What novel series has a young boy travelling across space with librarians and a bat-like dog?

Question

I am trying to dig up the name of a novel-series I read when I was a child (early 90's) but I simply cannot recall either the name of the writer nor the name of any of the books.

The series has a young boy in the center who is accepted into a conclave of Librarians who travel the universe in a massive spaceship. The members of the conclave value knowledge above all else and during the books they visit different worlds where each world presents a new challenge in regards to corrupt governments, dormant threats and so on. The Librarians "battle" these problems using their vast knowledge and skills.

The boy is followed by a sort of bat-like dog throughout the series and the animal is present on all the book-covers in the series.

I recall one book taking place in a vast sea-dominated world and another on a wood covered planet... but apart form that I am at a loss.

Answer 1

The book series was written by the recently deceased Norwegian author Jon Bing in the seventies and eighties, and published collectively under the name The Chronicles of the Starship Alexandria in 1997, so if you read them in the early nineties the series itself probably didn't have an official name; it consists of four novels in which the library starship Alexandria visits four different planets:

• Azur - Planet of the Captains (the sea-dominated world, where a benevolent totalitarian government of ecological activists has banned most technology)
• Zalt - Planet of the Steamlords (a desert world where the feudal leaders control all drinking water)
• Mizt - Planet of the Ghosts (a technocracy works to solve a scientific problem; probably the wood covered planet, as it features "hunters" and "werewolves" who kill people who escape from the forced scientific labour)
• Tanz - Planet of Riddles (humanity's first encounter with an alien being on an artificial planet)

The boy is the orphan Benji from the first planet, and the name of his "bat cat" is Miromurr.