Jack Vance, “The Book of Dreams” (1981) – Jack Vance’s Demon Princes saga ends with the taking down of the last and probably most interesting of the five space pirates who destroyed Kirth Gessen’s home village way back when. Howard Alan Treesong, like Viole Falushe, one of the previous baddies, just can’t get over high school. Born on a planetary backwater that sounds a lot like the upper Midwest or some descriptions I’ve heard of rural New Zealand, an imaginative and willful boy, he gets the works from the locals and dedicates his life to revenge. He gets far enough to become a sort of “Mr. Big” of galactic crime and nearly becomes something like space-Jesuit-General. But of course, he’s no match for Kirth Gessen’s focus and grit (and unlimited money he secured whilst taking out a previous Demon Prince).

Hero and villain both live for revenge. Kirth lives to avenge his family and home; Treesong lives to get his vengeance on his high school class and to make the universe as much like his adolescent fantasies (in the titular book, which Kirth eventually finds and uses as bait). The latter option seems to lead to a somewhat more colorful, if nefarious, existence for Treesong (and his fellow space pirates), but the latter provides the drive necessary to go through all the hoops to eliminate the former. In this installment, they range from a fake magazine contest to identify the one known picture of Treesong to the shenanigans with the lost diary to Kirth having to pretend to be a flautist to infiltrate the band at the high school reunion Treesong interrupts with dire theatrical revenge. Sometimes, the difference between hero and villain is how they go through the rigamarole.

The Demon Princes books are pretty cool. Vance clearly made more world than he could really fit in to these fairly conventional detective stories, as evidenced by the long epigraphs to his chapters full of lore from his universe. You mostly get the worlds through the odd planets Kirth visits, which showcase Vance’s fascination with the plasticity of people and societies, where oddballs in backwaters keep getting odder due to their cultural — and their planet’s ecological — logic. I ultimately prefer the Cugel and Anome books, but these are also cool. ****’

Wesley Chu, “Time Salvager” (2015) – This was fun. It’s set in the 2500s after humanity has fled a toxic Earth into a precarious existence on space stations and in outer moons like Europa. A profoundly unequal, megacorp-dominated society fighting a losing battle against economic and social decay, they use time travel technology developed in earlier, better days to essentially loot the past for raw materials and the types of goods they can’t manufacture anymore.

Of course, like any time travel story, there’s a bunch of more or less arbitrary rules, both to time travel itself and the way the time-looting agency, ChronoCom, uses it. In order to protect the integrity of the time stream, you can’t give the secret away, or cause major ripple effects. In the book, this means they wind up looting a lot from people who are about to die imminently, particularly at the sites of battles or disasters. Looting engines from spaceships about to blow, for instance, or art (of course, the megacorps commission custom jobs) from a cathedral about to be shelled. You also can’t bring people back, but that turns out to be more of a political rule. There’s a bunch of other rules that basically are there for story purposes- as Time Pimp informs us, “Nobody knows or cares how time travel works.”

Of course, somebody has to break the rules, and of course, that somebody is a grizzled veteran of ChronoCom who’s seen many a disaster, on top of an already rough life. The main character, James, is your basic gunslinger character put into this time-travel story. Everything changes when he meets the love interest, a scientist named Elise who works on a doomed experimental ocean station in the late 21st century. She’s nice to him, so when the station is destroyed, after looting the stuff he was sent for, James saves Elise. This is a big no-no, so they become fugitives among the tribes of the toxic Earth, with both a megacorp and James’s chronoman buddies after them. Despite being stranded amongst the primitive scavenger tribes of post-apocalyptic Boston, on an Earth where every ecological disaster was turned up to 11 over a few centuries, Elise discovers a potential way to save the Earth. Naturally, it ties in with what she was doing before she got time-napped, which of course ties in to various dark secrets of time travel, etc. etc.

This isn’t Philip K. Dick or Octavia Butler here. Hell, it’s hardly Shakespeare, even. The characters are pretty basic- James the hard-drinking vet who’s seen some shit, Elise the optimistic scientist who’s tougher than she looks, Levin the by-the-book enforcer whose honor compels him to hard choices, etc. etc. The prose doesn’t sparkle, especially the dialogue. But it’s fast and fun. I also think the various futures we see (Chu makes the interesting, and I think smart, choice to have the characters go back more often to the future history — the period between now and the time the main action is set — rather than doing our past) are assembled out of found parts, but well-assembled without too much exposition. The action is fun- close escapes, fights with assorted future technology, etc. It’s a good subway/beach read that plays familiar rhythms well. ****

Jack Vance, “The Face” (1979) – In this installment of Vance’s space-detective-western series, Kirth Gessen knocks off the fourth of the five Demon Princes that sacked his home planet. Space pirate Lens Larque hails from Dar Sai, a desert planet the climate of which breeds a harsh and haughty people. Think the Fremen from “Dune.” Herbert built his worlds like an engineer, with everything serving some purpose (however obscure) or making a point (however pedantic), and his desert nomads are an austere product of pure adaptation. Vance, more of a writer’s writer, makes his desert-dwellers capricious and proudly difficult, full of orientalist filigree like special sports and mating rituals. The reader spends a lot of time on this planet as Kirth attempts to track down stock certificates for a worthless company that Larque once controls which somehow will winkle Larque out of hiding, or provide information as to his whereabouts, or… something. It’s not very clear and it even gets tedious at times, which Vance usually doesn’t. There’s some encounters, including Vance beating the Darsh at their weird wrestling-diplomacy game, and the usual love-plot, in this instance with a winsome member of an elitist society colonizing Dar Sai for minerals. This would be the least inspired volume in the series so far if it didn’t build to a very satisfying and amusing end, when we find out what Larque was up to with all of his money-making and planetary construction schemes. It’s a gesture even Kirth has to respect- after getting his man, of course. ****

David Brin, “Sundiver” (1980) – I picked this one up at a library sale because it is the first of the Uplift War series, and A. I like to have a crack at many of the big SFF series and B. I’ve heard good things about its sequel, “Startide Rising.” “Sundiver” wasn’t great but does leave some hope that the fans of the sequel is as good as people say.

The premise of the series is interesting- a few centuries from now, Earth develops faster-than-light travel and comes into contact with a highly developed interstellar society made up of many varying civilizations. All of these civilizations were “uplifted” — brought to sentience and guided along all the way from banging rocks together to spaceships by a more advanced species. The oldest and most advanced species, in turn, claim to have been uplifted billions of years ago by the very first interstellar life forms. But humanity, playing the plucky upstart role it often does in this sort of scifi, not only developed space travel on its own but even began “uplifting” species on Earth (chimpanzees, dolphins, etc) without even knowing about the broader galactic social order. And so they mesh fitfully, if peacefully, in the galaxy, and people are still working out what to make of them.

This is all in the background. Mainly, this is a story about a crew of people and aliens investigating energy-beings on the Sun. Some people (and aliens) think these Sun-beings uplifted humans long ago, thereby fitting them into the normal galactic evolutionary scheme, some people… don’t… to be honest, it got kind of foggy (ironic, given that most of the story takes place between Mercury and the Sun!). There’s a sinister teddy-bear alien who wants to knock the earth-men down a few pegs, and a LOT of details about how to make a spaceship that can fly really close to the sun, some schemes, some really interchangeable characters… In the end, science prevails, and the mean aliens are kept from turning the neutral Sun-aliens against people. It’s slow. But it’s a promising setup, and I’m told the latter installments are brisker and take more advantage of the setup, so I’ll grab the sequel when it turns up on a used pile somewhere. **

Maurice Dantec, “Babylon Babies” (1999) (translated from the French by Noura Wedell) – It’s not a great sign when the title of your experimental cyberpunk novel — published by “semiotext(e),” MIT’s theory imprint, yet! — has a title that makes you think of the Muppet Babies except everyone is in those big hats and beards. I thought maybe it’d be better in French — “Enfants de Babylone” doesn’t sound so dumb — but nope! Dantec gave it that English title despite the novel itself being in French.

Anyway… for a 560 page novel replete with references to literature, history, and especially high theory like Deleuze (presumably by it got translated into English by a theory-specialist academic press), I haven’t got that much to say about the actual plot. A magical girl holds the key to a future of Deleuzean schizo-something or other, where the boundaries between people, machines, animals, plants, et al break down and everything gets all freaky and liberated (but in a scary way) somehow. I don’t hate that kind of theory in the way vengeful nerds often do. Some of it I even get something out of. But more of it strikes me as posturing obfuscation, not offensive so much as uninteresting. Perhaps in keeping with the muddle of this kind of postmodern thought, it’s not entirely clear how the girl, or one of multiple hard-to-distinguish cults with an interest in her, is going to effect this change- something about viruses and genetically engineered babies? Who knows.

This magical girl (Marie- natch) needs to be escorted by the main character, Toorop, a Flemish mercenary with a philosophical bent, initially hired by the Russian mob but then wooed away to save the girl and one of the nicer cults, or… something. Honestly it got hard to keep track. At 560 pages and numerous digressions into High Theory you’re not doing cyberpunk, you’re doing cyberprog. There’s some cool stuff in here; it’s not the worst laid out near-future dystopia I’ve seen, and there’s some good twisty crime stuff. But it gets overwhelmed by sheer volume of (basically indistinguishable) characters, digressions, and just words. It’s too long and confusing to work as a novel. The translation doesn’t help- among other things, there’s mistakes even someone who can maybe quarter-read French could pick up, like translating “ancien,” as in “former,” to “ancient,” so you get stuff like “Toorop was an ancient soldier” when really he’s a retired, hence former, soldier, only in his forties. Sloppy, or “post-modern”? You decide!

I will say I’m curious about this Dantec figure. He died a few years back, but apparently cut quite a swath in French-language literature, a sort of love-him-or-hate-him kind of guy. Supposedly his real magnum opus is where he pulls a Leon Bloy and wrote something like 3000 pages about how all of the rest of contemporary French literature is awful, and written by awful people. Untranslated, alas, and even the wikipedia article in French isn’t that informative- seems to be one of those literary fights waged fiercely in its circles and not making its way out, certainly not to Anglophone schlubs like me. Apparently, Dantec was on the political right, a supporter of the Iraq War and Israel. He selects some interesting backgrounds for his characters- Toorop fought for the Chechens against the Russians and the Bosnian Muslims against the Serbs, and his two friends on his mission are an American emigrant to Israel and a Protestant militant from Belfast… the romance of small nationalisms? A lot of our contemporary very-online far right seems to prefer big nationalisms against smaller forces seen as disintegrative, ala Russia, the US, Syria… but you do get the other side too, the fantasy of breaking apart the liberal global monolith through multiple secessions of militant nationalities, eccentric enclaves and ministates, and so on, which is pretty in keeping with cyberpunk tropes… anyway, who knows if that’s what Dantec was in to, but I’m basically more interested in that than the theory-inflected stuff. **’

Jack Vance, “Star King” and “The Killing Machine” (1964) – I read these two on two flights back and forth cross-country. At about 160 fast-paced pages, they worked out pretty well for that time slot. They’re the first two volumes in the Demon Princes series, named after the gang of five space pirates who destroyed the village and killed the family of Kirth Gessen (related to that n+1 guy, one wonders?) who, naturally, vows revenge, one novel per Demon Prince.

The setting is classic Vance- far future, interplanetary, but comparatively low tech (there’s hand-wavey faster than light travel, but everyone still deals in cash), and a crazy quilt of planets with radically different cultures and environments. One of the conceits is that anyone with a spaceship can lift off and find an inhabitable planet, so every oddball sect or separatist group settles its own world, and stuff gets weird out there after a few thousand years.

Into this welter goes Kirth, his life given relatively straightforward meaning and rationality by his quest for revenge. The Demon Princes themselves belong to a kind of competitor species to humanity, asexual amphibians characterized by an innate drive to imitate and eventually excel the most sophisticated species they can find- which, this being midcentury sci-fi, soon comes to mean humans. They even adapted themselves to look like us. Apparently, most people aren’t that worried about it, but these Demon Princes guys decided to pursue sneaky lives of spectacular crime.

This means along with sci-fi with a certain western element (the revenge quest, frequent visits to the untamed frontiers where all the weirdest planets are), there’s a certain detective story element to each of the books, as Kirth needs to poke through clues to figure out who each of the Demon Princes are. In the first one, he finds that his quarry is hiding among academic administrators(!), and uses the promise of rights to a lucrative planet, along with some good old-fashioned goon suborning, to winkle him out. In the other, the bad guy is hiding on a planet stuck in the Middle Ages, so Kirth needs to do some knight and princess biz.

The set ups are fun and the books are quick. They give plenty of range for Vance’s worldbuilding and his baroquely courteous but sinister dialogue- like Wodehouse’s evil twin. A particular favorite, after he gets a story out of an old flunky of one of his quarries who belongs to a cult that eats rotten food and is on his way out the door: “Gersen said thoughtfully, ‘I shall now take all your money, and throw your vile food into the sea.’” The Demon Princes, naturally, rant like Bond villains on acid when caught, and their henchmen are pretty good, too.

Hard boiled heroes of the Chandler or Hammett mold are often somewhere between standing aloof from the sordid worlds they deal with and being their apex predators. Something similar can be said for many of Vance’s heroes, including Mirth. One interesting difference- Vance’s sci-fi/fantasy worlds are rendered sordid by the forces of time, decay, and petty narcissism, especially the narcissism of difference, than by exploitation as in the noir. Vance wasn’t a comrade and tended to see people as amusing, amoral beings who do a variety of fun tricks.

As the story develops it becomes clear that the Demon Princes were undone by the constant striving after greatness that their species is prone to- they can’t just enjoy life, they need to be constantly chasing more, and in their case, it’s more refined wickedness. The bad guy in the second book, the titular Killing Machine, seeks out a medieval world because he has some long-winded theory about producing the perfect kind of fear. Kirth is a relatively straightforward type, but of course, he’s aware his whole life, too, is dedicated to killing, and what happens if it’s ever over? Presumably, we’ll learn more about that in subsequent volumes. ****’