- The Voyage of the Space Beagle
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The Voyage of the Space Beagle 
Cover of first editionAuthor(s) A. E. van Vogt Country United States Language English Genre(s) Science fiction novel Publisher Simon & Schuster Publication date 1950 Media type Print (Hardcover & Paperback) Pages 240 pp OCLC Number 1240657 LC Classification 50-14253 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.
Contents
Plot introduction
A huge spaceship with a chemically castrated all-male crew of almost a thousand, on a scientific mission to explore interstellar space encounters several, mostly 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 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 the alien entity, Anabis, and saving the ship and our galaxy.
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, a starving, intelligent and vicious cat-like carnivore with tentacles on its shoulders, approaches the ship, pretending to be a unintelligent animal, and quickly infiltrates it. The creature kills several crewmen before being tricked into leaving the now spaceborne ship in a lifeboat. It then commits suicide when it realizes it has been defeated.
In the second part, the ship is almost destroyed by internal warfare caused by telepathic contact with a race of bird-like aliens, called Riim. The benign signals that the Riim send are incompatible with the human mind. Only Grosvenor's knowledge of telepathic phenomena saves the ship from destruction.
In the third section, the ship comes across Ixtl, a scarlet being floating in deep space. It is a vicious survivor of a race that ruled a previous universe before the Big Bang, the creation of our own universe. Ixtl boards the ship, and being obsessed with its own reproduction, kidnaps several crew members in order to implant parasitic eggs in their stomachs. It is eventually tricked to leave the ship, after all the crew has left the ship temporarily, leaving no prey left to its offspring to feed on.
In the last section, Anabis, a galaxy-spanning consciousness, is encountered. Once again, it is both malevolent, starving and aggressive, and under all circumstances must be prevented from following the ship back to any other galaxy. Anabis, which is essentially a galaxy-size Will-o'-the-wisp, feeds off the death of living organisms, and has destroyed all intelligent life in its galaxy. It transforms all planets it can find into jungle planets through terraforming, since it is these kind of worlds that produce most life. The crew of the Space Beagle is brainwashed by Grosvenor into spending several years luring the intelligence to chase the ship into deep space, causing it to starve to death.
Running concurrently to this, the book also covers a power struggle on the ship among the leaders of individual scientific and military groups.
Reception
P. Schuyler Miller, while praising the original stories, found that the rewriting needed to stitch them into an original novel was inadequate, so that "the whole is less than its original parts."[1]
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 alien Ixtl also appears to be an inspiration for the film Alien,[2][3][4] 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.[5]
"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.
In David Gerrold's Chtorr novel A Season for Slaughter, a robot probe called a "prowler" is used. The prowler makes a distinctive "coeurl" sound, described several times as "the prowler coeurled on." The reference to the Coeurl in the first story of the Voyage of the Space Beagle, where the phrase "Coeurl prowled on" occurs, is unmistakeable.
Recent Perspectives
That the novel, first published in 1950, continues to attract readers is indicated by the publication of a reprint edition in 2008.[6] 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.[7] 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).” [8]
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. [9]
External links
- The Voyage of the Space Beagle publication history at the Internet Speculative Fiction Database
- Excerpt from Chapter 1 at ereader.com
- Covers of The Voyage of the Space Beagle from around the world
- Free Copy of the first section, Black Destroyer
Notes
- ^ "Book Reviews", Astounding Science Fiction, May 1951, p.152
- ^ Reeves-Stevens, Garfield; Judith Reeves-Stevens,Brian Muirhead (2004-12-21). Going to Mars: The Stories of the People Behind NASA's Mars Missions Past, Present, and Future. London: Simon & Schuster. pp. 124–125. ISBN 978-0671027964.
- ^ Rogers, Michael (1992-08-01). "Book reviews: Classic returns". Library Journal 117 (13): 156. ISSN 03630277.
- ^ Smith, Don G. (2005-11-29). H.P. Lovecraft in Popular Culture: The Works and Their Adaptations in Film, Television, Comics, Music and Games. McFarland & Company. p. 124. ISBN 978-0786420919.
- ^ BBC - My Science Fiction Life - The Voyage of the Space Beagle
- ^ A E van Vogt: The Voyage of the Space Beagle ; Reprint edition, Orb Books, 2008. ISBN 978-0-7653-2077-3
- ^ Milicia, Joe: “A E van Vogt’s The Voyage of the Space Beagle,” New York Review of Science Fiction, Number 262 Vol. 22, No. 10, June 2010, page 1
- ^ Milicia, Joe: "A E van Vogt’s The Voyage of the Space Beagle", New York Review of Science Fiction, Number 262 Vol. 22, No. 10, June 2010, page 4
- ^ Milicia, Joe: "A E van Vogt’s The Voyage of the Space Beagle", New York Review of Science Fiction, Number 262 Vol. 22, No. 10, June 2010, page 6
Categories:- 1950 novels
- Novels by A. E. van Vogt
- Works originally published in Analog Science Fiction and Fact
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