 He explained that the novel was inspired by David Lindsay's "A Voyage to Arcturus" (1920), with his characters "Thomas Perscors" and "Saklas" being the equivalents, respectively, of Lindsay's original characters "Maskull" and "Crystalman".He identified Edmund Spenser and Franz Kafka as additional influences on his novel.He gave his relationship to "A Voyage to Arcturus", which according to his own account he had "obsessively" read hundreds of times, as an example of his theory of the anxiety of influence.