The Voyage of the Space Beagle

Cover of The Voyage of the Space Beagle (Granada Publishing 1977)

The Voyage of the Space Beagle (1950) is a classic novel of science fiction by A. E. van Vogt in the space opera subgenre.

The novel is a "fix-up" compilation of four previously published SF stories:

• "Black Destroyer" (cover story of the July, 1939, issue of Astounding magazine—the first published SF by A. E. Van Vogt) (chapters 1 to 6)

• "War of Nerves" (May, 1950, Other Worlds magazine) (chapters 9 to 12)

• "Discord in Scarlet" (cover story of the December, 1939, issue of Astounding magazine—the second published SF by A. E. Van Vogt) (chapters 13 to 21)

• "M33 in Andromeda" (August, 1943, Astounding magazine, later published as a story in the book M33 in Andromeda (1971)) (chapters 22 to 28)

The book was republished in 1952 under the title Mission: Interplanetary.

Plot introduction

A scientific mission to explore interstellar space encounters several, largely hostile, aliens and alien civilizations. Meanwhile on board, revolutions, both political and scientific, take place.

Explanation of the novel's title

The title of the book is a reference to The Voyage of the Beagle, Charles Darwin's book about his five year voyage around the world on the HMS Beagle.

Plot summary

The book can be roughly divided into four sections corresponding to the four short stories on which it was based.

In the first section, the Space Beagle lands on a largely deserted desolate planet. Small scattered herds of deer-like creatures are seen, and the ancient ruins of cities litter the landscape. Coeurl, an intelligent and vicious cat-like carnivore with tentacles approaches the ship, pretending to be a dumb animal, and quickly infiltrates it. The creature kills several crewmen before being tricked into leaving the now spaceborne ship in a lifeboat, and is then killed.

In the second part, the ship is almost destroyed by telepathic contact with a race of bird-like aliens, called Riim. The benign signals they send are incompatible with the human mind. Only the knowledge of telepathic phenomena that two of the crewmen have, saves the ship from madness.

In the third section, the ship comes across the Ixtl, a scarlet being floating in deep space. It is the vicious sole-survivor of a race that ruled the universe before the Big Bang that signaled the creation of our own universe. Ixtl boards the ship, kidnapping several crew members in order to implant parasitic eggs. It is eventually outsmarted and defeated, at the cost of great casualties among the crew, both in lives and morale lost.

In the last section, Anabis, a galaxy-spanning consciousness, is encountered. Once again, it is both malevolent and aggressive, and under all circumstances must be prevented from following the ship back to any other galaxy. The crew of the Space Beagle is brainwashed into spending several years luring the intelligence to starve on a wild goose chase into deep space.

Running concurrently to this, the book also covers a power struggle in the ship among the leaders of individual scientific groups.

The main protagonist of the novel is Dr. Elliott Grosvenor, the only Nexialist on board (a new discipline depicted as taking an actively generalist approach towards science). It is Grosvenor's training and application of Nexialism rather than the more narrow-minded approaches of the individual scientific and military minds of his other shipmates that consistently prove more effective against the hostile encounters both from outside and within the Space Beagle. He is eventually forced to take control of the ship using a combination of hypnotism, psychology, brainwashing and persuasion, in order to develop an effective strategy for defeating Anabis and saving the ship and our galaxy.

References or Allusions

References in other works

A sentient panther-like species named Coeurl (or Zorl in French editions), with psi capabilities and tentacles coming out of its shoulders, was adapted as the character Mughi (or Mugi) in the anime Dirty Pair. It also appears in several versions of the Final Fantasy video games, and as the Displacer beast in the RPG, Dungeons & Dragons. The Coeurl suck potassium ("id") from their victims; the "salt vampire" in the Star Trek episode The Man Trap removes sodium.

It is reasonable to assume that the book was an influence on Star Trek. At first glance, the novel also appears to be an inspiration for the film Alien,^[1][2][3] though those involved with the film denied any influence on its part. However, when Van Vogt initiated a lawsuit against 20th Century Fox for plagiarism the studio settled out of court.^[4]

"Discord In Scarlet" was the inspiration for the 1958 film It! The Terror from Beyond Space.^{[citation needed]} The monster from this story was the inspiration for another creature from Dungeons & Dragons, the Xill, who share their scarlet color, ability to phase through solid matter, and implant eggs in the stomachs of their victims.

The book was translated into several languages and, as was the case for most of van Vogt's work, was very popular in France. In Japan it is noted that Korita, the character who explains the demise of the first monster, is Japanese, and presented without racist slights.

Two of the races, The Riim (pp 82–83) and the Ixtl (pp 52–53) are depicted in Barlowe's Guide to Extraterrestrials.

External links

• Excerpt from Chapter 1 at ereader.com
• Covers of The Voyage of the Space Beagle from around the world

Notes