The Voyage of the Space Beagle

After releasing Alien, 20th Century Fox was sued by science fiction author A.E. Van Vogt for plagiarizing his 1950's novel The Voyage of the Space Beagle (the first and third sections of the book). Fox supposedly settled out of court. (from Wikipedia): [i]The book can be roughly divided into four sections corresponding to the four short stories on which it was based. ... [/i][i]In the third section, the ship comes across Ixtl, a scarlet being floating in deep space. It is a vicious survivor of a race that ruled a previous universe before the Big Bang, the creation of our own universe. Ixtl boards the ship, and being obsessed with its own reproduction, kidnaps several crew members in order to implant parasitic eggs in their stomachs. It is eventually tricked to leave the ship, after all the crew has left the ship temporarily, leaving no prey left for its offspring to feed on.[/i] The Alien similarities are definitely there. Regarding Prometheus: [i]In the last section, Anabis, a galaxy-spanning consciousness, is encountered. Once again, it is both malevolent, starving and aggressive, and under all circumstances must be prevented from following the ship back to any other galaxy. Anabis, which is essentially a galaxy-size Will-o'-the-wisp, feeds off the death of living organisms, and has destroyed all intelligent life in its galaxy. It transforms all planets it can find into jungle planets through terraforming, since it is these kind of worlds that produce most life. The crew of the Space Beagle is brainwashed by Grosvenor (the main protagonist) into spending several years luring the intelligence to chase the ship into deep space, causing it to starve to death.[/i] Could this give us some clues to the motives of the Engineers?