The next meeting is on Saturday July 18th at 2 p.m. The meeting will be done using Zoom. For details see the Facebook Chester Science Fiction and Fantasy Book Group user group, or comment here to ask for the details if you are not on Facebook.

We will be discussing The Voyage of the Space Beagle by A. E. Van Vogt.

We thought it would be fun to discuss an old classic book to see how well it stood up in 2020, and The Voyage of the Space Beagle is certainly a classic. A lot of claims have been made about ow it influenced lots of later works. Well maybe it did and maybe there is just a finite number of story lines in SF. Whatever the case, this is a book that many of us old time SF fans loved as children. This is a “fix-up” novel i.e. novel created by combining several short stories. Van Vogt published a lot of these, apparently because he thought novels sold better than short stories, and the results are not always good. However this novel works pretty well. Being built up from short stories it is inevitably somewhat episodic, but the stories work well together and build to a satisfactory ending.