The Fading Genius of Jack Vance

Hilyer and Althea Fath are humanities professors from the world of Thanet, part of the sprawling interstellar society that has come to be known as the Gaean Reach. Every year, husband and wife embark on off-world fieldwork forays, usually returning with copious notes, field recordings of folk music, and the candelabra that Althea collects as souvenirs. One year, however, they return with something very unexpected – a new son, little Jaro, who the Faths discovered being brutally beaten by a group of surly youths in a rural backwater of an obscure little world.

At first, of course, the Faths did whatever they could to figure out where Jaro had come from – but he had endured some sort of horrendous experience even prior to getting dogpiled by those older kids, and was so traumatised by it that his psyche is entirely shattered to the point where he ends up having screaming, self-destructive fits whenever he regains consciousness, and only by deleting significant chunks of his memory are the medics able to bring him out of sedation. Further investigation fails to find any sign of his true parentage; eventually, the local authorities permit the Faths to adopt him and return to Thanet.

Jaro grows to adulthood on the world of Thanet. He chafes against the local culture, rooted as it is in constant striving for rank in a vast network of interlinked social clubs, but that’s a sort of rebellion the Faths understand; they are non-participants, or “nimps”, in this social game themeselves. What worries them more is his declared intent to discover the truth of his parentage – which would entail heading out into space, when the Faths would rather he live a tranquil life in academia like they have enjoyed. The Faths, though, may not have a choice in the matter forever – when they die in a mysterious bombing, Jaro is freed up to pursue his answers.

To uncover them he’ll have to fall back on a limited set of true friends. Skirl Hutsenreiter is an old schoolmate of his; although born into the elite Clam Muffin society which is among those at the pinnacle of society, she has had a more adventurous and unstable life than typical due to her father frittering away much of his money at gambling, and has decided to embark on a career as an “effectuator” – effectively a private eye. Maihac and Gaing are former IPCC agents and interstellar adventurers who each in their own way has taken Jaro under their wing, and who may know more of what’s going on than they have yet told.

Together, Jaro, Skirl, Maihac, and Gaing will discover the true fate of Jaro’s mother, and then embark on a quest to bring justice to the brutal criminal responsible for her death. But to do that, they will need to go to the mysterious world of Fader… a place settled by humans intent on breaking certain taboos and legal measures around eugenics and slavery that apply within the Gaean Reach, a world orbiting a star that is outside of the main body of the galaxy altogether… a lonely star given the picturesque name of Night Lamp…

Interstellar Hit List, Infernal Targets

It is some fifteen centuries into the future, and humanity has expanded to the stars, settling numerous worlds. Centred on Earth is the Oikumene, that set of worlds which can largely be said to be “civilised” – laws are set and adhered to, sufficient enforcement exists to ensure that one cannot rob and murder with impunity and troublemakers will be pursued by the authorities, and so on. Though a fully-empowered interstellar police force does not exist, a private investigation agency – the IPCC – has been set up to provide such functions, providing resources such as intelligence data and forensics labs to local police and assisting them in apprehending interstellar criminals.

Beyond the Oikumene is the Beyond – the frontier worlds where no interstellar law enforcement operates, either because there is no sufficiently strong local institutions to enact and enforce laws to begin with or such governments as exist are too insular to care about off-world infractions. Though the IPCC occasionally send agents – known as “weasels” – to the Beyond to track down and apprehend criminals whose actions are so flagrant as to merit it, weasels must work undercover and expect zero co-operation and maximum hostility from the locals.

Five of the most feared figures of the Beyond are the Demon Princes, so called because of the extent of the power they have amassed and the ruthlessness with which they use it. For the most part these organised crime kingpins attend to their own affairs – but once, the five Demon Princes acted collaboratively, launching a raid on the town of Mount Pleasant, massacring any inhabitant who resisted, and selling the rest into slavery, leaving nobody behind.

Nobody, that is, except Rolf Gersen and his infant grandson, Kirth. Taking Kirth off-world, Grandpa Gersen ensured that the child got a capable education as well as extensive extracurricular training, whilst he invested his time in trying to uncover the names of the Demon Princes – for each maintained a careful anonymity. Rolf would die before completing this mission – but he passed on to Kirth a letter identifying someone who would be able to name the Demon Princes definitively, as well as recommending certain additional training to undertake before he took up his mission of revenge.

Now Kirth is in his early thirties, his childhood and early adult life invested in gaining a very particular set of skills and tracking down the man named in Grandpa’s letter. He has left that man dead in an alleyway; he has tucked away in a pocket the list of names. His plan is to track down each of them one by one – and when he finds them, kill them without mercy. Yet despite himself, Gersen finds that his conscience won’t let him coldly apply himself solely to the job at hand, and starts to wonder if there’s more to life than revenge…

The Demon Princes is Jack Vance’s most expansive science fiction series, encompassing some five novels, and presenting an earlier iteration (both in terms of time of writing and the in-setting time period) of his Gaean Reach setting. (The setting is not yet referred to as such, but certain institutions in common between the stories mentioning the Oikumene and those mentioning the Reach suggest that the latter is an evolution of the former, much like how Le Guin’s similarly named Ekumen is an evolution of the League of All Worlds.)

Après Madouc, le Déluge

Jack Vance’s Lyonesse trilogy is his major work of the 1980s. Sure, he may have kicked off the Cadwal Chronicles trilogy in that decade, but that was not so special – as well as being far from his best work, it was yet more science fiction set in his Gaean Reach setting, of which there had already been plenty. Sure, Cugel’s Saga from 1983 and Rhialto the Marvellous from 1984 might have been welcome new entries in the Dying Earth sequence, though in some respects Rhialto feels a little out of place with the other four books in the series, its tone more comedic than ever (and given how comedic the two mid-sequence novels starring Cugel the Clever novels are, that’s saying a lot). Sure, he might have released The Book of Dreams, the final book of The Demon Princes – one of his greatest science fiction series.

Nonetheless, Lyonesse was a project both contained entirely in the 1980s and evidenced a greater density of research and worldbuilding and a far greater complexity of plot and characterisation than more or less any of these other projects. Lyonesse is Vance’s other fantasy series, and since the Dying Earth setting is arguably science fantasy, it’s the most “pure fantasy” material you will find in his bibliography.

The setting is the Elder Isles – an archipelago that never was, sitting in the Atlantic a little way west of France, north of Spain, and south of Ireland. The literature of medieval Europe is positively lousy with mythical islands – Lyonesse, Ys, Hy Brasil, Avalon, and whatnot. As it turns out, the Elder Isles is the archipelago which encompasses all of these locations and more besides.

The events of the trilogy take place somewhere in the early Dark Ages – long enough after the fall of Rome that there are Roman ruins on the Isles rather than Roman garrisons, but a generation or two before the rise of King Arthur on Britain (whose forefathers fled the archipelago after fortune turned against them). Christianity is on the rise, but slowly, and still shares the island with numerous pagan faiths, some of astonishing antiquity. (The mysterious city of Ys, for instance, was built and inhabited long before recorded history, and may well be an outpost of Atlantis.) Beyond this, the society and culture is more like that of the late medieval period than the Dark Ages.

This is a deliberate conceit; though the trilogy does not relate to Arthur specifically, it takes a lot of influence from Arthurian legend, as well as from similar bodies of legend and myth and stories from the high Middle Ages, and the likes of Malory and de Troyes and so on who forged those stories did so in an anachronistic manner, depicting a world much like the one they were familiar with rather than one rooted in historical accuracy.

This is not the only literary feature of medieval literature Vance lifts; the trilogy features significant use of Entrelacement – the technique of having multiple apparently independent stories which all seem separate and weave into and out of each other (and are not necessarily told in strict sequential chronological order) before their relevance to the whole tapestry becomes apparent by the climax, as used in sources ranging from Le Morte d’Arthur to the Poetic Edda to the Nibelungenleid.

With Vance regularly resorting to the picaresque over his career (as he also does here), it’s apparent that he had a long-standing interest in archaic literary forms; here it reaches its peak, as he brings together all of his imaginative powers and writing technique to make an attempt at writing a body of legend that could sit aside its inspirations proudly. Much like the source material, the subject matter is sometimes dealt with in strikingly direct and brutal fashion: content warnings for sexual assault, gruesome torture, and suicide apply.

Suldrun’s Garden (AKA Lyonesse)

The first book in the trilogy was initially released as merely Lyonesse on the front cover, but the interior title pages of such editions made it clear that this story was Suldrun’s Garden. That’s important, because it is Suldrun and her garden that tie the whole thing together.

When Suldrun is born, the Elder Isles have long ceased to be the united kingdom they were in her grandparents’ era. Now they consist of ten kingdoms – the great kingdoms of Lyonesse and Dahaut laying claim to much of Hybras, the large central isle of the archipelago, whilst other kingdoms claim the remainder of Hybras or the various satellite islands. In practice, the kingdoms of mortals only really control the circumference of Hybras, for at the centre of the island is the Forest of Tantrevalles, where the fairies hold sway.

Suldrun is born the daughter of King Casmir, the ruthlessly ambitious ruler of Lyonesse, and grows up in the royal palace of Haidion in Lyonesse Town, commanding a magnificent view of the sea. Suldrun chafes under the restrictions placed on a royal princess, but knows the grounds of the palace well enough to at least find somewhere she can be alone: an old, ruined garden under the cliffs, swiftly accessible from the palace grounds.

One fateful day, Casmir’s strategies reach a point where an alliance with the mysterious Duke Carfilhiot – theoretically a vassal of the King of South Ulfland, in practice an independent warlord – seems desirable. Carfilhiot is not averse to the idea, and requests as his price Suldrun’s hand in marriage. Suldrun, however, has great insight into the characters of others, and accurately perceives in Carfilhiot a cruel streak which would make marriage to him a living nightmare. On the day of the betrothal ceremony, she does not show, instead going off to be alone in her garden. Finding her there, a coldly furious Casmir pronounces his judgement: Suldrun must remain in the garden, and if she goes beyond its bounds she will be the slave of any man who captures her.

Suldrun’s time in the garden is lonely and melancholy, but she can stand being alone. This all changes when Prince Aillas of Troicinet, which is at war with Lyonesse, is washed up on the shore where the garden meets the sea – having been shoved overboard on a sea-voyage by his rival for the throne of Troicinet. Suldrun saves Aillas’ life and nurses him back to health, and the two fall deeply in love and hatch a daring escape plan – a plan foiled by the venal Brother Umphred, a Christian missionary who had his own intentions towards Suldrun, and who Aillas had bullied into witnessing his folk marriage to Suldrun.

Aillas is flung into Casmir’s oubliette; Suldrun gives birth to his son, Dhrun, and is able to obtain the aid of her childhood maid Ehirme in keeping Dhrun out of Casmir’s clutches. Alas: Dhrun is eventually abducted by fairies, unbeknownst to Suldrun; very much beknownst to her, for she can hear the screams from the torture chambers, Ehirme has been captured by Casmir and put through agonies to try and get knowledge of the location of the child. Convinced that Dhrun must eventually fall into Casmir’s power, that Aillas is dead, that all her plans have come to naught and that she will forever be at the mercy of Casmir’s dispassionate cruelty, Suldrun commits suicide. (Meanwhile, the half-fairy baby girl who was swapped by the fairies for Dhrun is taken in by Casmir and raised as the Princess Madouc.)

Aillas, however, is not dead; on escape from the oubliette, he reaches the garden only to encounter Suldrun’s ghost, who informs him of Dhrun’s existence and exhorts him to find their son. Meanwhile, little Dhrun lives with the fair folk and grows eight years in the space of one, and is then turfed out to make his own way in the world – taking with him a treasury of precious faerie gifts from his old playmates and a curse of bad luck from a rival. Shimrod, a former alter ego of the archmage Murgen who has now taken on independent personhood, must set off on his own journey to thrwart the machinations of the rival magicians who wish to strike at Murgen through him – among their number is Duke Carfilhiot himself.

As Aillas, Dhrun, and Shimrod weave their way throughout Hybras, picaresque adventure, fairytale whimsy, unseelie horror and brave deeds await them. Will Dhrun, Aillas, and Shimrod be able to find each other? And if they do, what will it mean for Casmir and Carfilhiot’s ambitions – or, for that matter, the greater game between magicians that Shimrod’s troubles, Carfilhiot’s plans, Casmir’s ambitions, and the very division of the Kingdoms themselves are merely the outward consequences of?

Daring and Danger On Durdane

Although Jack Vance’s most famous fictional setting is the Dying Earth, that was not his most extensive series; far more expansive was the mass of material he wrote set in the Gaean Reach, a vast realm of human-colonised worlds. The Reach has no heavy-handed central authority ruling affairs, except in some presentations of the setting where a body called the Oikumene exerted some interstellar enforcement – largely relating to necessary regulation of interstellar trade and the currency used for such rather than intervening in planetary affairs.

Between this lack of a heavy hand from Earth and the fact that each planet’s individual quirks and local conditions will tend to have an effect on the people and societies living there, the Gaean Reach is a fantastically diverse place, with humanity finding nigh-infinite different ways to live. In truth, the Reach is largely a default for Vance rather than reflecting a united future history which ties all the novels in it tightly together; Vance was largely interested in depicting curiously eccentric cultures and people’s responses to them, having a diverse cosmos like this where each world can run its affairs more or less as it likes serves that well.

As a result, the material from this setting is a bit of a mixed bag, and is often listed in Vance’s bibliography as a bunch of separate standalone novels or shorter series, rather than representing a tightly connected overarching sequence. Some of the books of the Gaean Reach are well-regarded; The Demon Princes is a widely-praised series, and I consider Vance’s 1996 Night Lamp to be his final truly great work. Others are less so; I felt that Vance’s talents were failing him with the Cadwal Chronicles, and that his final books, the Ports of Call duology, may as well have been written on autopilot.

One series based in the setting which had eluded me until a chance find in a charity shop was the Durdane trilogy. Durdane is a world of the Gaean Reach. Its original founders were extreme individualists, not keen on the compromises needed to live in Earth society, and so sought the most distant world they could find to settle in order to stave off, for as long as possible,. the time when the progress of human settlement would leave them surrounded; at the time of the trilogy, they are still a little way outside the wider human sphere of influence. The individualism and parochialism already strong in many planets of the Reach are turned up to 11 here…

The Anome

Lucky folk of Shant! In sixty-two cantons sing praise! How can evil flourish when every act is subject to the scrutiny of the GLORIOUS ANOME?

The first book in the trilogy is a coming of age story, covering around 15 years in the life of Gastel Etzwane; by the end, he’s gained sweeping but secret power over the destiny of his homeland of Shant, but at the beginning he is a little boy, asking his mother whether the Faceless Man is real. It might not be original to have a small child ask the questions a confused reader might ask when confronted with an unusual society invented by a fantasy author, but Vance manages to pull it off well, partially because the growth to adulthood of Gastel is as clear and firm a statement of a major theme in Vance’s work as I’ve seen anywhere.

It’s always dangerous to try and pin down an author’s political beliefs from their writing, but I think it’s fairly safe to say that Vance was something of a cultural and social libertarian; his books in general, and Gastel’s story in particular, espouse the idea that everyone should have the freedom to examine their own society and culture, adopt those standards and ideals they find beneficial, and, provided that they aren’t harming anyone by doing so, reject those cultural impositions, restrictions, and attitudes which do not serve them.

It Might Be Dying But It’s Still a Naughty Earth

This article was originally published on Ferretbrain. I’ve backdated it to its original Ferretbrain publication date but it may have been edited and amended since its original appearance.

Fantasy readers who want to dickwave about their erudition like to use The Lord of the Rings as a benchmark. Are the only fantasy novels you can name clear imitations of Tolkien? Did you only start getting into fantasy after the Peter Jackson movies came out? Have you not got around to reading any fantasy preceding the publication of The Fellowship of the Ring? If any of those apply, there are those who’ll consider you a lesser fan on those grounds alone.

These people are arseholes and you shouldn’t listen to them; you can be a fan of something without giving much of a fuck about its history. As far as fiction goes if you don’t enjoy a book in and of itself, or you don’t have a wider interest in its place in the particular genre or tradition it sits in or the place it came from or the author who produced it, then there isn’t really much good reason to read it. But if for some reason beyond my understanding you want to impress a fantasy elitist you could always drop Jack Vance’s name; with the first volume in his Dying Earth series being published in 1950, well before Fellowship came out, he’s got the “predating LOTR” angle properly covered, and with the spellcasting system in pre-4E versions of Dungeons & Dragons being called “Vancian” (due to it being a flavourless approximation of the way magic works in The Dying Earth) he also ticks the “influenced far more people than have actually read his stuff” box. On top of that, he actually has a fairly individual and distinct style which, if you happen to enjoy it, means the books are also strong on the whole “actually fun to read” front.

Inspired by a recent burst of enthusiasm for the Dying Earth RPG in my general vicinity, I just reread the books for the first time in years. I still love them, but because of some things I noticed in this readthrough, I’m not sure it’s a love I want to parade around openly. So obviously I’m going to blab about it here for you all to see. (In the event you do decide to tackle this stuff, omnibus collections of all four books are readily available, plus Vance’s official website and Gollancz’ SF Gateway offers e-books with texts taken from the Vance Integral Edition.)

The Apprentices Perform For Their Master

This article was originally published on Ferretbrain. I’ve backdated it to its original Ferretbrain publication date but it may have been edited and amended since its original appearance.

In certain important respects it is impossible for me to review Songs of the Dying Earth, because the anthology of all-original stories, compiled by George R.R. Martin and Gardner Dozois and published in 2009, was not entirely composed with a mass audience in mind. As the subtitle states, these are Stories In Honour of Jack Vance, and the book was published at around the same time as Vance finished his autobiography This is Me, Jack Vance! and retired from writing, after a career spanning some six decades.

It is, in other words, a retirement gift from the SF and fantasy writing community to a beloved elder, and it’s structured accordingly. It opens with a forward by Dean Koontz entitled Thank You, Mr Vance, in which Koontz discusses how he first encountered the great man’s work and its influence on him, and after each story the authors take their turns to share their memories of Vance as a writer and Vance as a person. Like in any retirement party, the retiree is given an opportunity to say a few words, and in Vance’s preface he glosses over the actual process of writing The Dying Earth in favour of enthusing about his own influences – naming Robert Chambers, L. Frank Baum, Edgar Rice Burroughs, Jeffery Farnol and Lord Dunsany amongst them, but surprisingly (and delightfully) naming C.L. Moore as the queen of them all. Yes, this is a commercially published product, produced both with an eye to turning a profit in its own right and promoting the work of the authors who contribute stories (each of whom gets a full-page biography summarising their important work at the start of their tales), but it’s also a carefully-prepared present from a collection of “high-echelon, top-drawer writers” (as Vance calls them) to one of the highest-echelon science fantasy authors of them all.

Jumping the Shark On a National Trust Planet

This article was originally published on Ferretbrain. I’ve backdated it to its original Ferretbrain publication date but it may have been edited and amended since its original appearance.

In 1988 Jack Vance took a break from writing his classic Lyonesse Trilogy to begin a new science fiction series, the Cadwal Chronicles. The series is notable for two reasons: it is the last group of non-standalone novels Vance wrote before the mediocre Ports of Call duology, and to my mind represents the point where Vance’s output jumps the shark. While 1996’s Night Lamp did represent a return to form, I can’t help but consider it a swan song; the ending of the Cadwal Chronicles reminds me nothing more of the disappointment I felt reading Ports of Call and Lurulu. In this article, I’m going to review each book of the series and painstakingly reconstruct Vance’s shark jump.

Book Review: Ports of Call and Lurulu

This article was originally published on Ferretbrain. I’ve backdated it to its original Ferretbrain publication date but it may have been edited and amended since its original appearance.

Jack Vance’s reputation in SF and fantasy is nigh-unimpeachable, with good reason. The Dying Earth fused the pulp fantasy approach of Clark Ashton Smith with the whimsical playfulness of Dunsany to produce something which, arguably, has had as much influence on the fantasy genre as Lord of the Rings (which it preceded by four years). Lyonesse, his other major fantasy series, was a striking reimagining of Arthurian myth. His various science fiction novels – including The Dragon Masters (which Anne McCaffrey drew on shamelessly for her Pern series), Emphyrio, The Demon Princes, and the brilliantly-named Servants of the Wankh – have been praised by just about everyone who’s written or read science fiction in the 20th Century.

Which is why I was keen to get to grips with his latest two-part series, Ports of Call and Lurulu – his previous novel, 1996’s Night Lamp, was excellent, after all. This pair of books may have an unoriginal concept – young man struck with wanderlust becomes crew member of space ship, gets to see universe – but you can forgive a man for writing traditional space operas if he was one of the pioneers of the genre, right?