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Jan 8, 2023

What Books Go Through

cover art by Boris Vallejo
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. 

 Fig. 1. scan of a page from Gödel, Escher, Bach
 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).

Figure 2. Split footnote. Click image to enlarge.
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). 

Fig 3. cover art by Ron Walotsky
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).

Figure 4. inside front of the book jacket
 * 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".) 

back part of the wrap-around cover
 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. 

the hideous Hildemar

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."

Mount Pleasant on the planet Providence
 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."

The Contest.
 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.

in the Ekcolir Reality
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. 😖

cover art by Broeck Steadman
 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."

Janet (image source)
 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.

Figure 5. The Computer. Text from "The Ultimate Biofeedback Device".
A biofeedback vision of grandma's nipples?
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).

Figure 6. Interior artwork by Tim Kirk

Echo of Cynym
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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