2. The Flight to Lucifer: A Gnostic Fantasy by Harold Bloom (1979)I usually know about these things.
The only novel that the famous literary critic ever wrote — and he has disowned it utterly. Don't let Harold Bloom see you reading this book! It's a quasi-sequel to the space-faring novel A Voyage to Arcturus by David Lindsay. And like Lindsay's book, this involves a flight to another world, in which Gnostic philosophy is explored — and this time, it's the planet Lucifer, where a guy named Olam guides the travelers to escape from Crystalman. As one Amazon reviewer explains:set on a distant world where time and space shift back and forth and where the conflicts of first-century religion are still being played out. Harold Bloom's story begins with an Aeon, Olam, descding to earth to bring two men, Valentinus, a reincarnation of a Gnostic prophet, and his young warrior escort Perscors, back to Lucifer on a quest to help Valentinus recover the call that motivated his previous life. For Perscors, the quest is a search for a transcendental principle, but to reach it, he has to do battle with enemies both divine and semi-divine, to finally reach his inner discovery of his own uniqueness.
(Charlie Jane Anders, 10 Weirdest Science Fiction Novels That You’ve Never Read, io9.)