The Voyage of the Space Beagle

An all-time classic space saga, The Voyage of the Space Beagle is one of the pinnacles of golden age SF, an influence on generations of stories. An episodic novel filled with surprises and provocative ideas, this is the story of a great exploration ship sent out into the unknown reaches of space on a long mission of discovery. The crew encounter several terrifying alien species, including the Ix, who lay their eggs in human bodies, which then devour the humans from within when they hatch. This is one of the most entertaining and gripping stories in all of classic science fiction. "Nobody, possibly with the exception of [Alfred] Bester of The Stars My Destination, ever came close to matching van Vogt for headlong, breakneck pacing, or for the electric, crackling paranoid tension with which he was capable of suffusing his work." -- Gardner Dozois The Voyage of the Space Beagle (1950) is a classic novel of science fiction by A. E. van Vogt in the space opera subgenre. The novel is a "fix-up" compilation of four previously published SF stories: "Black Destroyer" (appeared in the July, 1939, issue of Astounding magazine—the first published SF by A. E. Van Vogt) (chapters 1 to 6); "War of Nerves" (May, 1950, Other Worlds magazine) (chapters 9 to 12); "Discord in Scarlet" (December, 1939, Astounding magazine—the second published SF by A. E. Van Vogt) (chapters 13 to 21); "M33 in Andromeda" (August, 1943, Astounding magazine, later published as a story in the book M33 in Andromeda (1971)) (chapters 22 to 28). The book was republished in 1952 under the title Mission: Interplanetary. This is an exclusive 2009 hardcover reprint by the Science Fiction Book Club, #1258306, of an Orb trade paperback published in 2008 by Tom Doherty Associates.