Vance 1952

Figure 1. Woman-shape; interior art for "Noise".

 Last year I had a blog post called Vance 1951 and in May of 2021 I made an effort to read all of Vance's stories that were originally published in 1951. Then, as part of my celebration of the life and science fiction stories of Jack Vance, in August of 2021 I commented on Vance's 1952 story "Sabotage on Sulfur Planet". After publishing 10 stories in 1951, Vance published 8 stories in 1952, although two were fairly long. Back in February of this year, I read Vance's story "Noise" that was published in the August 1952 issue of Startling Stories and now I discuss it here (below).

Golden Girl's visit to Earth (Ekcolir Reality)

 All the noise. I suppose I can understand why Vance wrote "Noise". His 1951 story "Golden Girl" was popular with fans. The titular golden girl (Miss Lurulu) is an alien with golden skin who is stranded on Earth. Given the success of "Golden Girl", why not write a story about an Earthman who is stranded on an alien planet?

It is clear that Vance's story "Noise" does not try to wander very far away from an Earthly tale about a shipwrecked sailor. Howard Evans drifts through space for a week in his lifeboat and then he lands on a planet with air to breath and water. He sends out a distress signal and waits for rescue. I've previously complained about old science fiction stories that portray every stray planet of the universe as being habitable.

in the Ekcolir Reality

In 1951 and 1952 there was a series of 10 articles by James Blish in Thrilling Wonder Stories in which he speculated on the likelihood of there being life on other planets besides Earth. Blish took science courses in college and he was a good candidate to summarize what scientists in the early 1950s were thinking about the possibility of life on other planets.

For the October 1952 issue of Thrilling Wonder Stories, Blish's essay was called "Earths of Other Suns". Here is how he summarized his previous essays on the possibilities for life on the other planets of our Solar System (Figure 2, below):

Figure 2. The first paragraph of "Earths of Other Suns"

In the absence of any data from astronomers concerning planets in other star systems, Blish did a lot of hand-waving and then pulled a number out of his hat, suggesting that our galaxy might hold 200,000 planets so much like Earth that they could support human life.

abundant terrestrial planets of the galaxy (image source)

That guess by Blish about the possible number of human-habitable planets was based upon two major assumptions. First, that most Sun-like stars would be like our Sun in that they would have planetary systems. Second, as is the case for our own Solar System, most planets cannot support human life. During the past few decades, information for about 5,000 exoplanets has become available and these data from astronomers suggest that 1) terrestrial exoplanets are common in the galaxy and 2) many observable exoplanets are NOT Earth-like and seem unlikely to be able to support human or humanoid life.

Planets of a red sun (image source).

For Vance's story "Noise", he did not fret over the unlikelihood of a lifeboat reaching a habitable planet. In the story, Vance states that the lifeboat was "drifting", so I assume that means that Howard Evans did not get to select his destination, yet he arrives on an hospitable world. One of the big issues in estimating the number of habitable planets in the galaxy is that there are many long-lived low-light stars and many planets that orbit very close to stars. Might an Earth-like planet close to a dull red star be suitable for human or humanoid life? 

In the Ekcolir Reality

When the lifeboat carrying Howard Evans lands on an exoplanet, here is his description of the sun: "The sun is a ball of dark crimson and casts hardly more light than the full Moon of Earth". Even without a bright sun, there are plant-like organisms growing at the landing site. No animal life is evident... at first. After a time, Evans wonders if some kind of telepathy is allowing him to "tune into" an alien civilization that exists (or once existed) on (or inside) the planet. He "hears" sweet music and (imagines?) seeing people, including beautiful women (see Figure 1, above).

Eventually, Evans is rescued and returned to Earth, but he is unhappy. On Earth, he complains of "noise" and he wants to return to the exoplanet. I like to interpret this story as depicting an ability of Howard Evans to telepathically "tap into" some ancient alien civilization. When living in isolation on the exoplanet, he is able to "tune his brain" to the aliens, but then he is no longer comfortable living among humans; their thoughts seem like noise.

Alien telepathy in the Ekcolir Reality

I like to imagine that in a previous Reality, the Asimov Reality, there was a "Phari network" of planets, within which various ancient alien species were all linked by telepathy. When humans arrived on those worlds, the people with some telepathic ability were sometimes able to link into the Phari network.

 Rhodomagnetics. Also published in 1952 (in Rhodomagnetic Digest) was Vance's story "Seven Exits from Bocz". You can read the story at this website. Vance once wrote: "Seven Exits From Bocz is so baroque that only a fan magazine would publish it." I'll say that as a science fiction story about telepathy, Seven Exits From Bocz is "out there". The story concerns a sort of "mad scientist", Dr. Horzabky, who performed telepathy experiments with abused and dying prisoners at the Bocz death-camp, in Kunvasy.

entrance to the big bug universe

 Seven Exits From Bocz reminds me of Julian Huxley's story The Tissue Culture King (1927). It would be interesting to know if Vance ever read The Tissue Culture King and was influenced by it while writing Seven Exits From Bocz. 

In 1927, Huxley made use of the idea that large numbers of people might be able to effectively combine their individually weak telepathic powers. In 1952, Jack Vance ran with that idea... in a strange direction...

Figure 3. Creating the 7 exits.

At the start of Seven Exits From Bocz, Dr. Horzabky is living a quiet retired life. A mysterious visitor, Nicholas Trasek, arrives at Dr. Horzabky's home. Trasek says, "I might be an art fancier." Horzabky allows Trasek to examine the collection of strange "pictures" that are on display on the wall of Horzabky's library, but he says, "The pictures are not for sale".

 The 7 "pictures". 1) "merely a shading of blacks, dull browns and purples". 2) "the shapes seemed unreal, and when the mind reached to grasp them, they appeared to slip away from comprehension, and the colors equally odd - nameless off-tones, bright tints the eye saw but could not name". 3) "horizontal lines and stripes of gold, silver, copper, and other metallic colors". 4) a scene with what might be trees, but "everything as it would appear inside out". 5) "an intricate framework of luminous yellow-white bars on a black background, the framework filling all of space with a cubical lattice, the parallel members meeting at the picture's vanishing point" 6) "a grayish-pink blur". 7) looks like a mirror; "light refuses to penetrate it".

strange alternate universes

 Other Universes. Eventually, readers of Seven Exits From Bocz are told that these are not paintings or pictures, but rather portals to other universes (see Figure 3). For example, Dr. Horzabky explains that if you push an object from our universe through portal #7 then it "Melts to nothing, like tissue paper in a furnace". He adds, "Conservation of energy falls down in the other universes, where matter and energy are equally unacceptable, and where our laws have no authority".

You will have to read Seven Exits From Bocz to learn what use Dr. Horzabky made of the portals to other universes and why Nicholas Trasek has come to visit Horzabky.

Vance's first published (1945) story was "The World-Thinker" in which an alien named Laoome was able to construct new universes just by thinking. Vance must have liked that idea enough to return to it again for use in Seven Exits From Bocz.

in the Ekcolir Reality

In Seven Exits From Bocz, portal #4 plays a major role in the story. A prisoner at the Bocz death-camp who was sent through the portal survived, but his body was turned inside-out. What would happen if he went through portal #4 a second time? Might he be returned to normal? 

Isaac Asimov published a similar story in 1987 called "Left to Right". In Asimov's story, a physicist, Dr. Forward, built a ring-shaped device that could "reverse the polarity" of an object that passed through the center of the ring. The physicist was prepared to test the device and was not worried about unwanted side-effects. If any thing went wrong, you could just pass through the inverter a second time. Right?

Figure 4. image source

 Also in 1952. I previously mentioned Vance's story about telekinesis, "Telek". In "Telek" there is a "dramatic" scene with a "showdown" between two men with telekinetic powers. That scene is similar to another paranormal "showdown" scene in Vance's story "Parapsyche", published in 1958. 

I suspect that Vance was able to amuse himself by taking any random bit of paranormal silliness and trying to shape it into a science fiction story. I think of it as progress in the science fiction genre when some old example of magical fantasy can be re-written as a science fiction story in which  the "magic" is explained by an imaginary future technology.

interior art for "Telek" by Van Dongen

In "Telek", a couple of Vance's characters devote considerable effort to trying to understand the mechanism and physics of telekinesis. Probably the most audacious part of the story is the idea that any human can become an expert at telekinesis after a short training session. In second place for audacity, Vance provides an account of the Telekinesis Olympiad.

As shown in the image to the left, Vance imagined using telekinesis to travel between the planets of the Solar System while wearing a spacesuit. For Figure 4, above, I imagined that for a similar story written in the Ekcolir Reality, the clunky spacesuit could be replaced by "simply" using telekinesis to keep sending a steady stream of oxygen into one's lungs.

the creed of Atkinson

I've previously mentioned William Walker Atkinson and his well-publicized belief in the power of mind over matter. It would be interesting to know if Vance grew up reading the works of Mary Wright and if he was influenced by her work. Also, we should not forget that Vance had witnessed the promotion of dianetics by John Campbell and it must have been very tempting to $ubmit a wacky telekine$i$ $tory to Astounding.

Jean Parlier; a clone

Four other stories from Vance in 1952 were "Abercrombie Station", "Cholwell's Chickens", The Kokod Warriors, "Sabotage on Sulfur Planet". The first two of these stories were constructed around the use of future technology for human cloning, a Sci Fi plot element that I find irresistible.

According to Nick Gevers, Jack Vance's 1952 story "Big Planet" was "revolutionary" and "perhaps the first attempt at a convincingly complete imaginary world in genre SF". I've tried to read "Big Planet" in the past and could never get through it because I'd rather be reading other (better) stories by Vance that he published later during his career. 

 Figure 5. cover art by by Walter Popp

Not surprisingly, another commentator, Steven Harbin had this to say about "Big Planet": "compared to his later works it’s something of a disappointment". The first page of the story really sounds like it could be set on Earth in 1952: off in some dreary corner of the world, a new strong man (named  Lysidder) is growing in power and starting to cause trouble and so a Big Colonial Power is sending in a team of investigators... the hope is to get matters in the wayward colony under control.

Yes, that plot (above) would be too boring for Vance, so in his imagined HiTek™ future, where it is a trivial matter to fly spaceships between the stars, the particular spaceship of our hero (Glystra) crash-lands on Big Planet and we are off on horseback for a hair-raising adventure among the unruly natives. 

Nancy; A.K.A. Natilien-Thilssa
interior art for "Big Planet"

There on the Startling cover (Figure 5) is Nancy the troubadour, with the spike-hairstyle... she's from Veillevaux Forest, in case you were wondering. There's another view of "Nancy" (to the left). Readers quickly learn that her family was murdered and she is trying to deal with that loss. John Grant refers to Nancy as "hormone-rich" and asks, "Who cares about the fates of people who, one is ever reminded, aren't real?" Grant disagrees completely with the claims ("as real to you as your own familiar Earth") in Figure 6, below.

I expect the "unreal" in Sci Fi, so in my case, the question is, "Why should I read "Big Planet" when I already read another version of this same plot in Vance's The Killing Machine?"

 Full Page. The page 1 illustration for "Big Planet".

Lucky for readers, no matter how many centuries the people of Big Planet (or Thamber) have been isolated from the rest of the Galaxy, they still speak the same language as everyone else in the galaxy. How does Miss Nancy measure up to Vance's female lead in the The Killing Machine, who has another unfortunate hyphenated name: Alusz Iphigenia Eperje-Tokay (usually and mercifully shortened to Alusz)?

Right on page one of the story, as it was originally published in Startling Stories, was a full page illustration (see the image to the right) letting the reader know just what kind of adventure they were getting into by reading "Big Planet". In The Killing Machine, Vance included a mechanical centipede that was used to terrorize the primitive people of the planet Thamber. For big planet, we need to be prepared for our encounter with the griamobot, a terrifying "sea river monster".

 Figure 6. Editorial commentary that promises "fascinating people" in Vance's "Big Planet".

 Topless teaser. Sadly, this was 1952, before nipples had been invented.

There are the claims made by Startling's editor (see Figure 6, above). In case your interest is fading a dozen pages into the story, readers were provided with a view of the topless woman (see the image to the right, Topless teaser),  unfortunately spoiled by a misplaced towel. Vance informs us that among the first settlers of Big Planet were nudists who did not fit in with Earth's culture.

Every misfit from Earth could buy a spaceship and go to Big Planet, but nobody brought any metal to the metal-poor planet, so there could be no HiTek™ society. In fact, distant Earth tries to prevent people from bringing metal to Big Planet. How? By means of.... Plot...

I have to wonder if Vance had dreams of actually providing readers with an account of a 40,000 mile walk across Big Planet. Maybe he felt there were 40 novels to be had, all taking place on this one world, one novel for each 1,000 miles traveled. Fortunately, Vance realized that his Big Planet was a failed concept and he abandoned Big Planet.

 Figure 7. cover art by Ed Emshwiller

After the first few hours of walking across the vast surface of Big Planet in a direction chosen specifically to avoid running into Lysidder's soldiers, Glystra runs into... wait for it... a squad of Lysidder's soldiers.

Yes, these particular soldiers are on their way to Nancy's village, on a mission to kill Glystra and his away team. Lesson learned: no matter how ginormous Big Planet is, you will always run into exactly the right person who is needed in order to advance Vance's plot.

But we should not be surprised that the soldiers are so quickly hot on the trail of Glystra. Firstly, having been bumped on the head during the crash landing, Glystra was in a coma for his first three days on Big Planet. Yes, Vance assures readers that the spaceship crash was so violent that nobody should have survived... but all 8 members of Glystra's team survived. 

 Figure 8. Cover art by Carlo Jacono

Sure, it would have been a boring adventure story if everyone had died on page 2, so we have to expect Glystra to survive not just a crash-landing, but everything, for all 40,000 miles that he plans to walk across the surface of Big Planet. Secondly, the soldiers get to ride on horses that have six legs (see Figure 7), so... speedy.

Since they work for the Evil™ Lysidder, the soldiers are armed not only with assorted rocket guns and ray guns, but also an imported SuperDuper™ ray gun that can quickly wipe out an entire village in just a few moments of blasting. Glystra simply walks into the soldiers' camp and takes control of the SuperDuper ray gun, setting the tone for this adventure. Vance relentlessly stacks the odds against Glystra, but then Glystra wins every time because he's the most fascinating person on Big Planet.

 1978, after the discovery of nipples

 Fast woman. On day 2 of the journey, Nancy is sent back to her village and Glystra treks on in the other direction. Then, late in the day, Glystra runs into his next obstacle, a pack of cannibalistic nomads. And... wait for it... they have captured Nancy and hold her prisoner and plan to eat her for dinner. Yes, Nancy obviously has the power of teleportation and she gets around. And in case you had doubts, Glystra is not going to be rid of her, particularly after she saves the lives of Glystra and the remaining survivors of the away team.

By page 43 of the story, Vance makes it clear that Glystra would like to ravish the cute Nancy, but he restrains himself. Approaching the great Oust river, two nomad girls (Motta and Wailie) ask to be made slaves. I suppose that is a depiction of them in the Stephen Hickman cover art shown in the image to the left.

 Figure 9. Cover art by Manchu

As Motta puts it: "We are females and raised for use." Two members of Glystra's away team gallantly volunteer to take the girls as their slaves. One member of the team from Earth (Corbus) says: "That's the way to cross a planet, wench by wench!" On page 35 of the story, having reached the 3-mile-wide river Oust, we finally have the scene that was in the page-1 illustration for the story in Startling; the one shown above (Full Page) illustrating a griamobot. Because of danger from the griamobots, when people want to cross the river they have to make use of the cable system shown in Figure 8, above.

Vance was so happy with the idea of travel-by-wire that he later recycled the idea for his Durdane Series (see Figure 9). Yes, on Big Planet, where there is no metal, there is a long-distance travel network of high-tension cables (monolines).

cover art by Jim Burns

 Swamp Tales. Vance explains that the very strong monolines of Big Planet are actually organic ropes that are made from the secretions of giant swamp slugs.

I'll Flip Your Burger. After traveling a great distance by monoline, Glystra and his team arrive in the city Kirstendale where Glystra is assigned the topless servant girl that was shown above, (Topless teaser). Descended from Earthly aristocrats, the residents of Kirstendale all take turns living as aristocrats part of the time, but mostly also as servants (sometimes topless) and workers, so as to support the city's appearance of a haven for the wealthy. Several of Glystra's group are seduced by the luxury of Kirstendale, but the rest continue on their dangerous 40,000 mile journey across Big Planet.

 Fictional Chemistry. After a journey of a thousand miles away from the Evil™ Lysidder, Lysidder casually flies into Myrtlesee Fountain using an aircar, and now he is ready to question Glystra while Glystra is under the influence of a powerful "truth serum" drug.

the power of vitamins (excerpt from "Big Planet")

 Yes, children, take your vitamins! 💊 However, Glystra is not helpless. He has carried vitamins and food concentrates for 1,000 miles across Big Planet and now, by taking a whopping dose of vitamins, his mind remains in his own control despite the "truth serum" drug.

cover art by Jim Burns

All that remains is for Glystra to steal Lysidder's aircar and listen to Nancy's account of why she had been working with Lysidder to bring some type of stability to Big Planet. However, with Lysidder defeated, she's now quite willing to join forces with Glystra. At the end of the story, it is not clear how Glystra will do it, but readers can imagine that he and Nancy will at least try to improve the living conditions of the many scattered communities on Big Planet. Maybe by distributing lots of vitamins to the population.

Maybe Vance had plans for sequels to Big Planet, but eventually he moved in another direction... towards smaller more manageable planets of the Beyond such as those that grace his Demon Princes novels. Vance could not completely walk away from Big Planet. I suppose I'll have to eventually read Vance's Showboat World, but I'm daunted by warnings that it is essentially fantasy, not science fiction.

Alusz, along for the ride, too.
Vancian adventure: have ray
-gun, will travel by horseback.

 Nancy vs Alusz. Well, what about the relative merits of Nancy from Big Planet and Alusz from Thamber? The protagonist in The Killing Machine, Kirth Gersen, describes Alusz as "honorable and generous and kind", too good for the dark path of his life.

 Yes, it is true, Gersen basically stole a vast fortune from Alusz, taking the cash for his selfish needs, but, on the other hand, Alusz can be an irritating nag. Gersen is better off without her. Take the money and run. Gersen is destined to end up with his soul mate, Alice, not the spoiled princes Alusz.

Nancy seems like a good match for Glystra, although she is not very dynamically deployed by Vance as a character in "Big Planet". She's just sort of there... along for the ride. 

And, by the way, I still have not completely read all of "Big Planet"... I simply had to skim some of the most tedious parts. Sorry, Jack... I tried.

cover art by Patrick Woodroffe

For me, reading "Big Planet" is a very similar experience to reading The Gray Prince. Yes, it is interesting to see Vance creating story ideas that he would later re-deploy under more favorable conditions in his later novels. However, why not simply read the later novels and skip first drafts like "Big Planet" and The Gray Prince?

 Vance's Recycling Projects. In "Big Planet", Vance imagined that Nancy could be disguised an a nun during her trip to Earth. In the Cadwal Chronicles (specifically, in the third novel, Throy), when the failed Peefer, Kathcar, tries to slink away from Cadwal unnoticed, he uses as his disguise the false identity of Madame Furman, a Mascarene Evangel. When Vance had an idea that he enjoyed, he would recycle it. Nobody can fault Vance for all the fun he had while creating his tales.

in the Ekcolir Reality

I've long puzzled over the later part of The Killing Machine in which Gersen's HiTek™ aircar is shot-down by an arrow and during which Gersen and Alusz must travel across the dangerous terrain of Thamber on foot. Is it possible that this seemingly stray story fragment was recycled from an adventure that Vance originally wrote for the setting of Big Planet?

 See also: celebrating the first century of the Vance Era.

 Related Reading: the rhodomagnetic robots of Jack Williamson AND "Planet of the Damned" (1952) by Jack Vance.

Next: baseball in science fiction.

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