The Voyage of The Space Beagle - Recent Perspectives

Recent Perspectives

That the novel, first published in 1950, continues to attract readers is indicated by the publication of a reprint edition in 2008. The critic Joe Milicia took the opportunity of this re-issue to revisit the novel in a comprehensive review for the New York Review of Science Fiction. Milicia looks at what today’s reader might find in the novel, noting:

“Thus the stories read as if they were the inspiration for those episodes of Star Trek where some particularly odd and hostile entity must be ingeniously defeated by the Enterprise crew before that entity continues on its marauding path. (Indeed, they very likely were direct inspirations).”

But the novel is richer than this perspective alone allows. Among the surprises identified by Milicia that it may hold for the modern reader are the disharmony aboard the Space Beagle, (“Clearly, Machiavelli rather than Darwin is the true spirit guiding the Space Beagle.”) and that the Space Beagle’s mission is like the original Beagle’s and very unlike the U.S.S. Enterprise’s.