Secure A Copy Quest For The Future Formulated By A.E. Van Vogt Distributed In Softcover

read this book as a child and was captivated by the breadth of the story and the suprise ending.
I forgot about it and years later searched for it finally remembering the title, I'm now rereading it. Its what got me into SciFi in the first place,grade B I've read a few van Vogt novels, and enjoyed them, but this was a big disappointment, The early part is lifted almost verbatim from two short stories in his 'Destination:Universe!' collection, and the rest jumps all over the place until the unsatisfying ending.
Another gem from the golden age,
I first read the short story that started this novel going, The short
story, about a man on a trip to Alpha Centauri who wakes up centuries later
to find it already colonized, captivated me.
Van Vogt added a lot more
material and turned it into a novel about a man trying to track down a
woman through time after discovering a film showing future tech in
operation.
About every type of time travel back and forth are shown, until
a time traveling organization is uncovered, Like most works of this time
period the style is somewhat difficult for modern readers, but the idea is
wonderful and the story great, which is all I can ask.
It's actually not as good a book as my rating, but it just really hits my scifi nerve where it counts.
I love how van Vogt can write a wretched, paranoid person so well it hurts, This is my favorite A, E. Van Vogt book. I have read it several times over the years and enjoy every time, This was an amazing book, I want to read it again afteryears! Fun light novel to read before bed.
Lots of time travel to the point that it can be hard to follow, but I think I pieced it together at the end.
Great story, got a little lost in a few places, . . But that is what the book is about honestly! An awesome read for someone who likes to think of the possibilities of probability of inter dimensional travel.
. . Well, no doubt only Van Vogt would think of doing this ie, tying a bunch of hisseemingly unrelatedstories together to concoct a novel, and only A E would be able to pull it off! As mindboggling as any of his other stuff.
. . and I suppose at the end it all hung together the same way

he usually gets me feeling toward the finish.
The first time I read this I was a kid it was one of the first things I ever ordered up from the Science Fiction Book Club.
. . and I don't suppose I understand it all now much better than I did then, : An interminable bore fest, I'm afraid, The mechanics of the time travel loops are important to the plot, but are not well described, I found myself in the dark throughout much of the story, The main character is not very likeable, My favorite SF book. This book is a time travel / multiverse type of scenario, which sounds really cool in theory but in practice is like a knot no one can unravel.
Tough to follow. Get out the scissors. I like other works by this author but this one's not for me, Dated style, but still fun, This book was quite a surprise package, I thought that it would be a simple tale of travel between the, but it ends up as a story about a man who attempts to cross the themes of the multiverse.
There is so much in the book that it is quite a feat to unpack it,

The core idea revolves around a central clearing house from which the strands of time emanate, Within this, travellers can move across timescapes to see how any one particular timeline plays out, If it doesn't have a satisfactory ending, the travellers can replicate themselves, go back to the clearing house, and start again.
The whole idea is based upon the notion that there is no single timeline, but numerous timelines of multiple possibilities.
This notion sits quite well with contemporary futurist thinking,

Into this framework falls the hero of the story, He first becomes aware of this possibility when hiring films for a science class, It sounds a bit dated, but the book was published in, slightly before the onset of the videotape, Anyway, some of the tapes have been swapped around so that he receives a batch of films from the future.
Those around him treat it as a novelty, He decided to follow the scent,

It is while he was following this trail that he stumbles upon the clearing house, One of the interesting properties of the clearing house is that it allows time to flow backwards, thus rejuvenating him.
We later learn that, in the clearing house, time runs in a loop betweenAD andAD, It is the backstroke of the loop that allows travel back in time, This is a really clever plot device,

Within the clearing house, there are factions and divisions, This provides the dramatic tension within the book, I wasn't much taken by that because I wanted to focus on the underlying ideas of an explorer travelling across a vast timescape.
This, combined with the possibility of being able to produce a duplicate person, gave me a lot to think about.


On the whole, I rather enjoyed the book, I have in idea if it is still in print, I bought mine second hand in a charity shop, If you ever see a copy, buy it, It's well written, well paced, and absolutely jam packed with ideas about science that have only started to be explored.


This is the most chauvinistic piece of crap story, Especially the ending. Yeah I get that the concept is cool, But come on. Did not age well at all, Kind of a mediore Vogt story, Not horrible but far from his best, Excellent read. I am officially a Van Vogt fan, Worlds of differing probabilities and the constant search for immortality are the twin themes of this mindtoppling story, Expanding the enigmas of time, van Vogt carries the reader to the furthermost edges of past and future and outwards to a place where time loses all meaning.
Interesting time travel novel. It was first published inbut I had the nagging feeling that I had read parts of this story before.
And I was right, for Van Vogt stitched some old stories together to create this novel, It really has more of a's felling to it than, Interesting anachronisms such as mechanical postal delivery systems for transporting films in the latest century, No thought whatsoever of digital media, no computers,

The story I remember is that of the first space voyage to Alpha Centauri using suspended animation and then arriving five hundred years later to an established human colony.
And the psychological consequences to the voyagers, Can you say culture shock But this novel takes an entirely different twist to that earlier story,

Alfred Elton van Vogt was a Canadian born science fiction author regarded by some as one of the most popular and complex science fiction writers of the mid twentieth centurythe Golden Age of the genre.
van Vogt was born to Russian Mennonite family, Until he was four years old, van Vogt and his family spoke only a dialect of Low German in the home.
He began his writing career with true story romances, but then moved to writing science fiction, a field he identified with.
His first story was Black Destroyer, that appeared as the front cover story for the Julyedtion of the popular Astounding Science Fiction magazine.
Alfred Elton van Vogt was a Canadian born science fiction author regarded by some as one of the most popular and complex science fiction writers of the mid twentieth centurythe "Golden Age" of the genre.
van Vogt was born to Russian Mennonite family, Until he was four years old, van Vogt and his family spoke only a dialect of Low German in the home.
He began his writing career with 'true story' romances, but then moved to writing science fiction, a field he identified with.
His first story was Black Destroyer, that appeared as the front cover story for the Julyedtion of the popular "Astounding Science Fiction" magazine.
sitelink.