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. ( )

So good and so frustrating. I picked this up for a dollar and chose a cover that wasn't as good as the one pictured, but I honestly didn't want the Titty Cover. Anyway, this is a really fantastic book and achievement of craft, but it has the most boring 60s/70s science fiction sexual politics imaginable, to a degree that almost embarrassing. I couldn't put it down, but I still feel unsatisfied with it. No puns intended. ( )

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. ( )

This is a brilliant SF novel, presenting an unsolvable puzzle. The narrative is equally hilarious and terrifying, quite impressive. Probably not for all tastes. ( )

This is a small stunner of a book. Malzberg is one of the better pure writers to ever do 'science fiction' and one of the lights of the New Wave of the 1960s and early 1970s. Of course a lot of s.f. people hated this book back in the day for its very frank treatment of sex and its refusal to say things clearly -- or, rather, undisputably. Harry M. Evans is the ne plus ultra of the unreliable narrator. This book has a savage, jumpy purity that makes it nearly as fresh and snarling today as it was 46 (!) years ago. ( )