This is Star Trek before Star Trek. It is Alien long before Alien. It is the template for so much modern science fiction. What it is not is particularly good.
I don't intend to dump on the classics (and this is undoubtedly a classic) but 1950s sci-fi takes place in an almost alien media environment. Even if you ignore the anachronisms (like having to develop film in order to see photographs) and the archaic language (lots of vibrators being used against a big pussy) it is hard to get over how unconvincing it all is.
In the first story, the crew of the Space Beagle find an alien monster. It probably killed one of them. They bring it aboard and just let it lounge about in the library! Yes, all the science is fun, and the "competency porn" of the professional crew is suitably heroic, but the characters and their motivations are frequently bizarre. It is only through the complete absence of girls (urgh!) that there's no interstellar sexism.
The protagonist, Grosvenor, is a cipher for every geeky kid who ever felt he was smarter than everyone else. He is a sneering, taciturn, and deeply unpleasant character. When given the opportunity, he relishes the chance to become dictator.
Because the book started life as a set of short stories, it works reasonably well as a "monster of the week" show. It is episodic, with well-placed cliffhangers. The science is very sciency with some excellent speculative elements. You've got aliens planting eggs in people (like Alien) and a ship's engineer who says "Nooo! The walls couldn't stand it. They'd melt." (like Scotty) and any number of concepts you'll recognise from your favourite TV shows.
The obsession with hypnotism and mind-control feels a bit icky, especially when understood in association with the author's dalliance with the pseudoscience of Dianetics.
The language (when not steeped in 1950's idiomatic phrasing) can verge on the poetic. Every story includes a chapter or two from the alien's viewpoint. They are deliciously weird and elevate this book beyond what might be a slightly forgettable slice of sci-fi.
It is absolutely worth reading - if only to see how influential it has been - but it can be a bit of a weird slog at times.
Ethical Book Search
Read on Amazon Kindle
Audiobook and ePub from Kobo
Used from Alibris
Listen on Audible
Buy from an independent bookshop
Borrow from your local library
ISBN: 9780020259909
4 thoughts on “Book Review: The Voyage of the Space Beagle by Alfred Elton Van Vogt”
@Edent I've not read much Vogt (and haven't read this one), but what I have read has been ~~terrible~~ difficult -- much more so than many of his contemporaries or predecessors.
I think a group of us reading "World of Null-A" at school led us to the nickname "A. E. van Vogon", and that's stuck in my mind ever since...
| Reply to original comment on mstdn.social
I think Van Vogt was more of a General Semantics guy, as evidenced by the Null-Aleph series and meticulously documented in Martin Gardner's magistral "Fads and Fallacies in the Name of Science".
Jommy Cross
Huge fan of scifi from that era, but even I could never read van Vogt.
Thomas X. F.
I've read van Vogt's "Mission to the Stars" (1955) and I thought it was a highly entertaining space adventure; a page-turner full of ingenious and imaginative concepts.
More comments on Mastodon.