Voyage of the Space Beagle

The Voyage of the Space Beagle

Cover of the first edition
Author	A. E. van Vogt
Country	United States
Language	English
Genre	Science fiction novel
Publisher	Simon & Schuster
Publication date	1950
Media type	Print (Hardcover & Paperback)
Pages	240 pp
OCLC	1240657
LC Class	50-14253

The Voyage of the Space Beagle (1950) is a science fiction novel by A. E. van Vogt in the space opera subgenre. The novel is a "fix-up" compilation of four previously published SF stories:

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

A huge globular spaceship, manned by a chemically castrated all-male crew of nearly a thousand, who are on an extended scientific mission to explore intergalactic space, encounters several, mostly hostile, aliens and alien civilizations. On board the spaceship during its journey, both political and scientific revolutions take place.

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.

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 an 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.