13. The Voyage of the Space Beagle by A.E. Van Vogt

There is a group of gamers and cool nerds on Google+ who have a roleplayers book club that I keep trying to join but can never find the book or the time.  This time, I found both as this classic was easily found in the library.  We had a lively but short-lived discussion and I am very glad I read the book.

I have since learned that A.E. Van Vogt is an important though sometimes disrespected author in the golden age of sci-fi.  You can go to wikipedia to learn about the critic who dissed him early on in his career and left him with a maligned reputation.  I, for one, enjoyed the book. I particularily appreciated how he wed the space theorizing common to this period with a more aggressive pace than usual, so that just when the wankery was getting a bit too long-winded for my lazy mind, some shit went down (not unlike Raymond Chandler's send in the guns rule) and the narrative moved forward.

The Voyage of the Space Beagle is an episodic tale (technically a "fix-up" being several previously published short stories stitched together to make a novel) about a pioneering ship exploring distant galaxies.  It is high science fiction in the technology, but kind of low in the challenges, which is about a ship full of male scientists battling their own internal conflicts to overcome external ones.  Yes, all men.  And they behave stupidly quite often, which I don't think was intentional, but read today does seem like instead of some meta-philosophy to bring them together, they just could have had a bunch of women (and non white people too).

The meta-philosophy is "Nexialism" and the protagonist is the sole Nexialist on the ship.  His challenge is to use Nexialism to unite all the various disciplines so they can overcome the problems they face, because each discipline alone is too narrowly-focused to see the bigger picture needed to deal with the problem.  Nexialism itself is not entirely thought out, but it's fun and satisfying to see its superiority overcome the petty squabbles of its narrow-minded opponents.  The obstacles themselves are pretty cool as well, space beasts, telepathic societies and the like.  Good stuff.