Tuesday 29 January 2013

The Star Fox: A Series?

In Poul Anderson's The Star Fox (London, 1968), I have so far read only as far as p. 30, of 204, and, after today, will be away from computers for about a week so that, although I might finish reading the novel in the next few days, I will not be discussing it for a while.

I notice that the publishing history near the front of the book informs us that "these stories" were originally published in a slightly different form in a magazine. Further, the blurb informs us that the "Star Fox" of the title is a spaceship in which a crew of volunteers wages a hit-and-run battle against alien aggressors. This sounds like the perfect subject matter for a series of stories so perhaps The Star Fox was a series before being repackaged as a novel? I will be checking to see whether the narrative is structured episodically.

"Star -" is a generic title for sf works about interstellar travel. Everyone knows about Star Trek and Star Wars. Poul Anderson fans also know that he wrote an early novel called Star Ways which later had to be republished as The Peregrine to avoid the appearance of mimicking Star Wars. I expect to encounter more substantial speculative fiction by reading about the Star Fox in The Star Fox than by watching the Enterprise in Star Trek

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