The Voyage of the Space Beagle (A. E. Van Vogt, 1950)

An exploratory space journey on a scientific mission encounters several, largely hostile, aliens and alien civilisations. Meanwhile on board, revolutions, both political and scientific, take place.
The book can be roughly divided into four sections corresponding to the four short stories on which it was based.

In the first section, the Space Beagle lands on a largely deserted desolate planet. Small scattered herds of deer-like creatures are seen, and the ancient ruins of cities litter the landscape. Coeurl, an intelligent and vicious cat-like carnivore with tentacles approaches the ship, pretending to be a dumb animal, and quickly infiltrates the ship. The creature kills several crewmen before being tricked into leaving the now spaceborne ship in a lifeboat, and is then killed.

In the second part, the ship is almost destroyed by telepathic contact with a race of bird-like aliens, called Riim. The benign signals they send are incompatible with the human mind. Only the knowledge of telepathic phenomena of two of the crewmen save the ship from madness.

In the third section, the ship comes across the Ixtl, a devil-like being floating in deep space. It is the vicious sole-survivor of a race that ruled over and destroyed an entire galaxy. It takes over the ship, kidnapping several crew members in order to implant parasitic eggs, before being eventually defeated, at the cost of great casualties among the crew, both in lives lost and morale lost.

In the last section, Anabis, a galaxy-spanning consciousness, is encountered. Once again, it is both malevolent and aggressive, and under all circumstances must be prevented from following the ship back to any other galaxy. The crew of the Space Beagle is brainwashed into spending several years luring the intelligence to starve on a wild goose chase into deep space.

Rating: 8/10