| The Voyage Of The Space Beagle |
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| 1950 novels | |
| voyage of the space beagle, the | |
| science fiction novels | |
| novels by a. e. van vogt | |
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''The Voyage of the Space Beagle'' ( 1951 ) is a classic novel of Science Fiction by A. E. Van Vogt in the Space Opera mode. The novel is a compilation of four previously published SF stories: "Black Destroyer" (1939), "War of Nerves" (1950), "Discord in Scarlet" (1939) and "M33 in Andromeda" (1943). An exploratory space journey on a scientific mission encounters several, largely hostile, Aliens and alien civilisations. Meanwhile on board, revolutions, both political and scientific, take place. The book was translated in several languages and, as is 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. This monster—a sentient panther-like species named '' Couerl '', with Psi capabilities and tentacles coming out of its shoulders—was adapted as the character Mugi , or "Mughi," in the Anime '' Dirty Pair ''. It also appears in several versions of the Final Fantasy video game, and as the Displacer Beast in the RPG , Dungeons And Dragons . It is reasonable to assume that the book was an influence on both '' Star Trek '' and '' Alien '' (for the latter, one section of the book is particularly resonant—indeed, Van Vogt initiated a lawsuit against 20th Century Fox for plagiarism. Fox settled out of court {Link without Title} ). The title of the book is a reference to Charles Darwin 's five year voyage around the world on '' The Voyage Of The Beagle ''. Plot Details The book can be roughly divided into four sections. 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 infilterates the ship. The creature kills several crewmen before being tricked into leaving the now space-born 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 of two of the crewmen save the ship from madness. In the third section, the ship comes across the ''Ixtl'', a devil-like being floating in deep space. It is the vicious sole-survivor of a race that ruled over and destroyed an entire galaxy. It takes over the ship, kidnapping several crew members in order to implant parasitic eggs, before being eventually defeated, at the cost of great casualties among the crew, both in lives lost 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 decades luring the intelligence to starve on a wild goose chase into deep space. Running concurrently to this, the book also concerns a power struggle in the ship among the leaders of individual scientific groups. Dr. Elliott Grosvenor, the only ''Nexialist'' on board (a new discipline depicted as taking an actively generalist approach towards science), 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''. External links |
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