The Voyage of the Space Beagle Book

An exploration vessel with a crew complement of almost one thousand wandering between the stars... cue some music. No, wait a minute, it's not the Enterprise. It's the Space Beagle. When was this written then? Well, the individual parts that make up this novel were published between 1939 and 1952. This is quite a famous little novel, even though current opinion about it is somewhat divided. Some of the assumptions in this book are rather naïve, such as allowing a foreign organism into an enclosed system (spaceship) without any concern over contamination or disease. Perhaps it's merely anachronistic: this novel is, after all, from the golden age of Science Fiction. However, if you look at the story with eyes unbiased by 60 years of Science Fiction history and evolution, you should be suitably impressed.

The Discord in Scarlet storyline is especially memorable. A vicious and supernaturally powerful alien steals aboard the human ship; it lays eggs inside its hosts (the hapless humans); it hides in the "miles-long system of air conditioning"; it is bent on survival at all cost... Sound familiar? It should. 20th Century Fox eventually settled out of court, although in all fairness it may have been coincidence after all.

The novel also coined the phrase Nexialism, which is basically a consolidated approach to problem solving, by applying approaches from different sciences. Or, the holistic ("whole"-istic according to the novel) approach. The Anabis sequence contains some startling ideas, such as the teleportation of entire planets to create artificial systems. We are so used to high concept SF these days that it's somewhat hard to imagine what folk would have experienced when reading this in the 1940s when the sequence was first published (as M33 in Andromeda, Astounding, 1943).

Needless to say, the Voyage of the Space Beagle has influenced the field of Science Fiction and pop culture to a momentous extent. Whether you like the novel or not, there is no denying its impact. Van Vogt's alien creatures have even made it into Dungeons & Dragons and Final Fantasy, albeit in slightly altered forms. The novel carries its years pretty well, all things considered, and despite the fact that the Space Beagle still sports a mail chute. A true classic.