Review by Lyn Perry
Wow, this was pretty bad. Even if it was written in 1940s, the science was terrible and the prose was worse. It read like a rejected Tom Swift book - with the requisite superfluous adverbs - but the target audience wasn't juveniles. Quest Beyond the Stars by Edmond Hamilton really stretches the definition of pulp space opera.
The plot is linear and uninspired: Captain Future and his crew think and fight their way through every tough situation without so much as breaking a sweat in pursuit of their quest, which I can't even remember what it was. Which is fine, adventure heroes are supposed to do that. But the solutions were mostly deus ex machina in nature and the payoff was a foregone solution. So 1 1/2 stars for effort?
(Note: This short novel is #9 in a series of about 20 books written by various authors in the early 1940s. So maybe other Captain Future books were better. But I won't be finding out unless I have absolutely nothing else to read.)
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