.M. O'Donnell (science fiction/fantasy)
Mel Johnson (adult)
Howard Lee (martial arts/TV tie-ins)
Lee W. Mason (adult)
Claudine Dumas (adult)
Francine di Natale (adult)
Gerrold Watkins (adult)
Eliot B. Reston

Reviews

[mark monday · Rating 4 out of 5]

MYSTERY IN SPACE!



a mystery in space of How Did the Captain of the Venusian Expedition Die? is not the mystery in space the mystery in space is the mystery of the inner space the mystery of the confined madman and hopeful author and failed husband and tragic victim and master of projection and master of binary thinking and yet still somehow the master of accepting all probabilities all potentialities all things and possible murderer and time traveler and a lover both impotent and hyper-potent, the lone survivor, the unhappy astronaut Col. Harry Evans the mystery of the space between a man and a woman, a man and a man, a man and himself the mystery of sex, the banality of it, its constancy in the mind and its transformation of the body, its shaping of things into shapes shameful and quickly hidden away the mystery of a genre called New Wave Science Fiction, barely remembered, a genre that challenged its own genre and a genre that blazed bright and briefly and full of a strange stylized mockingly literary playfulness, a genre that pushes all sorts of buttons and pulls all kinds of levers, my mind moving in all directions, sparking and flashing, a constant smile on my lips at the ingenuity of it all as for the mystery in question, a sad Earthly answer: your wife no longer loves you, why is that why is that, perhaps a trip to Venus will solve this riddle, perhaps you can write a book, perhaps you can recreate reality, perhaps you can run away, perhaps things will be better then but probably not probability says no

One of the theories of the new mystics was that all of space was merely a projection of the inner wastes of man and that space exploration therefore became merely another dull metaphor for internal exploration: up against Mars, Venus, Ceres or the moon the voyager was merely confronting one or another pyramid reared in his own damaged psyche. Under this theory, the rationalization for space exploration became preposterous. One would have been better off accepting from the beginning the internal truth of oneself or, failing that, seeking competent care in an institution where for relaxation cryptograms, hairgrayers, puzzles, and sexual biography would serve the essential purposes while keeping allotted time free for introspection and the consideration of inner space.

[Bradley · Rating 5 out of 5]

This here is a very unusual novel.

Most of the time I read it, I was equally disgusted and remorseful for the kinds of pathetic sexualizations that came out of the early 70's. Being a New Wave SF novel, thoroughly in league with the heyday's literary works of "genius" in that the complicated concerns of mainstream knocked heads with a heavily SFnal landscape, I shouldn't have guessed otherwise. Sexuality was always made so large that they became frankly absurd. And the best novels turned this on its head and gave us Pure Absurdity.

I think Beyond Apollo, which might rightfully be renamed Beyond Venus, is one of those novels.

The fixation on sex is fully intentional every step of the way. It's rife with a lack of self-awareness and hyperawareness, impotence and hyperpotence, guilt and anger with his wife and wanting relations with his male captain, and possibly murder. Multiple murders. In all kinds of ways.

On the surface, it's just a failed expedition to Venus in a two-man capsule and trying to come to terms with being the only survivor.

Things get REALLY weird like an LSD trip when the MC tells us he will write the story as a novel, starts mixing his identities, gets super fixated on sex, aliens living on Venus, his multiple failures and rationalizations, his horrible marriage, and even the possibility that all of outer space is just a story we just made up. That timelines are like revisions in the story. That the universe is nothing more than a meta-fiction. That time travel, the re-ordering of the Solar-System, and a sense that everything is as malleable as virtual reality is a major question... or that, indeed, the narrator is BUGSHIT INSANE.

Actually... the whole novel is kinda brilliant. If not always consistently great, it is nonetheless brilliant. I'm willing to hate it a little while appreciating just how it always keeps us teetering on the edge of full collapse. :) Is this a novel about a man who goes into total mental fugue after a bad breakup with his wife? Or could he have been significantly f***ed with by the Venusians?

Who knows? :) Either way, it's pretty damn great. I love to hate it a little, too. :) Or a lot. But damn... PROPS.

[Jamie · Rating 4 out of 5]

There are precious few certainties to be gleaned from Beyond Apollo, apart from the fact that it is a complete and total mindfuck. It's an unwinding of the psyche, absurd and maddening in its own way. A man apparently driven mad by the extreme stress and desolation of space travel while on a mission to Venus on which the captain was killed (or murdered?). It is also perhaps a rebuke of the bloated bureaucracy and perceived vainglory of the space program of the 1960's. Coming on the heels of the enormously successful Apollo moon landing this is difficult to fathom, but Malzberg tells of waning political and public support for several subsequent moon missions and then a near fatal deterioration of support after a failed mission to mars.

All of this is written in the guise of the narrator writing a novel about his mission, in a quest to uncover the truth in as most indirect fashion as possible, further casting doubt on the truth of everything revealed. Along with the contradictory and frequently absurd revelations of events on the mission there are confounding accounts of his strained emotional and (crudely described) sexual relationship with his wife, homoerotic fantasies, encounters with xenophobic and telepathic Venusian aliens, an obsession with cryptograms and anagrams, episodes in which he detaches his consciousness from both his body and time, feelings of helplessness (embodied in the complete lack of controls in his spacecraft) and an underlying sense of distrust pervading all of his relationships with others.

In the final analysis an interesting, although somewhat baffling read, and while not exactly entertaining it is compelling in its own way.

[Craig · Rating 5 out of 5]

Beyond Apollo is my favorite of Malzberg's books. Though it's now quite dated in a number of ways, when it was published fifty (!) years ago it was a very influential work in which he incorporated his view of the genre with the reality of the government directed space program and filtered it all through the paranoia and social upheaval of the turbulent previous decade. I was fourteen or so when I first read it, and (in the parlance of the time) it blew my mind on a number of levels. It was science fiction, but it was about sex and obsession and science fiction and science and was bleak and depressed and the absolute definition of intended unreliable narration. I still marvel that a book that was so much the antithesis of everything he seemed to believe won the John Campbell Award. It may be something of an obscure curiosity now, but it was instrumental in standing the field on its ear at the time.

[Stephen · Rating 5 out of 5]

5.0 stars. Arguably Barry Malzberg's finest novel and certainly the one he is most remembered for. A one of a kind novel that is "unlike" any other novel I have ever read. Certainly not "light" reading but one that has stayed with me even though it has been years since I first read it.

Winner: John W. Campbell Memorial Award for Best Novel (1973)
Nominee: Locus Award for Best Science Fiction Novel (1973).

P.S. I just re-read the novel on January 21, 2010, and the novel has not lost any of its power. HIGHLY RECOMMENDED!!

[Nate D · Rating 4 out of 5]

Continuing project: pinpointing the more outre instances of new wave science fictional experimentation. While on the one hand there's a certain sense here that the hyper-prolific, wildly uneven Malzberg may simply be re-routing various post-modern narrative discoveries of his time, on the other, the post-modern discoveries of his time are actually very well suited to conveying his story: of psychological deterioration and narrative fragmentation under the extreme stress and confinement of space travel.

Written in 1972 and set in 1981, this one (one of those odd cases, like Dhalgren, when one of a writer's most experimental works may be their best known) deals with the collapse of the hopes of the space program. The Apollo program was ultimately unfulfilling, a subsequent Mars mission has gone wrong, and now our narrator has just returned from the two-man venus mission, alone and apparently unable to come up with the truth of his experiences to convey to his superiors. Instead, he supplies a constant stream of garbled memory, fabricated endings, possible explanations, general disconsolation about the collapse of his marriage just prior to and concurrent with the mission, other psychosexual disturbance (a favorite with Malzberg narrators making it difficult to extract whether its Malzberg or his avatars who seem to have an iffy relationship with the opposite sex) -- and then, of course, notes towards the novel he hopes to write to at last disclose the full experience of the trip, which may be the one the reader is holding.

But it's not just a haphazarding of fragments of narrative possibility (although that may be the essential form), but a deeper sense of structure comes through. In particular, the intimations that it all could just be yet another simulation designed to pinpoint psychological instability pre-mission (or else, it's not but the stresses of similar tests create instability in any member of the space program pre mission). Or better yet, where does the warping effect of the mission give off and where begins the warping effect of the chillingly undescribed "mechanical interrogation" that the frustrated Program resorts to? (The beginning of such hidden, brilliantly, from view by a dissociation into a third person viewpoint that quietly watches the narrator dragged from the room and away, left to search for meaning alone. Oh yes, or perhaps we should think on the automated mission control that leaves the two-man Venus crew entirely spectators to, well, their own narrative.

[Ira (SF Words of Wonder) · Rating 3 out of 5]

Check out my full, spoiler light, video review HERE. This is a very odd read that is hard to rate. It’s a simple premise about 2 astronauts on a mission to be the first humans to step foot on Venus. The narrator is the 2nd in command but the mission seems to have made him go insane, so the book is written in fragments and the reader doesn’t even know if any of it is true. I really enjoyed most of the book, but the ending let me down a bit. I’m looking forward to reading more Malzberg in the future.

[David Agranoff · Rating 4 out of 5]

The first read of my 2019 retro-sci-fi reads is a re-read of the Barry Malzberg classic Beyond Apollo. I first read this ten years ago, but I thought I would have more of context for it now. I did some research recently on BNM's career and history.

This short novel is the essence of out of date science fiction. It is about the first expedition to Venus a planet that we now know is too hot to visit. We have lots of great pictures in orbit but the idea of going to land on Venus is pretty silly. I like reading the out of date stuff because you get an idea of the imagination was at the time, in this case, 1972. Clearly, in the space race, the Apollo missions were coming to an end and no one really knew where the space exploration was going after the Apollo program. This story suggests a disaster during a 1976 Mars landing and the idea that we would be sending people to Venus in 1981 is pretty optimistic.

In many ways, BO is like a slightly harder sci-fi take on similar ideas that Lem explored in Solaris. He keeps it in the solar system and takes advantage of early 70's free love attitudes. I mean there is lots of adult language and tons of sex that feels very out of place and a bit awkward.

The narrative is told from the POV of Harry Evans first officer on the Venus expedition mostly in first person unreliable style. This works pretty well especially when his sanity starts slipping. Was he in psychic communication with Venusian Snake people or is he losing his mind? The theme of the novel appears about the idea that the vast-ness of space may just be too much for our puny little brains.

I am not sure I would call this short novel a masterpiece but it is a quick and interesting read. The author's contribution to the genre may be more as an agent and editor but he is giant and I give this novel a lot of respect. You have to keep the era written in mind or you'll have a lot to laugh off. That said I glad to have this on my shelf.

Note: This book was recommended to me by my friend Robert Garfat the first time I met him when I walked into his book store in Victoria Canada. I knew the man had good taste right away and left with this book and some Spinrad I came in there to find.

Full podcast breaking down the novel I did with James Reich:
https://soundcloud.com/dickheadspodca...

And my interview with Barry for the Dickheads (PKD) podcast:

https://soundcloud.com/dickheadspodca...

[Whitney (SecretSauceofStorycraft) · Rating 3 out of 5]

So weird.

This book follows the non-linear chapters of the only survivor of a trip to Venus, a man whose captain died and he becomes increasingly unstable as the book goes on. Many pieces of this story are only hinted at in the background or told through the man’s sexual difficulties with his wife (which seem to be about much more…)

I understand why some people find this book a masterwork, as it is multilayered, also breaks the fourth wall, and unreliable narrator makes an interesting aspect—- but it will never be mainstream as it does NOT have mass appeal—only for niche audiences.

I felt ambivalent about it.

[Kim Lockhart · Rating 2 out of 5]

If you like your Sci-Fi with a heaping dose of delusional misogyny, then this book is for you. I gave it two stars instead of one, because at least it was mercifully short.

[Fantasy boy · Rating 4 out of 5]

Beyond Apollo by Barry N Malzberg is a new wave Science fiction. It’s unlike standard Sci-Fi novels which I have read. The story is about Evans the copilot is an unreliable narrator that who couldn’t tell what had exactly happened during the Venus expedition. His incapable of having sex with his wife, the threat by Venusians and the death of the captain are all around the failure of the Venus mission. The story is not a linear time line as usual Sci-Fi books. Furthermore, the POV frequently switches from first person to third person, so that it’s difficult to pin down what exactly had happened in the story. Every time Evans was explaining his relationships with the captain and his wife, it impossibly pinpoint Evans’s relationships with the two. It’s easily to find the saying by Evans would be contradictory to the later statements to the previous. His conversations with his dead uncle, the interrogator, X,Y,Z who were on Mars mission that makes the story more obscure. Beyond Apollo was deliberately written in this kind of style, not giving the full picture of the story to readers’s understanding. Mostly New Wave writers have written not typically standard book, It is one of the examples to it.

The author mixes multiple different elements to let the Venus mission be more mysterious than I have ever imagined that could be. Evans mentioned he had time traveled to 1976 to warn X,Y,Z the mission is going to fail, but didn’t say what was his intention to do the time travel and how he did it. The conversations with Evans’s dead uncle and Venusians are connected to the Venus mission without the fact of the fail mission. Is it Evans’s hallucinations or not I don’t exactly know. All the elements that laden on the Ill- fated Venus mission is more surreal to the reading experience.

The narrator somehow recreate the reality which is around the myths of the Venus mission, like PKD’s science fictions, the more you think, the more you can’t comprehend the nature of reality. Most of time the narrators may have the ability to create their own version of reality.

[Graham P · Rating 4 out of 5]

Perhaps one of top disruptive novels ever written in the SF universe. Playful and perverse, this is such a tear and rip in regards to the operatic space-travel standard. This is like a good dose of fuck-you to convention and the Golden-Age mold that cemented the genre's scope before 1972 when this novel was released. Barry Malzberg seemed pissed off not only at the storytelling & heroic form, but also of America, especially the space race and America's part in it. Everybody is a sucker, so why not play them dry?

Conspiracy theories come across in rapid succession as our astronaut hero, Harry Evans, tries to write the novel of his aborted mission to Venus. Not only that, it is a duplicitous analysis of schizophrenia and slaptick, murder to the head, verbal hijinks played like locker-room chatter as performed by Samuel Beckett's tropes, and lots of sex with astronaut wives. Really, madness has never fitted both so wrong and so well into science fiction. Its abundance in playing the fool is something to applaud.

No wonder why this stirred the pot back in the day, and one can still hear that collective groan from the US authors on top, prim and proper wordsmiths cringing at all the sex, the passages of endless impotency, the shit into space jokes, the latent homosexuality, the carnivorous and inept feeding tube that psychoanalysis shirked alongside the NASA brass, and especially the unreliable narrator (which reminds me to come up with a list of the best books with unreliable narrators). This is all a scalding satire complete with sodomy and Venusian aliens, and thank you to Barry Malzberg for not giving a rat's ass. My first novel of his, and surely not my last of his. Guernica Night and Revelations are knocking at the back door. Malzberg is the foul jester of our beloved genre, surely.

[Courts · Rating 4 out of 5]

What the hell did I just read? An LSD trip scribbled onto the page, the deconstruction of the sci-fi genre? Who knows.

Beyond Apollo is imaginative and bizarre, often straddling the line between nonsense and cleverness, sometimes leaving that line far behind.

What I truly enjoyed about the book is that unlike pretty much every book I've ever read, Beyond Apollo gives you nothing to latch onto. You cannot be sure of anything, cannot grasp on to any genuine shred of personality from the main character, Harry, as he journeys through his own madness.

Harry spends a lot of time imagining having perfunctory and bland sex with the wife he seems to loathe and spends even more time homoerotically contemplating every man he meets. Did he murder the Captain of the Venus ship? I don't know. Did they even go to Venus? I don't know.

Harry is such an unreliable and metatextual narrator that I'm still confused about what I just read. But I liked it.

[Nate · Rating 4 out of 5]

Bemused Apollo

I knew it was big deal in new wave for those in the know but I don’t know exactly what happened.
This is the first Malzberg I’ve read and he’s a great writer, no doubt but my brain still hurts after finishing it.
It seems to boil down to the author slinging shit at the space program, how it lacks funding or public support and sends neurotic, unqualified, latently gay dudes into space knowing they will fail (and maybe do some off the books butt stuff)
The story takes place in the early 80s when only one man returns from a two man expedition to Venus.
The real mind fuck of it is the plethora of stories the survivor tells about the mission.
He just rapid fires different explanations, scenarios and possibilities about the events of the mission to the point that I questioned everything. Was there a second guy? Did he even go to space? Was he ever able to make his wife cum?
I’m not 100% sure.

[Erik Graff · Rating 2 out of 5]

Frankly, I found this acclaimed innovative dytopian science fiction novel irritating. The bibliographical card written at the time says simply "poor scifi."

[Bart · Rating 5 out of 5]

(...)

It is no surprise that a book that is essentially anti-explanation, anti-narrative and anti-idealism still manages to irritate certain readers in the 21st century.

Not everybody has the stamina of the active nihilist, and authors that pop our fluffy dreams are much easier to accuse of being crazy, nonsensical druggies than to take serious, and believe.

Please read the full review on Weighing A Pig

[Jheurf · Rating 1 out of 5]

A lot has been said about this book, so I won't go into details.

All I'll say is that I found it painful and boring. Intellectually, I understood it was narrated by a crazy person, but that could not stop me from cringing at all the mechanical sex and misogyny and closet homo-sexuality. Signs of the times I guess.

Halfway through and I'm done with this. Like a previous reviewer said: "I wasn't reading it because I enjoyed it, but because I wanted it to end."

[Jared Colley · Rating 5 out of 5]

This is a hilarious (and at times offensive) sci-fi novel. Malzberg is one of the great new wave sci-fi writers that has now fallen through the cracks. Probably can't find this one in print, but libraries should have it.

[cycads and ferns · Rating 4 out of 5]

“On one of these nights I dream that the Captain is falling again. He is falling through the capsule into the center of the sun….I beg him to be controlled and assume command of the voyage again, but he says he cannot because of the forces of gravity….I wonder why I do not follow my commander into the sun and be done with it….”

Two men, Captain Jack Josephson and copilot Harry Evans, are on a spaceship heading to Venus. Or maybe there was just one man and possibly no flight at all.
During the flight, the Captain and Evans discuss the purpose of their mission to Venus, with the various answers casting the US space program and governmental policies in an unflattering light.
Evans says, "…the reason we're going to Venus, the truthful reason, is that there's an enormous amount of hardware and administrative bureaucracy which must be utilized….Also, our going will keep people's minds off our international policy.”
And then later Evans answers, "The reason we're going to Venus is that the administration knows there are Venusians and they hope to precipitate an interplanetary war which will draw the nations of earth close together against a common enemy as the only means of survival. The psychologists figured it out and the administrators went along."

The Captain never returns from this mission because he killed himself, or he was brutally murdered by Evans, or Evans accidentally kills the Captain while fighting off unwanted sexual advances, or the Venusian snakes telepathically interfered to make one of these options possible. Evans, aborting the mission, returns to Earth and was questioned by medical personnel. Dr Claude Forrest insists that Evans explain the Captain’s death and the failure of the mission.
In one of the many sessions between Evans and Dr Forrest, Evans becomes violent.
“…but Evans, quite mad, is beyond any interventions of reason or Forrest or anyone else: they are alone in the room, Evans chokes him, Forrest dies; Evans breaks his neck, Forrest dies; Evans shatters his medulla with a backhanded chop and Forrest dies; Evans mounts him like a horse and rides him to suffocation and Forrest dies; again and again he dies, again and again Evans kills him- curiously satisfying it is, being able to work one's will at last. Forrest dies, Forrest dies: the attendants stand by the wall rubbing their hands and muttering to one another. They look pleased….Forrest groans under Evans and becomes the Captain, the Captain dies too; both Forrest and the Captain die together, two for the price of one, and oh, oh, oh, the satisfaction of it!”
Evans offers various versions of the past, frustrating Dr Forrest, and decides finally to write a novel called Beyond Apollo.

"’I loved the Captain in my own way, although I knew that he was insane, the poor bastard,’ I say. ‘This was only partly his fault: one must consider the conditions. The conditions were intolerable.’
And realize then what I have said. Forrest sighs, Evans sighs, the attendant sighs, they crumple in the hall, and I can see from the dull glare in Forrest's eyes that it is hopeless, quite hopeless.
He will never understand. None of them will understand. And I do not know the language to teach them.
‘This will never work,’ I say.”

[Richard · Rating 2 out of 5]

This novel promised in the earlier chapters,it seemed,to be an interesting and unusual chronicle of uncertainty and madness,that could have been an exciting excursion of surreal ambiguity and strange invention,but instead disintegrates into a cluttered mass of rambling and vague vistas of boring,repressed sexual fantasies and the vague notions of an insane survivor of a doomed expedition to Venus,whose memory of the terrible events is apparently impaired.He emerges as nothing more than mad,there being nothing more interesting about his character and the fact than that.

This was supposed to be a sort of polemic of the space program,and within the content of the book,this is apparent and quite interesting I suppose,but because of the lack of any real exposition,seemed to emerge as a lacquered version of old fashioned space exploration and astronauts.There was nothing unusual or challenging evident in the texture of it,nothing to make you sympathise with the psychological plight of the hero Evans,despite the obvious trauma.

I must say,it had quite a precise and readable style of prose and dialogue that rendered it quite engaging,but think the character development was unclear,and somewhere past the second half of the book,it devolved into a fussy drama that I couldn't wait to finish.As an experimental novel,it failed miserably I think.

[James Kemp · Rating 5 out of 5]

This was a difficult read. At first it seemed incoherent trash, and I put it down frequently. Having finished it I believe it is a work of genius.

Only the relative shortness made me keep picking it back up.

I picked it to read as it seemed like it would be a hard SF space flight story. To some extent it is, however what it really covers is the ascent from insanity of the lone survivor of the failed two man mission to Venus. The seemingly incoherent start is merely a reflection of the main character's madness and lack of grip on reality. Slowly we are presented with many different explanations for what may have happened, which grow more and more plausible as the character recovers. Although it is never properly resolved, but it doesn't need to, the point of the story being about the effects of long term travel in a confined space.

[Dan · Rating 5 out of 5]

At certain times I felt like giving this book a 3 star rating. It was just so darn confusing. However, I suppose that was just part of the story telling. On the topic of story-telling, this is the most bizarre piece I've ever encountered from any form of media. Names change, stories change, sexuality changes, dreams might be dreams or lies or maybe even government induced hallucinations.

Read it.

[Damian Murphy · Rating 3 out of 5]

Re-read to give another chance. Still three stars. Malzberg is vaguely clever here, but it all comes off like something he just made up as he went along. I have no problem with an author doing that, but I expect them to be clever enough to make it look like they did otherwise.

[Bryan Alexander · Rating 4 out of 5]

I first read this book when I was a teenager and understood... some of it. I've dipped back into from time to time as my literary studies increased. Now I reread it for our local science fiction book club.

Beyond Apollo is a short science fiction novel based on the idea that humanity sends its first crewed mission to Venus, after a Mars expedition fails badly. Something goes wrong and only one astronaut returns, quite insane. The book is that survivor's attempt to tell his story from within a mental institution. The result is a fragmented text by an extremely unreliable narrator. It's ultimately metafiction, as Evans turns his notes into a science fiction novel called... Beyond Apollo.

Rereading it now... I accurately remembered the unreliable invention. Tasked with describing what happened, the narrator tells story after story, imagining conversations and encounters with multiple characters to various degrees of plausibility. There was a fight with the other astronaut. The other astronaut tried to kill him. Aliens played a role. Etc. The narrator disassociates, sometimes in first person, otherwise in third, never establishing a ground truth. It becomes a shaggy dog meta-story.

...we will instead write sixty-seven chapters - I think of the novel as having many chapters, some of them interlocking, others never seeming to fit at all; a crazy dazzle this, but I am no novelist... (97)

The reader might feel sympathy with Evans' therapist who, desperately trying to get to the bottom of things, loses patience and possibly his own mind. (His name, Forrest, suggests to me someone lost in a dark one.)

It becomes clear that the book is a critique/satire of the American space program. Astronauts are not heroes but badly damaged people manipulated by an inhumane and incompetent bureaucracy. It's a darker version of Delany's great story and anticipates Pelevin's fiercely anti-heroic Omon Ra (1991). I'm also reminded of the odd film "about" Neil Armstrong, First Man (2018) as well as Kim Stanley Robinson's Aurora (2015), which argues against human space exploration. We could think of some of these titles constituting an anti-space subgenre within sf.

Ultimately for Malzberg's story science fiction becomes the book's target as a source of unreasonable expectations and stories. Here Beyond Apollo reminds me of Norman Spinrad's contemporary The Iron Dream or, more gently, Allen M. Steele's Orbital Decay. (1989) The captain even gets a series of manly, mockable names.

Malzberg's prose is excellent, clear and playful. He also adds fine word choice, as when someone gets hit by "a siege of coughing" (61?)

The book is dated in two ways. First, it draws power from coming right after the Apollo triumph in 1969, a moment hard to grasp now. Second, its depiction of gender and especially sex is very much of its moment. The one woman we see is a sex object with no life other than serving our narrator. Their relationship is hideous and possibly predicated on marital rape. Yet Evans describes her, and sex, largely in clinical terms - like another contemporary novel, Vonnegut's Breakfast of Champions. I think this would strike 2025's readers as off-putting at least, if not horribly sexist and spoiling the book entirely.

Here's a fine image for the book. (first page of that pdf)

[Tom Britz · Rating 1 out of 5]

Beyond Apollo was probably the worst book I've read in quite a while. It was written in 1972 amid the New Wave movement in science fiction. New wave was supposed to be characterized by a great degree of experimentation with the form and content of stories. But I tend to agree with Bob Shaw
in Foundation, "Malzberg's Beyond Apollo is, to me, the epitome of everything that has gone wrong with sf in the last ten years or so." This novel was supposed to be about the first manned flight to Venus, but it was a mishmash of porn and insanity.
The main character, Evans comes across as insane. Evans was the co-pilot and Captain Josephson go through rigorous training and supposedly blast off for Venus. But Evans is the only one to come back. During his debriefing, he tells so many different stories of what happened that the reader has no idea which is true. The stories he tells involve Venusians demanding that they turn around and go back or there will be consequences, but as I said so many different versions are told the reader is not only confused, but if he is like me he's angry. The book is only 157 or so pages or I would have tossed it. The book won the first John W. Campbell award which supposedly celebrates the best work in English. I question the veracity of that. I will never again pick this book up and reread it, in fact, I have a few more books by Barry N. Malzberg and I won't be in a hurry to pick up any of them. It won't be much of an exaggeration to say that the character is talking about his dick or someone else's or he's having sex with someone or thinking of it on damn near every page. This was the worst unreliable narrator I've ever come across. I still have no idea if they did indeed go to Venus or not.

[Irene · Rating 2 out of 5]

I didn’t like this book really, but it was interesting. As with some other New Wave sf I’ve read recently, this one was clearly LSD-influenced. Some redeeming humor in the form of political commentary vis-à-vis advances in metaphysics.

Sexually explicit in an almost Nabokovian way, it forced me to think a lot about sex in sf. About taking the most base of human activities and intermixing them with the most technologically exulted.

Finally, I think it’s funny to read sf set in a future that is now the past, but got it totally wrong. Like prophets who predict the end of the world only to have their dates go by with the world left unscathed, this sf really doesn’t stand up very well today.

[Ben Arzate · Rating 5 out of 5]

FULL REVIEW HERE

This novel is a definite recommendation. It’s not for everyone, but it’s certainly entertaining, often very funny and very thought-provoking. Much of Malzberg’s work is out of print but hopefully more will be coming back in the near future. He deserves to be named among the other greats of New Wave science fiction like J.G. Ballard and Harlan Ellison.

[Scott Nieradka · Rating 4 out of 5]

My friend gave me this book to make me suffer, but it really is almost a good book. some parts are typical malzberg offensive, or really too much information, but the book is saved by a playful gritty feel, and a general uncertainty about what is real or not that persists to the end. A surprisingly good book.

[Vicki Dee Rock · Rating 2 out of 5]

I saw a preponderance of positive 5 star reviews on this book ... Unfortunately, I didn't experience it that way. Its interesting ... different ... but ultimately unsatisfying. I felt compelled to finish it, in hopes that I would understand it more clearly if I reached the end ... but, alas, not really. And I did not look forward to reading it. I looked forward to finishing it.

[Jim · Rating 2 out of 5]

I don't give many 2 star reviews but I'm going to do it here. I think Barry Malzberg ( 1939-2024) is a good writer but in the case of this book, it. just. didn't. work. for. me.
It's "New Wave" sci-fi, from 1972, and you have to question the reality of what is going on. Are we getting the truth or not? I was not in the mood... I could try it again...or maybe not...