These did not age well. In some ways, the writing is very good - Vance is excellent at description, particularly of locations, and his aliens do seem alien, but in other ways, it's a mess. While the female characters get (somewhat) better over the course of the books, I was left with a definite impression that Vance was unaware that women are people. When the best it gets is a character who basically fits the Born Sexy Yesterday trope, you've got problems. (And a lot of characters people point to for that trope are still less...whatever the heck was going on here.)

The main character is less a person than a collection of whatever attributes is needed for a given scene, and there's a weird sort of exaggerated tension/stakes thing that keeps happening around him. "Oh, no, things look bleak, the [whichever alien race] are so much more powerful than our hero and his friends, whatever will they do!?" *five minutes later* "Oh, never mind, he just beat them in single combat (or whatever)." It's like the enemies all suffered from last minute power decay, which leaves one with the fridge logic of why Reith and co couldn't deal with them the way the eventually did sooner. (Particularly in the third book.)

Honestly, I'm mostly just disappointed there, because the character had potential - or at least certain versions of him did. But it was like... imagine playing a game of D&D, but every hour, your character's stats were randomly reassigned. Reith was kind of like that. For this scene, his highest score is in wisdom and he can accurately predict the psychology of an alien race. For this scene, his lowest score is in wisdom and he can't even understand a human from a culture not that different from ones found on Earth. (Also, he kept waffling between being utterly stoic and kind of refreshingly emotional.)

And, while I realize this is kind of inherent in the genre, since this is basically a more scifinal planetary romance, but there was something really uncomfortable both in nearly every society (human or alien) on Tschai being deeply terrible and in Reith proving, again and again, superior to everyone around him. I mean, I should be thoroughly rooting for him to win, since nearly everyone is made of awful, but there was some background assumption or...something...that made it all feel wrong. I have no idea whether I would have agreed with Vance on anything or not, but it felt kind of like finding oneself agreeing with that awful relative who has completely different political/social points of view. You find yourself asking what you're missing that this is happening.

Or maybe this is all a case of me taking the not-serious thing too seriously. I do that. Often. ¯\_(ツ)_/¯