Star King and The Blue World by Jack Vance

 

Jack Vance (1916-2013) hardly needs any introduction to fans of classic SF, having produced a substantial body of work between about 1950 and 2004. While some of Vance's  work is famous (The Hugo Award-winning The Dragon Masters and The Languages of Pao being my personal favourites - both previously reviewed on this blog) others are a lot more obscure. When I picked them off my shelf, I recalled nothing about either of the two I'm examining this time - an increasing tendency as I've noted before. I will soon reach the stage of being satisfied with reading nothing but old books, which will save me a lot of money on new ones.  

First, Star King (published 1964). To begin with the blurb: 

Star Kings are a race of non-humans who disguise themselves as humans with a difference. Power alone is their goal, a goal they seek regardless of the price in human life. Kireth Gersen was not a Star King but he was looking for one - a very special Star King who had murdered his parents many years before. 

The action starts on Smade's World, which is uninhabited apart from Smade and his family, who run a tavern with a lurid reputation. Gersen has just arrived, on the hunt for the evil Star King called Malagate the Woe (great name for a villain!). Gersen is pretending to be a "locator", basically an explorer who hunts for planets with useful resources or other marketable qualities. One of the other guests is Teehalt, a genuine locator working for Malagate, who has discovered a planet which is of great value as it resembles a pristine Earth. Teehalt regards his find as too beautiful to hand over to Malagate and tries to conceal its location, which is encoded in a memory filament. Gersen is focused on acquiring the filament to act as bait to catch Malagate, involving a journey to the planet (which proves to have some distinctive wildlife) before the real Malagate is revealed.

The book has an interesting structure, with a copious use of inserts such as quotations from books, articles and interviews, a convenient way of providing a lot of background information. Vance has a lot of fun with descriptions of a variety of inhabited planets, how humanity has evolved on them and their political and social structures. The overall mood of the story is rather dark, but leavened with dry humour. I read the book without making notes, so skimmed it again before writing this review and found myself drawn in to reading most of it again - it repays a careful reading as it is rather better than I first realised.

I see from Wiki that this was the first of five volumes in The Demon Princes series, but I have never come across any of the others.

Next up: The Blue World (published 1966).

Sklar Hast lives in the Blue World. A water paradise of floating islands big enough to support houses and sea gardens and communication towers so the People of the Floats can wink messages to each other. All is harmony and perfection. Except for the sea monsters.

King Kragen is the ruler of the deep, a great beast who subdues others of his kind in exchange for certain things. Like food. And reverence. The submissive People of the Floats pay up, they know King Kragen is indestructible. Sklar Hast knows it too but he doesn't care - he's going to to try and kill him anyway.

As with Star King, there is a lot more going on in this story than the blurb suggests. In particlar, the intricacies of the social structure which has developed on the Floats are fascinating and, I suspect, provided Vance with much enjoyment to devise. The battle of the generations is played out against an exotic background.

The "floating islands" setting for this book seemed familiar to me - can anyone think of any other novels with a similar feature? Two which occur to me are James Schmitz's Nandy-Cline stories, Trouble Tide and The Demon Breed; but while Nandy-Cline has floating islands it is not an entirely water world. 

Anyway, these two novels make for agreeable light entertainment, being only around 200 pages each, with just enough meat to provide worthwhile sustenance.

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The Jupiter Theft by Donald Moffitt

 

Yet another book I had forgotten (along with its author, whose name rang no bells), this being published in 1977. Moffitt (1931-2014), wrote only a handful of SF novels, but a larger body of shorter fiction as well as adult spy thrillers. 

To start with the blurb: 

Within hours after the Lunar Observatory picked up a strange new X-ray source in Cygnus, the disastrous picture was clear. An immense object was hurtling towards the Solar System at nearly the speed of light. And its intense radiation would surely wipe out all life on Earth within six months. There was nothing anyone could do. Then, incredibly, the rogue presence that had appeared out of nowhere suddenly changed its trajectory - and stopped in the region of Jupiter. But that was flatly impossible...

The story is set in a future in which humanity is recovering from devastating wars which had left American and China as the two major powers in uneasy co-existence. The inner planets had been explored and, in the case of Mars, settled, and a major expedition with a mixed Chinese/American crew of 100 had been organised to visit Jupiter and potentially establish a base on one of the moons.  However, the arrival of the Cygnus Object results in a rapid change of plan, with the mission repurposed to focus on examining the Object.

During the journey to Jupiter, the author provides lots of background information and introduces several key staff members who remain prominent for most of the story, in a variety of shifting relationships. The central character is Commander Tod Jameson and the events which unroll are largely seen from his viewpoint. 

The human crew are astonished when they arrive at Jupiter, since the Cygnus Object is not one but five spacecraft, each thirty miles long and with three folding arms in a configuration which can be adjusted to suit the different requirements of acceleration up to near-lightspeed, cruising at that speed for years, and then decelerating when approach the target system. The alien spacecraft are powered by gas stripped from giant gas planets, and are already stripping Jupiter's atmosphere to fuel their next journey. 

The Cygnans soon become aware of the arrival of the human Jupiter ship and swarm over it, capturing most of the crew. Many of them end up in a super zoo, where the tensions between the Americans and Chinese are intensified, and also between the democratic and dictatorial elements of the crews. To make matters even more unstable, the humans have nuclear weapons on board.

In contrast with their enormous ships, the Cygnans' standard method of inter-ship transport is by something like a rocket broomstick which the Cygnans sit astride and manoeuvre by shifting their body-weight around and judging direction by eye. Even more remarkably, they use spray-on space-suits which are almost invisible. This allows the humans to observe the truly weird Cygnans who (among other oddities) communicate by musical sounds;  a characteristic which gives Jameson (who has perfect pitch) a major advantage.

The Cygnans rely on a network of transparent tubes to move around at high speed within each ship. To avoid collisions, the tubes are directional and wrap around each other, forming a double spiral. To digress for a moment, this reminds me of a Victorian fort at Dover, Kent, in which the designers wanted to achieve rapid transport of large numbers of troops between the accommodation at the top of a cliff and the defended shore at the bottom. They built an ingenious 140-foot staircase with a triple spiral, known as the Grand Shaft - it still exists. The Grand Shaft was never used in anger, but the story goes that in order to maintain social differences in peacetime, the use of the three staircases was separated into "Officers and their Ladies", "Sergeants and their Wives", and "Soldiers and their Women".

Anyway, to cut a fairly long story short, most of the humans try to break out of the zoo and return to their ship, with some of them being aided by another zoo species who are highly intelligent and possess a unique inherent weapon system. 

The blurb credits the author with having the "world-juggling sweep of Larry Niven" and the  "scientific expertise of Arthur C. Clarke", and for once I would not disagree with this praise. I might add that Moffitt's handling of his characters is superior to both.