Scan barcode
A review by christopherc
Planet of Adventure by Jack Vance
3.0
“Planet of Adventure” is a science-fiction tetralogy written by Jack Vance in the early 1970s and consisting of the novels City of the Chasch, Servants of the Wankh, The Dirdir and The Pnume. It was originally commissioned as a young adult series, but through the addition of some sex and violence, it became more suitable for an adult readership. This Orb omninus collects all four novels into a single volume.
As the first novel opens, space explorer Adam Reith is stranded on the distant world of Tschai after an unknown adversary has blown up his ship and killed all of his companions. Tschai is home to four alien-races, the Chasch, the unfortunately-named Wankh (Vance was unaware of how silly this would sound to English speakers outside the US, and would change the spelling to "Wannek" in a later printing), the Dirdir and, indigenous instead of later arrivals like the others, the mysterious Pnume. Intriguingly, Tschai is also home to a large amount of human beings, scooped up from Earth in some prehistoric era. Though many live free, each of the four alien spaces has its own population of human servants, which sets Reith's blood boiling.
In this adventure much in the tradition of Edgar Rice Burroughs, Adam Reith fights his way across Tschai to liberate his fellow men from alien domination and searches for a spaceship to get back to Earth. The plot is generally ridiculous: book by book, Reith encounters warriors who have spent their whole lives training and fighting, and instantly dispatches them with his kung fu skills; he is captured time and time again by foes who are, unlike him, familiar with this alien world, but he always manages to outsmart them and escape.
Quite a lot of bodies pile up over the course of the tetralogy, and in one episode Reith commits what can be fairly called genocide, but our hero is never shaken by post-traumatic stress. Nor does he have any qualms about seducing the beautiful women in distress that he rescues. Planet of Adventure is very much of its time, written just before science-fiction would examine more deeply issues of morality towards alien races and gender equality.
What makes Planet of Adventure interesting and worth reading for any fan of science-fiction is Vance's interest in the diversity of human culture, which is his real concern here (unlike much of the genre, there's not much focus on advanced technology, and even the means by which Reith crosses hundreds of light years from Earth is never specified). The human servants of the alien races have conformed to their masters in their thought processes and sometimes (though prosthetics or clothing) in their physiology and appearance. The myriad free human races are each described in depth, each with its peculiar tradition, taboos, food and economy.
As the first novel opens, space explorer Adam Reith is stranded on the distant world of Tschai after an unknown adversary has blown up his ship and killed all of his companions. Tschai is home to four alien-races, the Chasch, the unfortunately-named Wankh (Vance was unaware of how silly this would sound to English speakers outside the US, and would change the spelling to "Wannek" in a later printing), the Dirdir and, indigenous instead of later arrivals like the others, the mysterious Pnume. Intriguingly, Tschai is also home to a large amount of human beings, scooped up from Earth in some prehistoric era. Though many live free, each of the four alien spaces has its own population of human servants, which sets Reith's blood boiling.
In this adventure much in the tradition of Edgar Rice Burroughs, Adam Reith fights his way across Tschai to liberate his fellow men from alien domination and searches for a spaceship to get back to Earth. The plot is generally ridiculous: book by book, Reith encounters warriors who have spent their whole lives training and fighting, and instantly dispatches them with his kung fu skills; he is captured time and time again by foes who are, unlike him, familiar with this alien world, but he always manages to outsmart them and escape.
Quite a lot of bodies pile up over the course of the tetralogy, and in one episode Reith commits what can be fairly called genocide, but our hero is never shaken by post-traumatic stress. Nor does he have any qualms about seducing the beautiful women in distress that he rescues. Planet of Adventure is very much of its time, written just before science-fiction would examine more deeply issues of morality towards alien races and gender equality.
What makes Planet of Adventure interesting and worth reading for any fan of science-fiction is Vance's interest in the diversity of human culture, which is his real concern here (unlike much of the genre, there's not much focus on advanced technology, and even the means by which Reith crosses hundreds of light years from Earth is never specified). The human servants of the alien races have conformed to their masters in their thought processes and sometimes (though prosthetics or clothing) in their physiology and appearance. The myriad free human races are each described in depth, each with its peculiar tradition, taboos, food and economy.