In a
recent blog post, I mentioned
The Languages of Pao by
Jack Vance. Since it is
August, I'm in the middle of another celebration of the science fiction stories that were written by Vance. Here, I want to comment on Vance's audacious effort to tell an epic story in
The Languages of Pao and how my reaction to Vance's dauntless undertaking influenced my own writing.
The planet Pao was settled by humans some 5,000 years before Vance's story begins. A popular theme for many Vance stories is a planet colonized by space-faring humans of the future who, after reaching a far planet, give up their advanced technology and live like Earthlings of old, even
sometimes abandoning the further use of space travel technology. Pao still has some contact with the outside world, but most of its residents are happy to live simple lives as farmers. For entertainment, the Paonese do not participate in sports, but they do routinely congregate in vast crowds to chant their "
ancient drones".
 |
Look, up in the sky,
it's Wizard Palafox and
his boy Beran!
interior art by Leo Morey |
In
The Languages of Pao, Vance describes the transformation of the Paonese from a homogeneous and "
docile lot, content to live in harmony with the rest of the cosmos" to a more diverse and believable society with the required educated specialists that will allow the planet Pao to defend itself against the meddling people of other worlds.
Five years ago I provided some fannish commentary on
The Languages of Pao, but what has always bothered me about this tale of the far future is how Vance crammed a big story of cultural engineering into the narrow confines of a short coming-of-age story. A young boy, Beran Panasper, is nearly killed by his power-hungry uncle. Vance tells his readers the story of how Beran grows up, kills his uncle and becomes ruler of the planet Pao.
 |
Women from Pao arrive on Breakness.
interior art by Leo Morey |
However,
The Languages of Pao is not really about Beran; it is the story of how the population of Pao is altered and transformed during a vast social engineering project. Imagine if
Isaac Asimov had written his sweeping
Foundation Saga from the perspective of just one man.
How can billions of Paonese lives be transformed in just 20 years? Most of the work is accomplished by the sons of Lord Palafox, a "
wizard" from the plant Breakness.
Palafox has been hired to socially engineer the people of Pao and quickly bring into existence Paonese warriors, scientists, weapon manufacturers, space ship builders and interstellar traders. In exchange, he is given large numbers of Paonese women who give birth to many sons of Palafox. Those sons are trained on the planet Breakness and then sent to Pao where they carry out the process of turning Paonese into warriors, equipment manufacturers, interstellar traders, etc.
We only meet one such woman, Gitan Netsko. "
She was charming... slender and clear-skinned with fine bones an precisely-molded features." There is small space for romance in
The Languages of Pao.
 |
this cover illustration has nothing
to do with Vance's story |
Gitan lives with Beran for a few months while Beran is a student on Breakness. And then Gitan is suddenly subtracted from the story after spending her time on Breakness "
staring blankly at the windy chasm." Vance does not allow himself to be distracted by a petty love story; his goal is telling a sweeping saga of planetary-scale social engineering.
 |
| cover of my copy |
The very rapid pace at which life is transformed on Pao is not believable. The social changes on Pao are rushed along in order to match the pace of Beran's life and the short attention span of science fiction story readers.
The Languages of Pao was originally published in a
Sci Fi magazine that did not have much space and there are significant differences between the version of
The Languages of Pao published in
Satellite Science Fiction in 1957 (download
here) and the version that I own (a 1989 printing).
 |
"From his finger darted
blue energy." |
In addition to my inability to accept how quickly the planet Pao is transformed, Vance's story also irritates me by continually calling Palafox a "
wizard". I suppose we are supposed to accept that the backwards people of Pao would only be able to understand advanced technology as being some kind of magic. However, when Palafox flies through the air, he is using an anti-gravity device that was implanted in his body. Similarly, when Beran kills his uncle, he makes use of a ray gun that was surgically implanted in his hand. I wish Vance had given us less fake "
wizardry" and more details about the "
delicate components" that Palafox provides to the Paonese so that they can begin manufacturing their own interstellar space craft.
Exode Saga
By my estimation, in Vance's depiction of the radical transformation of Paonese society, all the changes should have taken at least 75 years to unfold. Asimov's Foundation Saga ended up extending through several centuries. For the
Exode Saga, there are parts of the story that extend billions of years into the past and as far as seven million years into the future.
In order to accommodate such a vast sweep of time, I am trying to make use of "
an Editor" who can assemble the many sub-stories of the Exode Saga into a sequence of
five novels that will tell the story of how alien visitors to Earth shaped the human species and all of Earthly civilization.
An additional challenge that I face in crafting the Exode Saga is that it includes stories from more than just one
Reality. Further, I've made some of my favorite authors, including Vance, characters in my story.
I imagine that the analogue of Jack Vance existed in the
First Reality as part of the "
first family" of
Gohrlay. Later, when
R. Gohrlay and her tribe of positronic robots mastered time travel, a system for
Temporal Momentum was devised which ensured that an analogue of Jack Vance would exist in every Reality in Earth's
Reality Chain.
I like to pretend that during the
Asimov Reality, the
replicoid of Jack Vance was able to "live" into the far future and observe how humans spread from Earth to many exoplanets of the galaxy. Then, in the
Ekcolir Reality, the replicoid of Vance made sure that the analogue of Vance in that Reality wrote stories that provided many hints about events in the far future of the Asimov Reality.
In the Ekcolir Reality, the analogue of Jack Vance was actually born as twins, one of whom was female. Thus, I imagine that "Joan Vance" wrote "early" versions of some Vance stories that also appeared in the
Buld Reality.
In the Ekcolir Reality, the people of Earth had to be prepared for the arrival of the alien
Fru'wu during the 20th century. When
Interventionists of the
Writers Block made us of story tellers like Joan and John Vance to inform Earthlings about alien visitors to Earth, the people of Earth learned far too much about alien technology. Soon, the rapid technological advances on Earth led to problems, including a
global warming catastrophe.
To prevent catastrophic sea level rise, corrections were made to the timeline of Earth, bringing into existence the Buld Reality. I imagine that Jack Vance was still able to write stories in the Buld Reality about future events of the Asimov Reality, but he was not allowed to reveal details about alien technologies to the people of Earth. As depicted in
my previous blog post, there was some "fine tuning" of Vance's writing career in an attempt to make sure that Vance's science fiction stories would attract the attention of the Editor of the Exode Saga.
At the last minute, just before the
Huaoshy put an end to time travel, some more adjustments were made. Sadly some of Vance's stories such as the
Genesaunt Trilogy had to be removed from time. However,
care was taken to make sure that Jack Vance lived a long life.
Related Reading: celebrating Jack Vance's fiction in
August 2019 in
August 2020
Next:
Vance's first novel
