When I was discovering printed science fiction in the 1970s, DAW Books was the source of many of the Sci Fi novels that I could find in stores. I suppose I should be eternally grateful to Donald Wollheim for all his efforts that made so many science fiction stories available to readers like me. As discussed here and here and here, sometimes the promotional blurbs on the back covers of science fiction novels are quite amusing... sometimes having seemingly been written by someone who either did not read the story or did not understand it. However, particularly memorable for me is the DAW Books cover art for the first four Demon Princes novels with illustrations by Gino D'Achille (Figure 1, below). I suspect that Gino actually read the books and faithfully painted images that correspond to memorable aspects of the stories.
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Figure 1. cover art by Gino D'Achille in the Final Reality
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When the fifth novel in the Demon Princes series was published (The Book of Dreams), Ken Kelly
did the cover art for DAW (see Figure 2, below). Previously, I've imagined additional novels in Jack Vance's Alastor Cluster series.
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Figure 2. Covers by Ken Kelly for the Ekcolir Reality. Click image to enlarge.
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It is hard for me to resist doing the same for the
Demon Princes... there are so many other
Kirth Gersen adventures I would have liked to see flow from Vance's pen such as a description of the activities of the
Institute's Special Committee.
Recently, I've been suffering through the changes inflicted on
Isaac Asimov's
Foundation saga by
Apple TV. Now I've learned that Vance's Demon Princes stories have been adapted for a new comic book (see
this). For me, the main reason for reading stories by Vance is his talent wielding the English language.
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they're being
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The protagonist of the Demon Princes novels is
Kirth Gersen. He was trained for his role in destroying the five Demon Prices by his grandfather. Gersen has an eloquent letter from his grandfather (Rolf Gersen, now dead) that includes his thoughts about how good can triumph over evil, "...
first evil must be extinguished, then good must be introduced to fill in the gap." Rolf explicitly tells Kirth that he is to do the job of destroying the evil Demon Princes and that is all he has been trained to do. The comic seems to alter Rolf's instructions to Kirth and add to Kirth's plate the additional task of making sure that good is able to fill in the the social space left by destroying evil men. This is no small task since in Vance's fictional universe there is the endless "
Beyond", exoplanets in the depths of space beyond the civilized core of human society.
Is there any possibility that a comic book can do justice to Vance's prose? Rolf's letter to Kirth says, "Good and evil, in spite of traditional fallacy, are not polarities, nor mirror images, nor is one merely the absence of the other".
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destroy the wicked
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Then, after the comic has said Kirth "must" introduce good into the vacuum, it immediately contradicts that and indicates that to avoid the danger of "missteps", Kirth need only concern himself with destroying the wicked, beginning with
Malagate the Woe.
In a comic, I suppose all you need is plenty explosions, flying body parts and fleeing people being shot in the back... the words are not really important.
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Gersen travels through space in a 9B spacecraft
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I must say that if this (image to the right) is a depiction of a model 9B spaceship, then the comic artists made a big step up from what was depicted back in
1963 when
Star King was first published in
Galaxy magazine.
The evil Malagate blunders and kills Lugo Teehalt before confirming that he has the navigation data from Teehalt's voyage of discovery into the far beyond. Kirth Gersen gets his hands on Teehalt's valuable records that show where a beautiful new exoplanet lies in the depths of the galaxy.
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at Smade's Tavern?
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I think this (image to the left) is a depiction of Gersen chatting with Teehalt at
Smade's Tavern. I don't remember Vance ever using the word "hell" in
Star King. These are Gersen's thoughts: "
Teehalt apparently was a gentleman, well-mannered and educated sadly come down in the world." Asimov once commented that it is a mark of illiterates that they make use of expletives when they speak. Who is to say if Gersen might say sometimes say "hell", but in Vance's future universe almost everyone was well-educated and spoke eloquently without any need for swear words.
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machine intelligence; talking computer
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Some of the "updates" provided in the comic look like good, fun additions to the original story. For example, even a model 9B spaceship, the cheapest available, is equipped with an artificial intelligence device that can take care of routine tasks and carry on a conversation. Written in the early 1960s, Vance included very little advanced electronics technology in
Star King.
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monitors inside the 9B
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in the monitor store
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In Vance's telling of the tale, the navigational records are automatically recorded by a "monitor", a device that is built into the model 9B spaceship. The data is recorded on a "filament". One of the first ways of storing data was a
wire recording.
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future shopping
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When updating
Star King for the comic book, the "monitor" got transformed into what looks like a cassette tape. In the comic, Gersen drops by a shopping center that is located in the stratosphere of a planet and buys a bunch of monitors that can be used to fool Malagate's henchmen into mistakenly believing that they have obtained Teehalt's valuable navigation records.
The futuristic shopping center looks cool, which is apparently all that matters. In Vance's version of the story, Gersen must land on a planet to get a replacement monitor (one is enough) that can be used as a decoy that fools Malagate's henchmen.
Gersen must also visit the planet where Teehalt's monitor was manufactured in an effort to get the "decoding strip" for the encrypted data and while there he tries to learn the identity of the monitor's owner. Failing in that effort, Gersen must spend the remaining 7 chapters of the novel figuring out Malagate's secret identity.
When Malagate's henchman
Suthiro catches up with Gersen, Lugo Teehalt is long dead. However, Suthiro pretends that Teehalt is still alive, as shown in the scene depicted to the right. Smade's Tavern seems to have been replaced by "the hotel. 😒 This is emblematic of the transformation of that Vance's story underwent in order to become a comic book.
Next: Part 7 of "Telepaths of Site Q"
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the Grand Interplanetary Spaceport in Avente on Alphanor. (image source)
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