The Space Beagle

So, there I was reading The World Turned Upside Down when I thought I'd take a little time to read the first section of Voyage of the Space Beagle by A.E. Van Vogt to compare with Black Destroyer (the original version of the first part of the book).

Space Beagle is less an original novel than the disparaging-sounding term "fixup novel". Fixups are usually made up of several stories, sometimes published over a long course of time, sometimes from different periods of the author's life. Some fixups work, some do not.

(Before I talk about the first part of the book, gosh, I did it again. I had re-read the book in 2002. But before you knew it, I was hooked and going to M33 with the Space Beagle and had finished the silly thing! So, what follows is less a comparison between Black Destroyer and the first part of the book than a new review of the book!)

The book is made up of four of van Vogt's tales: Black Destroyer, War of Nerves, Discord in Scarlet and M33 in Andromeda. Of the four, the first and third work, I think, the best.

In Black Destroyer, we're introduced to the Space Beagle, a ship from Earth (and populated entirely by men), setting out for one of our neighbor galaxies, M33 in Andromeda. (Interestingly enough, M33 is probably not the galaxy you think of when you think of Andromeda. That would be the more famous, and, to the naked eye, more visible M31. M33 is a lot harder to spot under your average twenty-first century sky; it is a much larger and diffuse object. But, if you can spot it, and look at it with binoculars or a low power/wide field eyepiece in a telescope, it is quite a sight!) In the original story, the Space Beagle is crewed by 100 humans; in the book, it has a crew of 1,000. In the story, there is nary a mention of the "working crew", most of the characters are scientists. In the novel version, there is not only much more attention paid to the crew of the ship, but there is also a sizeable military contingent (and part of the tension comes from times when the science crew debates who is in control with the military crew).

However, despite this, it is intended to be a peaceful voyage of exploration. In fact, Space Beagle is the earliest, to my personal recollection, tale like this (i.e., a heavy emphasis on scientists), well before Star Trek.

The story Black Destroyer and the first part of the book are similar enough in the broad strokes. In both, the Beagle lands on a planet where civilization crumbled. They run into an apparent animal (which is named Coeurl, however that name, with a lower-case "c", also is applied to the race). They bring the animal on board, where it manages to get loose, kill a number of crew (the number differs significantly between the book and the story...but the story is set on a much smaller ship!), grab a lifeboat, and almost escape back to his planet to rescue more of its kind so they can invade our galaxy. It seems the coeurls feed on "id" (which turns out to be the potassium, why van Vogt chose a famous psychological term for this, is beyond me). They drained their planet of life and would be happy to do the same to the rest of the planets out there.

There are some parallels to "Don A. Stuart's" (John W. Campbell, Jr.) famous Who Goes There? The story is especially interesting because, in its original form, it is told almost exclusively from the first-person (creature?) viewpoint of Coeurl. The biggest difference, other than ship size and crew makeup, is the presence or absence of the main character of the book version...the Nexialist, Elliot Grosvenor.

Nex-al-whaaa? Well, let's see what the book says:

The guard looked again at the card, and then said as he handed it back, "Nexialism? What's that?"

"Applied whole-ism," said Grosvenor, and stepped across the threshold.

Which is about all you really need to know. In some ways, it is a pretty neat idea. The science of Nexialism is a sort of super-science, one that looks for links between the various specialties and finds ways that they might work together and come up with solutions that individual specialists might not see. So Grosvenor would be able to look at the results of the biology lab, some of the geology results, toss in some astronomy and come up with a solution to the problem.

The weak point to this made-up science is that van Vogt tosses in a number of other things that don't really work. Grosvenor uses sleep-teaching, hypnosis, subliminal messages, etc. So you end up with something more like something that L. Ron Hubbard might have preached.

Having read both the original and the novel, which is a better tale? The novel is stronger for having the bigger ship and the more diverse crew. But Grosvenor does not really play a major role in the first tale and doesn't really add much. So, I'd vote for the original tale (and recommend a look at the original magazine cover, what a wonderful painting!)

I have not been able to find original versions of the other tales in the book: War of Nerves, Discord in Scarlet and M33 in Andromeda. I would like to read them, someday, to see how much Nexialism and Grosvenor added or took away from the stories.

The second tale deals with a telepathic encounter with a race that inhabits a solitary planet between our galaxy and M33. What is intended as a friendly communication has deadly consequences for the Space Beagle. Grosvenor makes full use of his sleep-teaching and other devices in order to save the crew. Given the lack of direct conflict or interaction between the humans and the aliens (Riim), I found this a weaker tale.

The third tale is a winner. The crew finds a humanoid alien floating in the space between the galaxies. They bring it on board and it escapes (don't these folks ever learn?). Like a good John W. Campbell, Jr. or E.E. "Doc" Smith space opera installment, we don't have a re-hash of the encounter with Coeurl, this alien, Ixtl, is much nastier and much more powerful. This tale makes a lot of use of Grosvenor, but also the character Korita, a historian (who puts forward in several parts of the book of a cyclic theory of history somewhat along the lines of people like Spengler).

The fourth part is also weak in that the crew reaches M33 to find it inhabited by a gas creature. As with the third tale, there isn't much interaction between the humans and the alien, resulting, I feel, in a less interesting tale. This time around, though, the following caught my attention:

To the men, darkness made no difference. The Space Beagle crouched on a vast plain of jagged metal. Every porthole shed light. Great searchlights poured added illumination on rows of engines that were tearing enormous holes into the all-iron world. At the beginning the iron was fed into a single manufacturing machine, which turned out unstable iron torpedoes at the rate of one every minute and immediately launched them into space.

By dawn of the next morning, the manufacturing machine itself began to be manufactured, and additional robot feeders poured raw iron into each new unit. Soon, a hundred, then thousands of manufacturing machines were turning out those slim, dark torpedoes. In ever greater numbers they soared into the surrounding night, scattering their radioactive substance to every side.

Was this tale by van Vogt the first science fiction appearance of the von Neumann machine?

So. It was a fixup. Two of the stories are weaker. Was it worth it? Heck, yes. van Vogt has a less than stellar reputation these days, but he remains one of my favorite authors. Books such as this, along with The War Against the Rull or Slan were among my formative books in the field, along with authors such as Norton or Nourse or Clarke or Heinlein or Asimov or Smith. I can see problems with style or plotting, I can pick holes in the science, I can laugh at the technology, but these tales started me on the road that has given me a life of reading pleausre. So, it was worth another visit to the Space Beagle and its crew and the weird critters that litter the spaceways, Coeurl, Ixtl, the Riim and the gas creature. Hmmmm...it's been a long time since I've read Rull or Slan, it is time for a visit to them!

(Finally, to compare and contrast, here's a "classic post" from SF Signal! Nice to see those kids reading the classics now and again.)

Counts as 4 entries in the 2006 Short Story Project.