by Jack Vance

Cut to a sunny early-August day in 1959. I had just debarked in that European port city a couple of hours earlier, saying a fond farewell to a particular one or two from among those shipmates I knew I would never see again and then slipping the traces that linked me to the rest of my party (with whom I was scheduled to depart from that city and country for an overnight train trip across a second country to a third) and was wandering the streets by myself, wondering where I should go (the only address I knew was “Eendrachtsweg 7,” but I didn’t have the vaguest idea where it was). Finally, I found a place that looked familiar a bookshop, though of a very different nature from Portland’s Cameron’s or even J. K. Gill. I wandered in off the street, accosted the attractive blonde shopgirl and asked her for science fiction. Surprise! She spoke not a word of English (though I had been assured that everybody in that country was fluent in my language). Finally I found a few English-language SF books buried away on a back shelf and picked up a 35-cent Ace double novel that I hadn’t seen before Slaves of the Klau and Big Planet, both by Jack Vance, with whose name I was vaguely familiar.

It proved good reading for the train, and for rereading during the next six months. Slaves of the Klau was fun, but Big Planet was a revelation; Vance’s description of the approach to and descent into the Galatudanian Valley along the monoline to Kirstendale remains one of my two favorite pieces of descriptive writing in the SF field to this day ⁽¹⁾, along with E.R.R. Eddison’s “dawn off the coast” page in The Worm Ouroboros, and Big Planet remains, so many years later, on Harlow’s list of the ten most enjoyable SF novels of all time.

After that, I watched for Vance, and he seldom let me down. ⁽²⁾ In fact, in many ways his writing continued to improve over the years. As an example in the early sixties he projected a series of novels about a young boy, Kirth Gersen, the survivor of a coordinated raid by five vicious pirates, the “Demon Princes,” on the settlement where he and his family lived, growing up to become a nemesis for those five criminals, to each of whom a single novel was to be devoted. He wrote the first three (The Star King, The Killing Machine, The Palace of Love) in the mid sixties but was then attracted away to other projects until, apparently, Wollheim convinced him to finish off the series for DAW Books at the end of the seventies, when he wrote the last two novels in the series (The Face, The Book of Dreams). Compare the quality of the first three with that of the last two, and I think you’ll see what I mean about the improvement in his writing capabilities — which were notable to start with. ⁽³⁾

You may suppose that it was with great pleasure that in the spring of 1988 I found a new, and very large, Vance hardback on the shelf at The Other Change of Hobbit in Berkeley. This was Araminta Station, first novel in a new trilogy, “The Cadwal Chronicles.” ⁽⁴⁾

In Araminta Station Vance returns to an examination of a philosophical question from one of his earlier books (who owns the land? from The Grey Prince) as exemplified by a location borrowed from another of his earlier books (planet as nature reserve, from the climactic section of The Book of Dreams); but this is also a coming-of-age novel, concentrating on a single protagonist caught up in a struggle that will decide the fate of a world. There are also a few references that readers of Maske Thaery may find familiar (a preoccupation with the evils of tourism and the ownership of personal space yachts, for instance).

The world is Cadwal, owned by the Naturalist Society and declared a conservancy; with only two exceptions, its three continents Ecce, Deucas and Throy (“the first three cardinal numbers in the language of Ancient Etruria,” Vance informs us in one of his copious footnotes, and he may well be right) are off limits to colonization. The two exceptions are the Conservancy’s administrative headquarters at Araminta Station, a hundred-square-mile enclave on the eastern coast of Deucas, largest of the continents, and Stroma, a rather bleak stone village hanging on the cliffs of the subarctic continent Throy, where visiting Naturalists are forced to live. The permanent population is limited to some 240 persons, divided among six families associated with the six administrative bureaus, though a “temporary work force” consisting partly of excess population from the six families (the “collaterals”) and partly of imported labor is tolerated — as long as it remains strictly temporary. Nonetheless, a population of immigrant “Yips” has succeeded in congregating at Yipton, on tiny Lutwen Atoll some hundreds of miles off the coast of Deucas; at the time of the story, they outnumber the legitimate inhabitants of the planet of several orders of magnitude, and continually threaten to swarm ashore and occupy the lands of the conservancy, with some assistance from a group of renegade Naturalists, the “Life, Peace and Freedom Party,” aka “peefers,” who have ambitions to turn the planet into their own private playground with a large underclass population. And there is a third force, in the person of Simonetta Clattuc, who, rejected in love by her distant cousin Scharde and having been refused permanent status on the planet because of an indifferent study record, wants revenge against Araminta Station and all who live there.

The protagonist of Araminta Station is Glawen Clattuc, son of Scharde and Marya, an off-world woman who was drowned in an accident when Glawen was only a small child. Glawen’s main gift on his 16th birthday is a particularly nasty trick by Simonetta’s sister Spanchetta, aimed at forcing him into the ranks of the collaterals. Shortly thereafter, he falls in love with fellow student Sessily Veder, but the love affair is prematurely aborted when Sessily is raped and murdered by some unknown individual. He meets Wayness and Milo Tamm, daughter and son of the Conservator, the executive officer of the conservancy; and, through them, becomes aware of the ongoing political struggle between the more conservative naturalists and the ambitious peefers. He joins Bureau B, the police arm of the conservancy. He travels to Yipton as a spy along with a fellow officer, Kirdy Wook, as a member of a rather sedate youth gang, the “Young Lions.” Ultimately, he and Kirdy are sent off-planet to track down the source of certain unpleasant events and he is imprisoned for several months in a most unpleasant location; while Wayness, with whom he has fallen in love, travels to Old Earth to search for certain important documents that have gone missing. Ultimately, he solves the murder of Sessily Veder, tracks down one of the proximate causes of the problems that Araminta Station is having, and, with the help of elderly Bureau B chief Bodwyn Wook, saves himself from yet another malicious trick of Spanchetta’s.

After Araminta Station, I had to wait some years — three and a half, to be exact — for the second of the “Chronicles,” Ecce and Old Earth. After Araminta Station, I was somewhat disappointed. The book was only half to two-thirds the size of its predecessor. It begins with Glawen’s rescue of Scharde from a most unpleasant place to which he has been consigned by his enemies; he is then sent off to Old Earth to help Wayness, who, apparently, does not actually need much help; the lion’s share of the book covers her peregrinations over the planet, hunting for the missing documents that deed the planet to the Naturalist Society and establish the conservancy. All in all, this is not nearly as much fun as the first book, though it has its typically dry Vance moments, as in Lefaun Zadoury’s description of one of the sights of old Kiev on pp. 190-191

Yonder, on that contrivance of iron rods, is where Ivan Grodzny roasted the folk of Kiev for their misdeeds. That was long ago, of course, and the grill is a reconstruction. Directly to the side, in that little kiosk, a vendor sells grilled sausages, which I think to be in rather bad taste.

Ultimately, Wayness and Glawen get back together and, between them, manage to arrange for Julian Bohost, Wayness’s sometime wannabe soulmate and always political nemesis, to snatch defeat from the jaws of victory.

Only a year and a half intervened between the appearance of Ecce and Old Earth and the third and final novel in the series, Throy. Unhappily, the final novel, though it nicely ties up the series, is considerably shorter than either of the other two, a bit more than half as long as its predecessor. Here Glawen and his friend Eustance Chilke, who unwittingly has played a major role in the finding of the two missing documents, are sent off-planet by Bodwyn Wook to track down someone who is believed to be a key individual in the plot to turn Cadwal over to the peefers and Yips. Ultimately, the problem of the peefers and the Yips is resolved in a way very reminiscent of Alexander cutting the Gordian knot, and the series ends on an optimistic note.

As usual, the series was very reminiscent of Vance’s earlier books. This is particularly true when it comes to reuse of names. One minor character, mentioned only in passing, is Shugart Veder; the name “Shugart” is borrowed from Vance’s earlier book Wyst, where it belonged to a major villain. Elsewhere, one of the characters mentions the “site of the ancient city of Tran” on Old Earth; Tran was a city in an early Vance novella, “Telek,” but the world of “Telek” was a very different one from that of the Cadwal Chronicles.

I should add here that this book, like most of Vance’s works from the last three decades, takes place in the universe of the “Gaean Reach,” formerly known (in the “Demon Princes” novels) as the Pale; ⁽⁵⁾ in fact, one of the institutions created for the Demon Princes works, the IPCC, has survived into this period, though in an evolved form, and Baron Bodissey, quotations from whose works are scattered through the DP novels, is mentioned several times here.

There are, I must say, a few inconsistencies and even illogicalities in the series. The evidence that solved Sessily Veder’s murder was so obvious and accessible that it seems impossible to believe that the competent agents of Bureau B — including Bodwyn Wook, Scharde Clattuc and Glawen himself — would take years to come across it. The affair with the bunters depended completely on the idea that only the nasty, carnivorous and untrustworthy bunters were available as riding animals; as though horses could not easily have been imported (Vance makes a point of assuring us — in several places — that scientists had long solved the problem of importing outside lifeforms without damaging the local ecology). The disappearance of Arles Clattuc from the series early in Ecce and Old Earth was, I think, an error; Arles still had a role to play as Glawen’s long-time rival and foil.

Araminta Station was, I believe, perhaps the climax of Vance’s career as a writer. He was already well into his seventies when it was published, and is now even more well into his eighties — in fact, he’ll be 84 on August 28, 2000. SF writers older than this are rare birds indeed, though Jack Williamson, who will start writing his age with three digits in a very few seasons, is still writing (and having published) quite readable new novels. In the last twelve years, besides Ecce and Old Earth and Throy, I remember only two new Vance novels, The Night Lamps and Ports of Call, neither of which struck me as terribly memorable (though Ports of Call gives indications of being the first in a new series).

If we see little or no more Jack Vance, it will be, IMHO, a great loss. Vance is a writer less about phenomena or about great historical events than about people facing up to what we might consider relatively minor problems, largely personal ones. He is not particularly interested in technology as such (the technology of Araminta Station, except with regard to space travel, is that of the 1950s). His vocabulary is vast; stylistically, he is, in some senses, the Nabokov of SF, and has found relatively few imitators in the field (the only one I can think of, Paula Volsky, though she imitates him well, is still imitating). He finds fans in many places and in many languages. ⁽⁶⁾

Enjoy the series. I don’t know how soon we’ll see Vance’s like again.

—-

⁽¹⁾ Years later I found out that Don Wollheim at Ace had expurgated this version of the novel slightly, from its original magazine appearance; Nancy, the heroine, is at one point described by Charley Lysidder, the Bajarnum of Beaujolais, as his “secretary,” whereas in the original Vance used the somewhat more descriptive term “mistress.” The more recent Tor edition — which may still be available, here and there; if so, I recommend it — corrects Wollheim’s editorial weasel-wording.

⁽²⁾ Any American planned-language aficionado will be familiar with Vance’s 1950s novel The Languages of Pao. That Vance is not unfamiliar with this particular field is indicated by his use of the name “Novial” for a second-rate hotel in Ecce and Old Earth; “Novial” was coined by the Danish Anglicist Otto Jespersen as a name for his planned language, and is short for “Nov-International-Auxiliary-Language.”

⁽³⁾ Tor has also collected these five novels into a pair of trade paperbacks, which should still be available.

⁽⁴⁾ I do not find this term being used to identify the series until it appears, for the first time, on the title page of the second book. That it was to be a series, however, was made apparent on the last page of Araminta Station.

⁽⁵⁾ There are, of course, a few obvious exceptions such as his Lyonesse fantasies.

⁽⁶⁾ John Wesley Starling, whose web site at http://www.esperanto.us/ provided me with the date of Vance’s birth, also gives us (authorized) Esperanto translations of Vance’s “Three-Legged Jack” and his masterful novella from a sixties issue of Galaxy, “The Moon Moth.” Note, by the way, that the planet Sirene in “The Moon Moth” should not be confused with the star Syrene, around which Cadwal orbits.

My authorized translations of Threelegged Joe and The Moon Moth are now online as Ogg Vorbis audio files at the URL linked to by my name below.