Worlds of Vance

Showboat World and Galactic Effectuator

A friend - you know who you are - handed me a bunch of Vance and some Lieber a while back. Aside from my most profound thanks, the greatest appreciation I can grant is to give the books their due attention. Among the first I’ve finished were The Killing Machine (second of the “Demon Prince’s” books), Showboat World, and Galactic Effectuator.

While I have liked some more than others, there is yet anything by Vance that I actually disliked. By way of example, I personally didn’t care much for the Cugel stories from the Dying Earth - mostly due to Cugel - but absolutely loved the Planet of Adventure stories.

Showboat World

There are other covers for this book, but the one I’ve shown above is the one I had, and I find it remarkable in exactly how little is has to do with anything at all in the book. Rayguns, spacesuits, spaceships? Not a one. About the only thing it properly evokes is the feeling that anything may happen.

Imagine a world, where civil societies, such as they exist, cluster around a shared river basin and its far-flung tributaries. Plying the river are merchants, but also showboats - think a cross between a Mississippi steamship and a mobile stage and and circus troupe. The showboats travel up and down, stopping at the varied ports, and putting on performances for pay, with each boat specializing in different types of low and highbrow entertainment. The exact nature of the show can change from port to port, as the cultures and towns are wildly varied with their respective likes, dislikes, and outright taboos. The shipmasters obtain guidance from an Almanac listing the salient points that travelers must be cognizant of in preparation for each port.

Now imagine that as the backdrop of Dirty Rotten Scoundrels, with a dollop of the weird a la the Oddysey. Two ship intensely competitive ship captains, playing practical jokes upon each other, undertake a journey to compete in a far kingdom, with the winner gaining wealth and a title of nobility. On the way they meet a mysterious woman with her own motives, and suffer multiple reversals of fortune as they prepare and refine a unique interpretation of Macbeth for the festival.

Greed, skullduggery, barbarians, fine wines, and passionately pursued hobbies, with a bit of picaresque.

Galactic Effectuator

This is a collection of two stories about Miro Hetzel, an Effectuator - a cross between a detective and resolver of problems. This cover actually does faithfully depict what could very well be a scene in the story, and while little of the action shows such scenes, the aliens and planet on the cover are utterly central to the first tale, Dogtown Tourist Agency. These are mysteries, but more in the spirit of old pulp private eye novels. However Miro is not your down-on-his-luck PI - indeed, he lives rather well, and has an outstanding reputation for resolving extremely thorny issues.

In the first tale, Miro successfully resolves a job noting that a person he’d been instructed to trace has departed for a planet called Maz, on the border of two other interstellar principalities. He then later goes to Maz for another case involving industrial secrets, and discovers that his earlier case may not be disconnected after all.

Maz itself is an interesting world. It is the homeworld of the alien race on the cover, natural and fearless warriors who are discrete individuals, yet fearless in part due to being part of a telepathic collective with their sept. These Gomaz , despite being primitives, were such effective warriors that all three interstellar empires including the two highly xenophobic alien ones put down the Gomaz, confined them to their homeworld, and established a shared governing body on Maz.

In the second tale, a client hires Miro to look into his former schoolmate, a man sociopathically convinced of his infallibility and superiority, who has also turned rogue as a doctor, and has enacted a horrible vengeance upon those he believes slighted him.

Vance’s protagonists, indeed, all of his characters, are all unique. Here, Miro is used to the finer things in life, but is distinct from Apollon Zamp and the other ship captains of Showboat in being direct, and honest with those entrusting him. Unlike the grayer end of noir detective stories, Miro seeks justice, if not necessarily jail, or dead instigators: he takes his work at resolving issues seriously, and exercises extreme competence and thoroughness. He is physically capable if not the man of action exemplified by Adam Reith in Planet of Adventure.

His common trait with many Vance characters is his unwavering persistence.

If you like Vance, you will almost certainly enjoy these.