“One Long Discomfort”: The Legacy and Future of David Lindsay’s ‘A Voyage to Arcturus’

By Ben Schwartz

David Lindsay’s masterpiece A Voyage to Arcturus was first published in London in 1920 by Methuen & Co. It came dressed in a simple red cloth cover; no dust jacket, just the title and author’s name debossed into the front. This first printing sold less than 600 copies, and so Arcturus didn’t come to the US until Macmillan brought it out in 1964…

We Who Are Alive: The End Times On Screen

When I was about 7 or 8, one of the girls in my neighborhood explained what would happen to me if I didn’t become a Jehovah’s Witness. She said that we were all living in the “last days,” that the world was a horrible place full of sin and disease and false prophets, and that God was coming back soon to rescue His “sheep”—those baptized into the Jehovah’s Witnesses…

The Illustrated Rapture: ‘There’s a New World Coming’, 1974

Hal Lindsey’s bestselling The Late, Great Planet Earth, originally published by the Zondervan Corporation in 1970, revolutionized the Christian publishing industry and introduced the mainstream to rapture or “end times” terminology and imagery, which took root in America with Puritan settlers Increase and Cotton Mather. It was the first Christian book to be reprinted by a major publisher—Bantam, in 1973—directly after the Bantam edition of Chariots of the Gods? became a phenomenon…