The Voyage of the Space Beagle

A. E. van Vogt

The cover of the ebook trumpets this as “the novel that inspired Alien.” And, to be fair, van Vogt sued Ridley Scott and co. and won. Okay, you can see the resemblances to the film if you turn your head and squint just right... but that Beagle did more than influence (roughly) the folks who developed the film is, in the final analysis, hogwash.

Voyage of the Space Beagle (the ship named, of course, after Darwin's home for a number of years) is only loosely a novel. It is actually three of van Vogt's stories from Astounding combined with some extra material intended, one assumes, to tie the whole thing together. It doesn't work very well in that regard, as the book still comes off as far too episodic to be more than a collection of short stories. The added material is, however, the best-written and most compelling stuff in the book, and should be noted for that.

The stories center around one Elliott Grosvenor, paragon of a science called Nexialism, which unites all the sciences into one whole. (One is tempted to think of Nexialism as the science which grows up after the Unified Field equation is discovered.) He's on a very large (thousand-man) ship travelling about the Universe for what one can assume are the purposes of discovery (the ship's purpose is lightly alluded to close to the end of the book, but never spelled out). As with all episodic novels, the crew ends up encountering new creatures, trying to figure out what they are, and trying to figure out how to rid themselves of them once they have figured out what they are. The original stories follow exact patterns in this regard, and are where the source material for those parts of Alien that can be found here stem; everything Alienesque one will find in the book, by the way, happens in the first half hour of the film.

What is more interesting here is what came after to tie everything together, the expanded sections of Grosvenor's dynamic with the rest of the crew. The ship is filled with petty disagreements and minor skirmishes for power, each of which is catalyzed into action by the invasion of each of the new species in turn, and Grosvenor's handling of the various power structures is what makes this a truly readable piece of work. Had van Vogt expanded this aspect of the book more, it could have done nothing but improve. As it stands, worth reading for Alien completists. Those who are wondering what all the fuss was about will probably still be wondering after they finish.