The main protagonist of the novel is Dr. Elliott Grosvenor, the only Nexialist on board (a new discipline depicted as taking an actively generalist approach towards science).

It is Grosvenor's training and application of Nexialism rather than the more narrow-minded approaches of the individual scientific and military minds of his other shipmates that consistently prove more effective against the hostile encounters both from outside and within the Space Beagle.

Coeurl, a starving, intelligent and vicious cat-like carnivore with tentacles on its shoulders, approaches the ship, pretending to be an unintelligent animal, and quickly infiltrates it.

In the second part, the ship is almost destroyed by internal warfare caused by telepathic contact with a race of bird-like aliens, called Riim.

Ixtl boards the ship, and being obsessed with its own reproduction, kidnaps several crew members in order to implant parasitic eggs in their stomachs.

Running concurrently to this, the book also covers a power struggle on the ship among the leaders of individual scientific and military groups.

[6] A sentient panther-like species named Coeurl (or Zorl in French editions), with psi capabilities and tentacles coming out of its shoulders, was adapted as the character Mughi (or Mugi) in the anime Dirty Pair.

The Coeurl suck phosphorus ("id")[7] from their victims; the "salt vampire" in the Star Trek episode "The Man Trap" removes sodium.

[11] The third section of the book, "Discord in Scarlet" was given a comics adaptation (under the title "Voyage of the Space Beagle") in the February 1983 issue of Eerie.

[citation needed] In Japan it is noted that Korita, the character who explains the demise of the first monster, is Japanese, and presented without racist slights.

A hologram called a "prowler" appears as one of the distractions employed by the Enterprise lieutenant Kevin Riley to surprise the deck crew of the "Voyager" worldship in David Gerrold's Star Trek novel The Galactic Whirlpool.