Demon Princes

I'm re-reading the old Jack Vance series "The Demon Princes". I remember taking years to hunt all 5 books down, and also that, in the end, I felt like it hadn't quite been worth it. But with that kind of build-up, it's not clear that any book would have felt worth it.

So, I took advantage of the fact that Orb has recently packaged them into two volumes, and I picked them up. They're definitely better than I remembered, which is always a pleasant surprise. Although the story is a straight our revenge tale -- our hero must find and kill the five men who destroyed his town when he was young -- it's worth reading for all the extra fillips Vance throws in. There's the mysterious Institute, which wants to restrict the development of science, so that people will be forced to fend for themselves more. There's the trans-planetary police force, the IPCC. There's a planet where kidnap victims are kept until ransomed, very business-like. And Vance tosses all these into his story, often just on the periphery, just as a mimetic story might happen to mention the UN or the Fed -- we feel that there's a lot going on in this universe, and that the story we're following is a very small piece of it.

In the end, even though he's chasing down 5 crime lords, Gersen isn't going to change the universe much -- other criminals will replace them, and, in the end, they don't affect most people's lives that much. I think that we're so used to dealing with epics in sci-fi that this is a refreshing change.