Numciamento

source

Here in August, I'm celebrating the fiction of Jack Vance. Recently I mentioned fictional places invented by Vance that I would like to visit. One such destination is the remote Smade's Planet. The only attraction on Smade's Planet is Smade's Tavern, a place where Mr. Smade welcomes visitors from both the civilized worlds of the Oikumene and the frontier worlds of the Beyond. However, due to its location and lack of other nearby attractions, sometimes weeks go by without any guests being in residence at Smade's Tavern.

Don't worry about Smade becoming lonely during those times. He lives with three wives and eleven children who constitute the working staff of the Tavern. Smade's daughter, Araminta, grew up to be a prolific author, so we know many details about her life while growing up on Smade's Planet.

Welcome to Smade's Tavern!  Mr. Smade with one of his wives and one of their children, ready with a cold brew for
a new guest. Also available from the bar: Fraze and Hannah's Mascarene Rum from Copus.

Death on Smade's Planet

In the Asimov Reality.
original cover art by John Styga
and Edmund Emshwiller

With no formal landing procedures, guests arriving at Smade's Tavern simply landed their space ships on the heath behind the tavern and then walked within the confines of the white-washed stone fence that surrounded the grounds. Before arranging for use of a room on the second floor, the tired and thirsty guest might first down a cold glass of Smade's Own Ale.

Araminta's mother, Úna Nybröm, was an agent for the secretive IPX. When Lugo Tehalt was murdered at Smade's Tavern, Úna was at work, trying to make sure that Kirth Gersen would come into possession of Tehalt's space craft. She had deployed a special IPCC cloaking shield over Tehalt's ship, preventing Malagate the Woe from finding it and thus depriving the Demon Prince of the data encoded upon its Flight Course Monitor. See "Reality Simulation" for details.

cover art by
Alex Schomburg

Those data were valuable: providing the location of a pristine new world, just the kind of planet that Malagate wanted for his personal domain.

Cosmopolis, October 1923

Vance introduced readers to Smade on the first page of his Demon Princes saga. Smade is a minor character in Star King. By my count, he speaks a total of 69 words (not counting the interview transcript that was published in Cosmopolis magazine, part of which Vance transcribes for readers and includes at the start of Chapter 1).

Even before Smade's interview, Vance provides readers with some quoted text that is attributed to His Majesty, Balder Bashin. Through the entire Demon Princes saga, Vance sprinkles in little historical nuggets illustrating the twisting course of religion through his imagined future society. Balder Bashin's words were lifted from the pages of an Ecclesiarchic Numciamento.

Wyst: Alastor 1716

"Balderdash" is exactly the type of word that readers should expect to grace the pages of stories written by Jack Vance. I believe it is a typical Vance joke for him to name a religious leader "Balder Bashin".

Vance used "balderdash" in his first published novel, Vandals of the Void (1953, download here). According to this page, Vance's novel was one of 37 novels that were published in the Winston Science Fiction series from 1952 to 1961. Writing in the Forward to Vandals of the Void, Vance predicted that humans would travel to the surface of the Moon by 1965, only overly optimistic by a few years. He also predicted that there would be permanently manned bases on Mars and Venus by 1980, which from the perspective of 2019 might be labeled as "balderdash".

The Languages of Pao

Rated PG
Since Vandals of the Void was written for a young audience, there is no sex, but a smattering of death and violence. Everyone knows that the protagonist will win. Vandals of the Void is a story about how the young (15 years old) Dick Murdock goes on summer vacation and ends up helping the Space Navy capture an evil space pirate. Dick is then invited to attend the Las Vegas Space-Training Academy in preparation for a career in the Space Navy.

The last scene in Vandals of the Void is very similar to what happens to the young Jantiff Ravenstroke (Wyst: Alastor 1716) when he is invited by the Connatic to join his staff. In Vandals of the Void, Dick is assured of a position on Commodore Hallmeier's staff when Dick graduates from the Academy.

Apparently, Vance chafed at the restrictions imposed on those who wrote science fiction stories for television or for children in the early 1950s. In 1957 Vance published another novel in which his 15-year-old protagonist, Beran Panasper, got to live with his girl friend, Gitan Netsko.

Asimov on Venus

In the early 1950s, Vance got a high-paying job writing scripts for the Captain Video television show. I like to imagine that in the Ekcolir Reality, Isaac Asimov became famous for his Lucky Starr television program.

I've previously lamented the fact that the writing of stories about human colonists on Venus persisted for so long in the science fiction genre. During the 20th century, astronomical observations and robotic probes revealed that the surfaces of both Mars and Venus are inhospitable. Kids of the Vance and Asimov generation grew up reading stories about life on Venus (example) and, unfortunately, they had to write their own stories in the Planetary Adventure genre (See Asimov's Oceans of Venus). Vandals of the Void begins on Venus, at a settlement called Miracle Valley, the birth place and home of Dick Murdock.

Welcome to the Future

James Webb space telescope

Lucky for us, atomic engines are ready to lift us off of Venus and get our adventure underway. Traveling millions of miles through space takes time (going faster would use up too much expensive plutonium), but the lucky space ship passengers have access to a microfilm library! The word "computer" does not appear in this story.

in the Ekcolir Reality

Dick is off to the Moon where his father runs an observatory that is equipped with a telescope that has a 36-foot metallic lens. The precision of their stellar observations is limited by the quality of their photographic plates. There is mention of a smaller space telescope: the Harvard Camera, but the telescope on the Moon is more powerful... and they have room for accumulating a library containing hundreds of thousands of photographic plates... not to mention a single printed copy of the star catalog that has been painstakingly assembled by the local Librarian.

Pirates Vandals

1953

The Vandals of the Void are space pirates. Dick can't have a nice peaceful vacation on the Moon because pirates have been attacking the space ships that travel between Earth, Mars and Venus much like ocean liners going from New York to London. "Dick had a sudden vivid picture in his mind: roaring bestial men in the calm streets of Miracle Valley, burning, destroying, carrying off women." This is exactly the scenario later used by Vance as the backstory for his Demon Princes saga, but in that case it was Kirth Gersen from a settlement called Mount Pleasant that was destroyed by space pirates.

In Vandals of the Void, the pirates are defeated and the United Nations Space Navy stands prepared to usher Humanity into the age of interstellar space travel. Ta-da! Through most of the story, nobody can figure out where the pirates come from, much like the silly "plot" in You Only Live Twice.

The Palace of Love

If you want to read Vandals of the Void, stop reading this blog post now...

Spoiler
The only thing that has the potential to rescue Vandals of the Void from collapsing into a black hole of its own Hardy-Boys implausibility is a quirky resident on the Moon known as Crazy Sam who tells wild stories about meeting native residents of the Moon, aliens who he says live in deep caves. Sadly, poor Sam is murdered and Dick must solve the mystery of the space pirates on his own. In later novels such as The Palace of Love, Vance would luxuriate in his quirky characters such as the mad poet Navarth.

original cover art
by Henry Van Dongen

More Spoilers
Although Vance mentions abandoned alien cities on Mars and inside deep lunar caverns, we meet no space aliens in Vandals of the Void. The evil pirate leader can magically both be 1) a working scientist and second in command at the Lunar Observatory and 2) the head pirate leading a large force of: "Hard, mean, shifty-eyed ruffians; bloated and arrogant bullies; sly-eyed men... scarred, pulp-nosed, weasel-faced—the stench of evil..." Sadly, Vance would later give his readers a similarly unconvincing multiple-identities wielding character in The Killing Machine: Kokor Hekkus, a hormagaunt. In Vandals of the Void, the pirate leader goes by the name "the Basilisk" and he wears a disguise (with large yellow eyes), trying to make his minions believe that he is an alien creature with telepathic powers.

Next: origins project, Star King

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