The Voyage of the Space Beagle

The Voyage of the Space Beagle is a science fiction novel by the American writer A. E. van Vogt, published in 1950.

It is a fixed-up novel, assembled from four stories van Vogt had already published: Black Destroyer, which appeared in the July 1939 issue of Astounding and was the first of his stories to see print; Discord in Scarlet; War of Nerves; and M33 in Andromeda. That origin shows in the book's shape, since the episodes are largely self-contained, but it also explains why it has been so widely read: each one sets a problem the ship's scientists have to solve with the knowledge they have, whether the alien involved lays its eggs inside human hosts, works on the crew's nerves, or has simply been around for a great deal longer. Van Vogt's title nods to Charles Darwin's account of the Beagle's five-year survey, and the novel keeps a Darwinian interest in what a species needs in order to survive. Between the encounters the book tracks the argument between the expedition's departments about how the universe should be studied, and more than one of those arguments is settled by a species the crew has not met yet.

Black Destroyer is often named as one of the stories that opened the Golden Age of science fiction.