Back in
2014, I mentioned short comings in my copy of
Araminta Station from 1988. At that time, I complained about the unimaginative printing style used in that book.
Great Expectations. I suppose I was spoiled in 1979 when
Gödel, Escher, Bach
was published. The author of that book was able to collaborate with the
type-setter and control the way that text was printed, using large
amounts of mathematical notation, different fonts and font sizes, etc
(see
Figure 1, to the left).
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Figure 2. Split footnote. Click image to enlarge.
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Sorry about the quality of that scan,
Gödel, Escher, Bach is a thick book and I could not get it to lay flat on the scanner. Vance liked to use
footnotes, and for
Araminta Station
there was some problem in getting all of the footnotes printed
correctly. For example, on page 31, only the first 2 lines of footnote
10 ended up on page 31. The last two lines of that footnote ended up at
the bottom of page 32 (see
Figure 2).
Other long footnotes in
Araminta Station
were not split in this way. Did someone have to manually check and make
sure that each footnote was set correctly? I don't know. I have no
understanding of the realities of book publishing. Maybe companies such
as
Tor simply can't afford to make science fiction novels look fancy.
New for 2023. I bought my first Vance novel in 1977, it was a copy of Trullion. In 2015 I blogged about my obsession with all the books in Vance's Demon Prices series (5 novels), his Alastor Cluster trilogy and the Cadwal Chronicles
(3 books). My old paperback editions of the Demon Princes novels from
the 1970s have fallen apart, but now I have a copy of the 2005 omnibus printing of all five novels. Some of the typos in the old editions (for example, IPX
instead of IPCC) were corrected in this newer edition, but sadly the
jacket cover seems to have nothing to do with Vance's fiction (see Figure 3).
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Figure 4. inside front of the book jacket
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* The Demon Princes was apparently first issued in
1998,
after the arrival of the internet era. The copyrights page has URLs
listed for both the Science Fiction Book Club and Tor. The type-setting
for this edition is not horrible. They tried to reasonably format
Vance's elaborate chapter
pre-notes, but unlike
Araminta Station from 1998, the printing software that was used for
The Demon Princes did not even try to number the footnotes*.
Marketing Hype. It is often amusing to see what gets written on book jackets by marketing folks (see Figure 4). I suppose the person who wrote that blurb has no idea what a galaxy
is. These stories take place in our galaxy, at a fairly early time in
the future of the Space Age. Much of the action takes place on
exoplanets that orbit around Rigel and Vega. Kirth Gersen does not ever go to another galaxy.
The inside back of the book jacket has three quotes about Jack Vance
from "Los Angeles Times Book Review", "New York Newsday" and
"Washington Post Book World", but none of those blurbs has anything
specific to say about the Demon Princes novels themselves. I suppose
there is no obligation for a book publisher to solicit and print helpful
quotes about novels that might help readers decide if they want to buy a
book.
What might I say about these five novels? Back in 2017, I compared the original magazine version of "The Star King" to "Star King", published as a paperback novel by DAW. (Yes, the 2005 omnibus edition has the title changed back to "The Star King".)
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back part of the wrap-around cover
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Beyond Star King. How can anyone give a brief comment that captures the essence of nearly 1000 pages of science fiction adventure?
Adventure. Vance put a lot of effort into imagining multiple planets with interesting cultures where Kirth Gersen could have adventures. In fact, I'd be tempted to write a blurb for The Demon Princes that ignored Kirth Gersen; he's is a pretty boring protagonist and the real "stars" of the stories are the various planets.
It
can be argued that in each of these novels, there is at least one
character who is more interesting than Gersen. For example, in The Palace of Love there is the Mad Poet, Navarth.
The jacket blurb says that Gersen's "entire world" was destroyed by the
Demon Princes, but that is not true. In fact, at the start of The Star King, Gersen has pretty much gotten over the trauma of the Mount Pleasant Massacre, and in The Killing Machine he states that he is not out for revenge.
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the hideous Hildemar
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In The Star King, poor Pallis Atwrode
is abducted and abused by the hideous Hildemar Dasce. Gersen feels
responsible for her abduction and he expends great effort trying to find
and rescue her. At the end of the story, Gersen even seems to hesitate
when he gets a chance to fire his ray gun blaster at Malegate,
the first Demon Prince. In the end, on a distant exoplanet, an alien
creature kills Malegate and Gersen returns to civilization with Pallis.
What is the fate of Hildemar Dasce? He ends up with a fate worse than
death, being held prisoner and routinely tortured by Robin Rampold, a
man who Dasc kept in a cage for 17 years.
My Blurb. "Each of Vance's Demon Princes novels is full of jokes, pranks and amusing prose
even while Kirth Gersen is doing the dangerous work of methodically
delivering justice to the five Demon Princes. Go along with Gersen for
adventures on dozens of planets where quirky human splinter cultures
have sprouted among the far stars of the galaxy."
About the List. As told in
The Star King, more than
2 decades
after the Mount Pleasant Massacre, at a time just before the beginning
of the story, Gersen finally discovered the names of the five Demon
Princes. Upon hearing the 5 names from Parsival Pankarow (and then
killing Pankarow), Gersen went to
Smade's Planet in order to "think things over". Upon meeting Dasce and suspecting that Dasce killed
Lugo Teehalt,
Gersen adds Dasce's name to the list of the names of the 5 Demon
Princes that Gersen has on a sheet of paper. At no other point in the 5
Demon Princes novels do we hear about this printed list of names. In
Chapter 2 of
The Star King, we readers are privy to Gersen's thought processes and we are told that "...
there was no real need for a list: Gersen knew the five names as well as he knew his own."
Rockets, Paper, Sivij Suthiro.
One of the intriguing features of Vance's five Demon Princes novels is
that while they take place thousands of years in the future, there seems
to be a kind of technological stagnation. Spacecraft are widely
available that can cruise between the stars at faster-than-light speeds,
but there are no cell phones. Letters are sent by snail mail and
printed magazines (such as
Extant and
Cosmopolis) and newspapers are the standard sources of information for people of the Space Age.
After Gersen murders Parsival Pankarow, his next victim is
Sivij Suthiro.
Suthiro helped Dasce abduct poor Pallis, so Gersen poisons Suthiro.
This is ironic because Suthiro is a Sarkoy from the planet
Sarkovy, a world renowned for its poisons.
Sadly, ever since 1963, book and magazine publishers have had a devil of a time with the word "Sarkoy". The Demon Princes alternates between spelling it "Sarkoy" and "Sarcoy", even right on the same page of the story. 😖
Write Pain. In the
December 1981 issue of
Isaac Asimov's Science Fiction Magazine, there was an essay by
Isaac Asimov called "
What Writers Go Through".
Among Asimov's loooong list of problems that confront writers, he
included: "
A book can be produced in a slipshod manner or it can have a
repulsive bookjacket, or blurbs that give away the plot or clearly
indicate that the blurb-writer didn't follow the plot." However, Asimov
added this: "
I know all the miseries, but somewhere among them is
happiness."
2 Doctors in the House. Among Asimov's travails, I'll count the fact that
his wife also wrote some fiction. In that December 1981 issue of
IASF Magazine was "The Time-Warp Trauma" by Asimov's wife, which is part of her "
Pshrinks Anonymous" series. I took a look at "
The Ultimate Biofeedback Device" from 1983. The story involves biofeedback made possible by three futuristic devices:
1) A kind of medical scanner that can provide detailed information about a patients cells and molecules, including DNA.
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A biofeedback vision of grandma's nipples?
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2) A sophisticated computer that is described in
Figure 5, above.
3)
The biofeedback goes from the computer back to the patient by way of
another device, apparently using electrical signals to directly modify
the activity of neurons in the patient's brain.
Readers are told
that this biofeedback device was created as part of an attempt to help
patients cure themselves of cancer. However, the SuperDuper™ biofeedback
device also provides people with "visions" from the past... starting
with your grandmother's nipples and going all the way back to the Big
Bang (see Figure 6, below).
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Echo of Cynym
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At
this point, I'll abandon the fantasy-prone plot of "The Ultimate
Biofeedback Device" and explain why the story is of interest to me. In
my own story
Echo of Cynym,
the topic is telepathy and in particular, the problem of how to control
the telepathic signals that are emitted by telepaths. I assume that in
order for telepathy to be possible, the brains of telepaths would have
to function so as to 1) produce (emit) signals that reflect their brain
activity (thoughts) and 2) receive those emitted signals from others and
be able to correctly interpret them.
But what if some
people's brains were "noisy" and produced too much output, interfering
with telepathic communication? That problem is faced in Echo of Cynym,
and during a corrective neurosurgical procedure, the person whose brain
is being restructured (Eddy) must participate and help guide the
surgery, providing feedback that can organize and direct a series of
adjustments to his neural networks.
Echo of Cynym is
a science fiction novella (28,000 words), in which I wanted a
mechanistic way for such a neurosurgical procedure to be conducted. As
usual for the
Exode Saga, I wave my hands and say that
nanites are involved. I imagine that humans are composite organisms, composed of a mixture of conventional biological cells and also a
Phari endosymbiont composed of femtobot components as well as a
zeptite endosymbiont.
For the Exode Saga, I leave this as an unanswered question: does a
human mind actually reside mostly in its nanite components, not its
cellular components? If it is nanites, then the cells of our brains are
relatively unimportant targets during Eddy's neurosurgery, with most of
the modifications being made to his endosymbionts.
Next: The Hua Nanites.
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