The Void Captain's Tale takes place three or four thousand years in the future in an era called the Second Starfaring Age, a setting Spinrad revisited in the 1985 novel Child of Fortune.
Unlike the technological focus of many science fiction novels, Genro claims the exact nature of space travel is not understood; the ship's interstellar drive is powered by the psychic energy of a young woman pilot.
Theodore Sturgeon explained the "erotic form of space travel" in the Los Angeles Times Book Review: "Spinrad's ingenious space-drive has the ship's machine create a field ... which at peak and at captain's command melds with the pilot's psyche, causing the ship to cease to exist in one spatial locus and reappear in another.
His growing disassociation from society and his allegiance to the succubus-like hold of the pilot's psychic siren call lead to his eventual submission to Dominique's will, and he jumps the ship without first laying in any coordinates—freeing Dominique from both the physical world and her sexual servitude to the jump circuit, but trapping his ship and its passengers in the void between the stars.
[3][4] A Library Journal review made a similar point but came to a different conclusion, noting "one may be able to wring a highly rewarding experience from this dense and difficult novel," but calling Spinrad's use of language "laborious reading".