Episode 48.2 transcription - Jack Vance - "The Languages of Pao" (1958)

(listen to episode on Spotify)

(music: clanging bells)

Jack Vance bio

JM:

Hello and welcome to Chrononauts, a science fiction literature history podcast. This is J.M. and I'm here with Gretchen and Nate and in this series we're talking about language, communication, and linguistics. And this particular episode we're going to be talking about a book called "The Languages of Pao" by an author who I may have a little less objectivity about than some just because he is a personal favorite. Kind of we're back in the situation that we were with Fritz Leiber here with Jack Vance. Only the difference between, well, one of the differences between these two writers is very much illustrated to me during the background research for this episode. Leiber was very open, very communicative about his thoughts and feelings about things and about his experiences of writing and doing different things and his troubles with alcoholism. Vance is a very different character. 

For this segment, I did refer to the autobiography or memoir of Vance that was put out in, I believe, 2009. And it's called "This Is Me, Jack Vance", or more properly, "This Is I", which is the subtitle. Yes, I had a really interesting experience reading this book. I always knew that Vance was a very, not a remote person, but he didn't like to talk about a lot of the things that other writers seem to like to talk about. He didn't really like to talk about the process of his writing. He didn't really like to talk about his specific thoughts on the books that he wrote. He had a very, I guess, almost a workmanlike approach. But at the same time, Vance's style always stood out to me. And in the last few years, now that I'm a little older than when I first discovered Jack Vance in my early 20s, I do find myself asking myself every now and then, why do I like Vance so much? 

I think the reason I like, well, there are several reasons I like Vance so much, and this has kind of come up recently because I know a big topic among especially readers of a certain type of fantasy fiction is world building and how building the world that you're going to set your story in is almost considered by some, maybe to be more important than the story itself. And in those cases, there's a lot of justified criticism that maybe the story gets lost in all the background lore and you get so much background lore that it's like overwhelming the story. You kind of want to get into something a bit less detached than like thousands of years ago, the gods made this and like, not everybody is Tolkien and you're not writing the Silmarillion basically. So I don't know, it's a justifiable criticism of fantasy fiction nowadays as we sometimes see it, especially in the doorstopper form. 

Vance never wrote like that though. And yet I think he is probably one of the best world builders you'll ever come across. And just his imagination and his sense of perspective and his ability to just come up with weird societies and then explain them really, really well is to me really amazing. He can do it in just a few pages, but he's also not above doing things like including footnotes and end notes at his novels, which I'm sure would infuriate some readers. But again, it's something that he just seems to enjoy doing. And I think he does it pretty well.

When I come down to it now and thinking about it, a lot of Vance's stuff really is just adventure. And it's just a person or persons going through a kind of a coming of age story, perhaps, while exploring a strange world. And oftentimes, maybe there's not a whole lot underneath that. But sometimes there doesn't need to be. We're going to be talking about what we've already talked about to an extent some of these writers, but we're going to talk a little more on the podcast on a future date, I'm sure, about writers like Edgar Rice Burroughs, for example, who, yeah, they really tell adventure stories. And sometimes there's a little depth there. There's a little philosophy there or something like that. But Vance's real strength is in creating, I think, an interesting world that you even might want to move around in while you read it, but also raw humor, some really enjoyable, fruity dialogue from pretty much every character. And yeah, a real sense of place. I think those are mostly the things that I enjoy about Vance. 

There are varying degrees of things that he gets into. I mean, we'll get into this in a little bit, but he did also work in multiple genres. And as well as these science fiction stories like this one, "Dying Earth" fantasies, which is how I first discovered him by reading the original Dying Earth stories. Those are just incredibly imaginative and weird. And at the same time, you can see how there's such a huge influence on modern fantasy, but especially stuff like Dungeons and Dragons, because there's all these like, wizards going around, and there's a certain way they have of just practicing magic where there's a certain number of spells known to the human race. And it's actually a very far future. So all these spells have been, in fact, scientifically codified, but a lot of ancient knowledge is lost. So now all the old wizards are basically on a quest to find more spells, if they can, because the human race only knows a certain number of spells. And also, the wizards can only memorize a certain number of spells. And that's why they have their Grimoires and stuff like that. 

I think the Dying Earth stuff is like Vance at his most colorful and most, I guess psychedelic, you can almost say, and weird. I just really, really loved it from the start. And it was an interesting experience for me, because when I first discovered that, I was definitely in a phase where I didn't want to read typical fantasy. Like, I was pretty much burnt out on all the stuff that I read when I was, I don't know, between the ages of like 11 and 15 or something like that. And just like, yeah, I already know Tolkien, all these other guys are like, not as good. So I don't know why would I want to read more of this, right? But that was before I discovered a kind of a contemporaneous strain of fantasy that's not so much influenced by Lord of the Rings, but maybe works alongside and in parallel to it. And first it was, yeah, it was the Zothique stories by Clark Ashton Smith, which are also set at kind of like the end of the world. The sun is dying out kind of scenario. We can trace all that back to our friend William Hope Hodgeson's book "The Night Land" from 1912. 

But for me, the Vance Dying Earth tales are the epitome of this genre. And after the initial Dying Earth set, which was like a bunch of almost mythologically cast stories set in his end of the world magical place, there's the two books about Cugel the Clever, who's this wandering rogue who's basically a complete rascal, totally non likable character. But he gets into, yeah, he like tries to steal something from a magician, and he gets like sent across the world and has to retrieve these objects. And it's all the picaresque adventures he has. And like dozens and dozens of weird characters that he runs into and weird societies he has to deal with and coming up against like magical artifacts. And it's all just craziness and really, really fun to read. 

So that was my first discovery of Vance. But I mean, he's also written mystery novels, lots of series of science fiction set in, I guess his own like future timeline that he's kind of created. I don't think it's that detailed compared to some other writers who really mapped it out like even Robert Heinlein has this well-defined future history kind of thing. But Vance has it too. And this book does figure it into that a little bit in that in some of the other books, there's this mysterious organization referred to as the Institute. It doesn't get named, I don't think I remember seeing the name Breakness anywhere else, but this book, but I could be wrong. But we'll get there. 

But anyway, yeah, so reading the autobiography, which is what I was going to get to kind of demonstrated to me what I kind of suspected about Vance all along. And that's that he doesn't really want to talk about the traditional things that these authors like to discuss in their books. So when I read the Williamson autobiography, the Frederik Pohl memoir, even the Sprague autobiography, I felt really informed about the writers and I felt informed about their personalities and their, I guess, the way they thought about things and how it was when they wrote a certain book and all this stuff, what it was interacting with all the other members of the science fiction community. I got none of that from Vance's book. 

You want to know what I got from Vance's book mostly? Him traveling all over the world, visiting random places in like far out of the way corners, going bicycling around Europe, eating all kinds of food, like detailed descriptions of food that he had 50 years ago.

So before I get into this a little more, I'll explain that in this book, which was written when he was in his nineties. Jack Vance, by the time he wrote this, he had pretty much no vision and he was not writing anymore in the traditional sense. He had written his last book in, I believe, 2002 or maybe 2004. And at this point, his was officially retired and he pretty much dictated the entire book. And yeah, for something like that, which was probably edited by his, I imagine maybe his son had something to do with it, but it's very well done. But it reads very much like your 90 something year old granddad telling you all kinds of crazy stories and getting sidetracked and going off on all sorts of tangents and the jokes being like sometimes feeling like maybe half finished just because he like wandered off somewhere. And like, it is really funny at times. And there's a lot of cool anecdotes and stuff like that. But it's just not really the kind of thing that I would really want to get into in the podcast because it's just so like, well, okay, this is this guy's life he loved to travel. And that's what he mostly wrote about just visiting places. 

It's a short book. And I definitely recommend it for people who know Vance. But if you want to get to know Vance and his writing, this is definitely not the way to do it. But it was an interesting read. So before we talk about this one specifically, and now that I've finished babbling to you all about my experience with Jack Vance, I'll just talk a little bit about him and we'll summarize what kind of life he did have. 

So John Holbrooke Vance had this to say about his book. He says, "this is not a self portrait, but a landscape or rather a ramble through the landscape of my life". And like I said, he dictated this whole thing. And it's very unusual in terms of what the background research that I do for this podcast. But he was born in 1916 in San Francisco, California, USA. And he was a third of five children. The Vances seemed rather well off. Jack didn't spend much time with his father as a child, the man being stationed in Europe "in some connection with the Red Cross" is what Jack is vague on saying. 

His mother was apparently quite a part of the San Francisco social scene. His maternal grandfather was a German expatriate of some kind and heavily involved with local politics. His grandfather was part of the Dawes committee, which was sent to Germany in the early 1920s to assess German economics. And there's also noted by him some indigenous blood on his mother's side. His father seems to be of Scotch/Irish descent. 

In the early 20s, mother and kids moved to a family farm property outside the city. Vance describes this in rather idyllic ways. He was a fan of very early jazz music and had affinity for music started at age seven, which unlike Williamson, this Jack talks about a lot and really into music specifically jazz. So he picked up the harmonica along with a bunch of other instruments. And in 2009, he said he still played the harmonica along with a banjo, the ukulele and cornet/trumpet. He was influenced by a family friend, jazz pianist and orchestra leader, George Gould, which I think might have been who may be first became made the acquaintance of the style. 

Yet basically throughout his book, he talks about all the musicians that he got to hang out with sometimes and play with even I don't recognize most of them. I guess they were big on the scene at that time in the 1930s and 40s and 50s and so on. It's pretty cool. He's really into this stuff and he talks about it pretty passionately and also with a great understanding of the music itself, which I think was kind of fun. Jack's dad wasn't around much and Jack and the others didn't mind. Jack said of his father, "he was a rather bluff, boisterous, self-righteous chap". And if I must say so, a bit of a bully. And their father had a sister, Nellie, who seems to have had a controlling influence over the family, including Jack's mom. 

I don't know, this is something that I kind of noticed at Vance that I think might be in part that upbringing, but partially the influence of one of his own favorite writers, Wodehouse. But he has a thing about not very likable aunts, evil aunts, or aunts said to destroy your family fortune or something like that or keep you back somehow. It's kind of funny, but after graduating from the rural schoolhouse, this aunt persuaded mom to let the older boys move back to the city. So the household was diminished. 

Meanwhile, Jack's father went to live in Mexico, where he had acquired some property somehow. And they literally never saw him again. So this is an interesting pattern that I'm noticing among a lot of the writers that I've been covering lately is that they live fatherless existences. So that's kind of interesting. But the house in San Francisco was rented. And supposedly the aunt kept it in charge of this. And the income of the family farm received was minimal. In fact, it seems like Jack's father and aunt swindled his mother somehow, who believed the couple had joint ownership of the house. Grandfather's money was largely in breweries at the time. And during prohibition, this was obviously no good. So the family fell on pretty hard times. 

So the idyllic country life full of nature and pastimes like kite flying and stilt walking. In the midst of all that, Jack's describing the large ranch being full of books. And his mother apparently had books by Robert W. Chambers, three of which Jack's mentions in his autobiography, discovering very early, including "The King in Yellow". And less regarded works now like "The Tracer of Lost Persons" and "The Maker of Moons". Fellow Californian Edgar Rice Burroughs was also represented on the bookshelf. His "Tarzan of the Apes" serial being described by his mother as something of a fad among her acquaintances. Jack also mentioned L. Frank Baum's, Oz books, as well as boys books emanating from the Edward Stratemeyer fictional factory. He describes a finding Amazing Quarterly in a nearby town and soon discovered and subscribed to Weird Tales. He does remember authors like Seabury Quinn, H.P. Lovecraft, Nictzin Dyalhis. I don't know if we ever finally decided on a pronunciation. 

Nate:

No, I don't think we did.

JM:

But he thought that was a pseudonym, but learned later that it wasn't. And perhaps misrecalling as she didn't start till the 30s, but C.L. Moore as well. And he describes discovering a book by James Jeans, "The Universe Around Us", and a budding interest in astronomy and stargazing developed. Despite Jack's noting that, even early on, he had terrible eyesight. He always wore glasses and he described himself as a child as small and thin without any social graces when he started high school at age 11 in 1928. 

He did start to play tennis, but mostly loved the science laboratory, where he seems to have been able to spend time unsupervised and formulate "substances of my own contrivance, attempting and failing to hit upon some novel chemical reaction". In a familiar story, which again reminds me of Williamson, Vance and a friend from the South share a cabin and attend college together in a little town called Portersville, way down in, I think, New Mexico. And they hitchhiked there during the 30s and rode boxcars way down into Santa Fe. Jack's money runs out and he has to quit college, arriving home to find his grandfather, the financial center of this side of the family, dead. He died utterly broke in the end. So there's no income, whatever, and Anne stopped sending money from the rental, as I guess she felt everything was hers now. 

Jack and his mother both had to go to work various jobs and Jack is a farmhand they rent and Jack picks fruit for 20 cents an hour or one cent a pound depending on the season. And one thing leads to another and he has to quit the farm work and go back to the city where he was a bellhopper a while and an elevator operator at the Olympia Club, where his old grandfather had been a member. And he was living then with his aunt who he hated the working conditions at the Olympia Club. It seems like the manual labor was more fitting for him. 

So in his spare time though, he started to write poetry and rudimentary science fiction stories. At a dinner, he met Stanton Coblentz, who was an editor of a poetry magazine and also a science fiction writer in his own right, but apparently he never published anything with him. So later, he had a rooming house where he got even more into jazz and he talks about his first record portrait, Duke Ellington's "Daybreak Express". And yeah, if you're into your old jazz, that's when you gotta know. 

Then it's back to the Boondocks and mining surveys. And he talks about the rambling hotel he stayed at in the Sierra Nevada Hills, like something out of the Wild West. And honestly, reading these parts of his memoir was a lot like reading his books sometimes because they're full of places like this and the way he describes all the scenery and everything like that and the weird characters and all that and the doings and going on at a rundown inn or something like that. It's classic. 

He has pretty minute recollections of the interesting, mostly heavy labor jobs he did. Like Sturgeon, he became a bulldozer operator. In the fall of 1937, he enrolled at the University of California at Berkeley. And it was mostly pleasant but tough since Jack hardly had any money. And the rooming situation was somewhat weird. And so he was doing housework for a guy in his family in exchange for a room and board or a hash cook at a sorority. And his second year, he started as a physics major, but abruptly changed to English and journalism after getting involved with the Daily Californian newspaper. And it was on the school paper staff that some true friendships were developed. And many adventures were definitely had. And science fiction stories were also written. Nothing submitted as yet. But his creative writing teacher trashed them, of course. 

Within a couple of years, Vance ended up signing up for the war. And he applied for the Navy and said it was overall a pretty disenchanting experience. Bad conditions. Men on troops ships treated like cargo. No recreation but a little gambling and fighting. And he ended up at Pearl Harbor. And good times at Waikiki and while Hawaii are noted, and the work like degaussing ships was sometimes pretty grueling. And I don't know, if you guys know what that is, I had to, he explained that pretty well. It's basically going along the hull of a ship, trying to demagnetize it by hand. 

Nate:

Yeah. 

JM:

Yeah. Definitely sounds like it could be pretty taxing work in certain conditions, especially when it's hot like it is now. 

Nate:

Yeah. 

JM:

But he went home before the week Pearl Harbor was bombed. And Jack went to work at a shipyard, citing imaginary qualifications, something which he tried several times in his youth, a bit tricksterishly. And he wanted to get into an army intelligence program. So he studied Japanese at night. And he talks of a lot more jazz club stuff and 43. He listed for training as an ordinary seaman. Here began Jack's somewhat famous maritime career. So life at sea was very unlike anything Vance had experienced before. And there was more spare time than usual too. And he used a lot of this to write. And this in this setting is where he started getting published. And among other things, here's where the first Dying Earth stories were written. More or less, on deck of the ship late at night, most of the time. And there's also a mystery and a strange whimsical piece called "Bird Island", which is really about cats. 

But Vance describes himself as the worst quartermaster in the Navy, pretty much his course charts looked like a oscillogram. I guess because he couldn't see straight, so he couldn't really steer straight either. But he used his rascals tendencies again to bypass the medical exams by memorizing the eye charts again, for obvious reasons. So his first foreign short was Australia. And amusingly, Vance describes a game of two up happening in Australia there, where he was hanging out. And yeah, if you've seen "Wake and Fright", which I mentioned in the Hawkwind episode, you know what the game of two up is, where you all bet your money on whether the two coins land heads or tails. And it's seen as the most important thing in the world to these people sometimes. And it just was funny that it had just come up, because I just rewatched that movie. And then reading that, and hearing Vance mentioned the game of two up, that cracked me up. 

But he also describes sojourns in South America, and building the stills on tanker ships, and run ins with the Chilean police, and much, much more. And the mention and a memoir about being torpedoes didn't even happen. So I don't know. That's a famous anecdote from Vance's life that I read in various articles and things about him and postings on the internet, talking about how he got torpedoed twice. But that's not something he'd aim to talk about in his memoir. I guess because maybe it wasn't that fun. I don't know. Or maybe it didn't happen. Maybe it's an apocryphal thing. It's funny that he didn't even mention it, though. 

Gretchen:

I feel like it wasn't as fun as meeting a lot of jazz musicians.

JM:

Yeah, this is a man with his priorities, right? So he wants to talk about the food they ate, not the fact that they almost drowned. So after the war, he wanted to devote himself to writing, and back in Northern California, living with mum. There wasn't enough money to get on, though. So he decided to bark upon carpentry as day work, and quickly became a journeyman. And he describes the way he met his wife in some really casual sentences. Basically, he was working a job, and he saw a pretty vivacious looking girl on a nearby porch petting a cat. And he introduced himself, and she was happy to know him. And they were married, quote, in due course.

And it's just so funny. He doesn't want to share the really personal stuff, which I just find interesting because so many of these writers were very open about stuff like that. And it's almost like he's putting on, like, this is the Vance, especially maybe because when he does kind of open up about some of this stuff, he's older. So maybe he's just putting on a bit of the personality here to describe these events. And unless somebody really does a meticulous biography of Jack Vance, we'll probably never know exactly how everybody felt. But they were married till the end, as it were. And there's Jack and Norma. And they started a ceramics work of all things, making and selling clay dishes and stuff. Didn't last long, but Jack describes it as a social hub of sorts for a while. 

At this point, Jack already had the somewhat famous literary agent Scott Meredith in New York. And this guy really worked with everybody. So many popular writers in the field and other genres too, besides science fiction, mystery writers and so on. I could be wrong, but I think even Stephen King might have been with him for a short time. Anyway, this guy's been all over. So Norma worked closely with Jack from the start, and I guess doing revision suggestions, editorial stuff. And he credits her a lot in his memoir, but she never got on the book covers. So I guess she didn't really come up with the ideas for the stories, because I feel like he would have credited her if she had done that. But he definitely acknowledges her everywhere he can. 

He really enjoyed writing abroad. So they took long European vacations and rented places. And he already worked on a failed screenplay for the story "Hard-Luck Diggings" for 20th Century Fox. And he sold a juvenile novel called "Bandits of the Void". And so he had his intro to television around this time, working for a producer named Olga Druce, her series called Captain Video and the Video Rangers. Never seen that show. You don't know how much of it is available or if you can watch it. So here he worked alongside Robert Sheckley and later astronomer Robert Richardson, writing scripts for the show. Apparently, Vance wrote most of them. And the pay was then quite handsome, $1,500 per episode. And he was eventually fired, he says, for injecting too much humor into the scripts. I don't know, again, if that's a thing or not. 

So yeah, he doesn't talk a lot about writing or his fellow writers, but one good friend in the field to him was Poul Andersen. Another was Frank Herbert, whom he originally met as a reporter who did an interview with him that erroneously called him a, quote, flying saucer expert. Another good friend of his was Australian writer and television performer Terry Dowling, who was also an editor, I believe, and he can be found in the Vance tribute anthology called "Songs of the Dying Earth", which is basically a whole bunch of more nowadays, 90s, 2010s writers paying tribute to the Dying Earth setting. There's some pretty legendary writers in there, like Silverberg and Tanith Lee, who else is in there? Neil Gaiman is in there, I guess his star is somewhat fallen, but at the time he was probably a draw. Dan Simmons is in there. A whole bunch of really cool stuff. Some of the quality of the stories vary, but if you're really looking for more Dying Earth fix than what Jack brought, you can do worse than to pick that up. 

But he also describes meeting Arthur C. Clark in Sri Lanka, just like Mr. Gallun, and they seem to have enjoyed each other's company. He loves talking about all the trips on the restaurants and the minor, but memorable incidents. It's charming, but not particularly instructive. Vance and Herbert came up with a plan to start a kind of writer's community house in Mexico. So they drove a station wagon there and set up in a rented house in Chapala. And I think this would have been around 1955. And the project, again, didn't last for very long. And the Herberts remained in Mexico for a while, though, and the Vances returned to the U.S. They bought a property, I think, near Oakland and basically built a new house on it with their bare hands. Actually, the house seems to have been an indefinite project that the Vances enjoyed working on, perfecting, adding to over a period of decades. 

And there was a lot of travel pretty much right up until the 1980s. They like to stay at low key establishments and ride bicycles. And sounds quite ideal of a life in many ways, renting homes in Ibiza and Las Palmas in the Canary Islands and Tahiti in the Pacific, and riding the entire time. And their son, John, was born in 1961. Later in the 60s is when Jack decided to build his somewhat famous two-pond-tuned houseboat. Frank Herbert and Poul Anderson apparently got on in this too. And Vance just loved boats, and it seemed he always had some form from a small 14-foot sloop to, well, a houseboat.

In the 70s, there were a whole lot more traveling world. And yeah, some books published too, including some mysteries like "Bad Ronald" and such. And some of these were under the Ellery Queen name. And also the Durdane trilogy of science fiction books, which is definitely one I really enjoyed reading. And in the 80s, Vance was diagnosed with advanced glaucoma, and he went and had some laser treatment. But instead of helping, scabs were formed over the optic nerves, causing serious damage. And this slowed Vance down quite a lot. His travels and many activities, such as the pottery work, he pretty much had to stop completely. And he still wrote, but he had previously done all his work in longhand, and this had to change. So he learned to use a computer and a word processor, though I don't think he ever truly loved this method. Eventually his eyesight was totally gone, and even large print was no good. So he had to use a synth. And I didn't realize just how early that was in his writing career. He says he wrote pretty much all of Lyonesse, which is his epic high fantasy trilogy in this state. And everything else done after this was done this way as well. The "Cadwal Chronicles", lots of "Ports of Call", "Night Lamp" and "Lurulu". And he says he has no way of knowing for certain, but wonders if he might be the only professional writer who bypassed the typewriter completely, going straight from longhand to the personal computer. 

These last works were laborious for Jack. After "Lurulu", which I think was his last book, the process he describes as being like going through triage, he retired from writing. Of course, he never learned Braille, but reports spending a lot of time listening to audiobooks, which he got from the Library of Congress and OS service. Towards the end of his life, he mostly read mysteries, which he prefers the "cozy British type", scientific journals, and works of history about the ancient world. He speaks great admiration for our former podcast writer, PD James, as well as Ruth Rendell. He has more to say in his autobiography about his love of contemporary mystery writers, most of the women than SF or his peers. 

Jack speaks with great admiration of his son, John, who he calls a creative engineer. John can build anything he sees, sets his mind to, he said. Norma Vance, who was Jack's companion and editor, for decades, died in 2008. In the final word section of his autobiography, he does deign at the request of a friend and advisor of his to talk a little bit about writing. And he doesn't mention the book we're reading today, "Languages of Pao", but list some of his favorites, of which I've read a great number, but not by any means everything. He says, he believes the purpose of fiction is to amuse and entertain the reader. And he achieves, in my mind, what he sets out to do. "The mark of good writing, in my opinion, is that the reader is not aware that the story has been written as he reads, the ideas and images flow into his mind as though he were living though." Elsewhere, "the sentences must swim." Vance says the reader shouldn't be cognizant of the writer's presence, but to me, he has a pretty distinctive voice, which I, for one, really like.

So Jack Vance died at his home in the spring of 2013, probably right around the time I was seeing Manilla Road play at Maryland Death Fest. So that's an odd personal relation for me there. But he also, of course, didn't mention the many awards he won in his autobiography, but he received the prestigious Edgar Award handed out by the mystery writers of America for the 1958 novel "Man in a Cage". He got a Hugo in 1963 for the "Dragon Masters", which is a really awesome story, even though now, if I see dragons in the title of a fantasy novel, I'm probably going to run. But I don't know, it was 1963, and his approach is very different than what you would expect. So, but yes, there are dragons in it, basically. Yep, 1966, a nebula for "The Last Castle", got the World Fantasy Lifetime Achievement Award, and many more, actually. 

So this is certainly a writer who I sometimes wish I did see his name a little more often when people talk about SF classics and so on. But I also get it, maybe he's not for everyone. I, again, really, really enjoy stuff a lot. So before we get into this one, do you guys have any previous experience?

Nate:

No, this is the first one I read. 

Gretchen:

For me, this is the second Vance work that I've read. The first is actually, and J.M., you know this, is "Bad Ronald", which feels like a very bizarre place to start with Jack Vance, since it is so different from the sci-fi fantasy that he's usually known for. Yeah, that was actually, it was because of that book that J.M. and I met, which is very nice. Yeah, this is my first sci-fi work that I've read by Vance, and I really enjoyed this work.

JM:

Cool, yeah, "Bad Ronald" was definitely a different, I hadn't read that one before, or why don't we, we both read it as well. And it was really interesting coming at that one, as somebody who was already, I guess, the only person in that group who'd already read a lot of his stuff, but not that particular work. And yeah, and that's of course the one that was made into a maybe so-so 1970s made for TV movie. So I think that's the reason why people might know that one as well, because apparently it's actually a reasonably often seen movie. Anyway, I guess it was probably on television a lot for a long time. It's basically a story about some boy murderer living in the walls of a house when his mom dies and some other people come into possession of house and this messed up young kid is still living in this hidden wall space in the house and basically watching everything that's going on with the family and having, I guess, designs on the three young daughters and stuff like that. 

Gretchen:

And he's also very into fantasy world building. 

JM:

Yeah. Yeah. 

(music: 8-bit minor melody)

non-spoiler discussion

JM:

So yeah, "Languages of Pao" then. What do you guys think of this one?

Nate:

Yeah, I was a little mixed on this one. I like some stuff, but there is definitely some stuff I wasn't so fond of. So it definitely offers some interesting looks at what happens with society when it undergoes rapid industrialization and militarization and how that would affect that society. And there's also a fair amount of parallels to colonial resistance. I thought the Palefox, Palafox, I don't know how we're supposed to say his name, Palafox, the technological wizard aspect is pretty cool. Like yes, a mental slide rule. That's just like pretty awesome. I just really like that idea of the technological wizard. 

JM:

Yeah, it kind of reminded me of the Dying Earth stuff, even though those guys really did use spells and stuff, but it was like that the way it was presented was kind of like the far future technology that seems very magical. Yeah. And of course we learn it's all like body modifications. 

Nate:

Yeah. But like you said that he writes a lot of these adventure stories, a lot of the plot is this castle intrigue stuff as it is a genre novel. So it is really fast paced and never really gets dull. And it's not that long to begin with. But the negatives I had were the sexism in the novel, which is kind of hard to talk about in non-spoiler terms. So I'll say a little bit more after the summary. But generally speaking, the only women characters in this novel are like sex slaves and the only female character who gets any significant amount of time is there to affect the emotions of the protagonist. And she's not really in the novel for that long to begin with. And women in general have no agency of their own in this world. They're literally traded around like cattle. And that's kind of generally presented uncritically in the text. And while the main character tried to introduce some reform, it feels a little hand wavy in ways that reminded me of the end of "Ringworld", which I had alluded to earlier. But when we get to that point in that novel, I'll point that out as it marked down the specific quote. But yeah, it's kind of the elephant in the room. And again, it's typical for these 50s sci-fi novels, but it just definitely sticks out with a modern read for sure. 

Gretchen:

I have some mixed reactions to that particular aspect of this novel. I feel relating to some of the other themes of this novel, I think there's something that can be, there is a sort of interesting reading that I have with like the connections of sexism. And as you mentioned, Nate, what I found really interesting about this book and about the linguistic themes of this novel, not necessarily the Sapir-Whorf, but how language and colonialism interact. And I think there's some really interesting intersections of imperialism in this empire building and this like very misogynistic and toxic masculinist attitude. I think that there's something that is really interesting there to explore. 

Nate:

Yeah, definitely. 

JM:

Yeah, well, it's cool. I mean, I definitely was curious to see what you guys would make of this. And yeah, like as somebody who's reading, been reading Vance and slowly making my way through as much of his stuff as I can, who already has some definite favorites. And this has been going on for well over 20 years now.

For me, This was a good one. I think it was a good one to do because, yeah, I mean, the linguistics one was one that I thought of for a long time as a theme. And I did want to get Vance in on the podcast. And I thought of doing "Emphyrio", which I hadn't read yet, but I didn't end up reading it. And I thought, you know what, this is good. But I think maybe we could start with something different. And Vance has a lot of stuff that is in series. So far, we don't really do that kind of stuff on the podcast. So rather than try and somehow introduce "The Demon Princes| or something like that, I mean, if we want to do that at a future time, or talk about it, it's cool. It's a really awesome series of five fairly short novels. But we've just tossed that out on the podcast already in the bonus episodes. And we're not sure when or if we're going to tackle that, despite the fact that most modern marketable science fiction and fantasy is all in large multivolume series. 

But this was a standalone. And I think, along with perhaps his book "To Live Forever", which was written around the same time as this one, this is, I think, one of the more memorable Vance standalone books to me. I really enjoyed it. I think there are ones that are maybe a bit more fun than this. But this still had an element of adventure to it, a sort of a wry humor that popped up every now and then that I really enjoyed. And yeah, the characters were maybe not like totally three dimensional, but a lot of it's like, I like the larger than lifeness, the grotesqueness that he describes reminds me of Mervyn Peake sometimes, just the way he talks about people's faces and their body language and stuff like that. And I know Peake is somebody he's mentioned offhand before. So I know he was aware of him and maybe read his stuff. But yeah, I know, of course, probably one of the biggest influences on Peake, of course, being Dickens. So anyway, grotesque characters with weird names, pretty much, right?

And yeah, I mean, the sexism, I don't know, to me, there's a big difference between making a character that's a love slave and like, I don't know, doting on it and like, repeatedly hammering that point home in a way that seems lecherous. And I don't think this book was doing that at all. I think you did get to see a little bit of her point of view. And yeah, maybe it's a shame that the only female character in the book is used in this way. But I don't know, I think at least she did get a point of view. And I think it was done in a way that was not gratuitous. If you know what I mean, like, it was to illustrate that things like this could happen. And there's a lot of other things that go into that, like the Breakness culture and the weird hallucinations that Beran has when he's talking to Palafox at the end, where he's like, seeing all these visions and he turns into a giant phallus. And it's just like, that was just totally out of left field. But it was also really funny and kind of cool. So I don't know. It's just like, yeah, I don't know. I don't think it was done badly. Yeah, it's definitely a very, the Breakness culture itself is sexist. And that's what you're facing here. And I think for writer in the 50s anyway, Vance does a pretty good job of just showing that. But he also shows like, the army of the Paonese does include women as well, even though none of them really feature in the book. It might have been interesting if he'd went that route. But he does write from women's point of view fairly often in his books, actually. So it's not something he's incapable of doing. 

But I don't know. I see what you mean, Nate. But I don't know. To me, it didn't really bother me. But again, it could be that I'm already embroiled enough in Vance that I kind of know a little bit what to expect from him, maybe I'm not sure. Right. So this is why having you guys, your experience is reading this. This is also my second time reading this. 

Gretchen:

I also read a version of this that it's in a collection with two other novels. I know it's "Emphyrio". And there's another one that's in the three book collection. But this particular novel has an introduction actually by Le Guin. And she does bring up the point of sexism in this book. And she herself talks about her feelings about it and says, you know... 

JM:

I wanted to find that. 

Gretchen:

Yeah. So I kind of went in with Le Guin's opinions in mind where she has her own thoughts on, even though Vance may not be portraying three dimensional female characters in this particular novel, she kind of is still able to see the way that Vance is treating this misogynistic society in a way that feels a little more delicate than other writers at the time would do so. 

Nate:

Yeah, interesting. I didn't read the Le Guin introduction. I just read it in the standalone form. 

JM:

Yeah, I would have read it if I could find it, but I wasn't able to locate it. So I checked what I think were several different editions of the book. But yeah, I don't know. 

Gretchen:

Yeah, I think it's a very interesting read. She talks about that part of the novel and also Vance's writing style, which she deeply appreciates.

JM:

Interesting. Yeah. Yeah. And yeah, like another reason why I kind of wanted to do this one is that yeah, this is one where perhaps even the usual Vanceian element like the adventure is secondary to the ideas. And this is a theme episode. So it kind of made sense to put this in here. And yeah, I mean, it's definitely one also that gets mentioned in usually in a somewhat offhand way in the reference material that documents basically the theme and how it started to take off in the late fifties and sixties, for example. So I'm not surprised that this is something Le Guin would have noticed. Yeah, probably Delaney as well. We're going to talk about "Babel-17" next. And there are some maybe interesting parallels for this in certain ways. So that was a very different story in a way. But yeah. 

So what do you think of Vance's prose? 

Nate:

He's a good writer definitely, especially for the genre at the time. Definitely a good stylist. This is the only thing I've read by him. So I'm not really sure how this compares to other works like "Dying Earth" or some of his more popular ones. But yeah, prose is definitely good here. 

Gretchen:

I do enjoy the prose quite a bit. To say antiquated feels sort of derogatory. But I mean that in a very positive way, where there's sort of this very classical feel to his writing that I think really captures the atmosphere that he's going for. 

JM:

Yeah, I enjoy his very smooth flowing style. And I really, it's for me, especially when he's writing about sort of otherworldly settings that are not quite the ones we know. And just the way he does it is just so like it really pulls me in. And I really love, I do think this book maybe is more arresting in the beginning than towards the end. But I think also there's some great parts towards the end. And also that's again, not an atypical reaction for me for a lot of books. And I just think the way he sets the scene in this one is really, really like so cool. You just want to keep reading and find out what's happening and what's going to happen next and stuff. 

The book is pretty short. So I do think a lot of things don't get explored. Like there are a lot of directions he could have taken it, right? Maybe if this was a 550 page book, he could have done that. I mean, there's enough material here to warrant a large page count. Even the language hypothesis, like it's described very well. And you get the background of it is delineated in a pretty awesome way. But you never really see all that stuff in practice all that much. And I guess that could be a disappointment with this book. Again, I think like if it was longer, maybe more of that stuff could have been gone into. But I think it is a pretty tightly focused book. So I'm not sure like if I necessarily want expanded to three times its size "Languages of Pao", I'm not sure. I don't know. 

I will concede that there's a lot of areas that this could have gone into, which he did not explore. And I guess you can say that about a lot of books, especially in this kind of genre, because so many of them just open up ideas into your head, right? They're just like, if you think about, oh, how could that be used? Where can we take that in the future? And so on. But I think that's part of the fun of it too, because you get to think about that. And it's not necessarily all laid out for you. You can imagine some things too. I don't mind where he did choose to take this. I mean, I as a Vance book, I probably would put it behind like "The Dying Earth" and stuff just in terms of my personal experience with it. And "The Demon Princes", which is my favorite of his like, more science fiction stuff. But the thing about "The Demon Princes" is, yeah, I have to admit, so much of why that's so good is the way the building of the worlds is done. And it's so like, immersive and everything. And yeah, the dialogue and even though it's the future, everything is just so mannered. Like I think he has a very Edwardian English style of putting sentences together sometimes, and especially like dialogue. And I find that a lot of fun. 

He has these quirks that he likes to do, and which you don't see too much in this book. But when I was waiting for, because I couldn't remember from the last time I read it, if he does it, he does this thing. It's even the name of the Jack Vance Facebook group. So I know other people have acknowledged it too. But when people are having an argument, and one person really disagrees with the other person, they usually get up and fluff up their chest. And they put with an exclamation mark, "By no means!". And yeah, the name of the Jack Vance Facebook group is "by no means". So I know somebody else noticed it. But it's just one of these quirks that I see in so many of his books that every time I see it, I can't help but laugh. And it's just one of those things like, I'm not being derisive, I really enjoy it. He says these other little phrases that he likes to say, like when somebody, some character says something, another character thinks it's irrelevant or something. "He's like, the question is nuncupatory!".

He does some cool things like that here in this book too. Like the key form of execution on Pao is drowning. But they don't call it drowning. It's subaqueating. Right. This is why not. I mean, that's what it is. These are the kind of things that I enjoy. And after reading 20 years worth of stuff from a writer, definitely pick up all that stuff.

Gretchen:

You're in tune with the Vanceisms. 

JM:

Yeah. 

(music: slow driving and clanging synth) 

spoiler plot summary

JM:

So this book was published in 1958 by Avalon. Right away in the beginning, we get this is where we're going. And here is the geography. And Vance lies a lot very concisely out here, the culture, the climate, geography, again, customs, language, the people. And it seems rather uniform. And above all is the Panarch, ruler of Pao, a man capable of great vices, but unable to display happiness or gaiety or break his archetype of certainty and decisiveness. And this particular Panarch is hanging out on resort island with all his people, including delegations from another planet. 

The Panarch, Aiello, he's always dressed in black. He sits at his meal and listens. Aiello is described as a big old baby. And again, this was very Gormenghast like to me. I don't know. This is some of these descriptions definitely made me think of of Gormenghast. So some of the character names to like, even though it is actually named but Bustamonte. He's a strong, a little fellow. And he's his brother. And he gets the idea that we get the idea that Bustamonte is unusual and different and possibly has some tricks up his sleeve.

Nevertheless, he is subordinate to the Panarch and must taste all his food, according to custom first. Aiello's son Beran is a nervous youth with some darkly hinted at mental or emotional crisis taking place. There's a lot of cool descriptions of the people and stuff around them. And the eunuchs or the especially bred Mamarones or neutraloids, who are the loyal soldiers and protectors. And they're dealing with representatives from Mercantil, a commercial planet. 

Business can't go ahead till after the repast. And yeah, Vance usually does spend a lot of time describing meals, but he's pretty spare here. So among the business, they have water transport and overpopulation in one area. And just to describe what the society can sometimes be like, the Panarch decides all children born to parents who already have to should be subaqueated immediately. That's a standard procedure. 

So business with the Mercantil is discussed. And this seems to be the main thing. The Panarch is not happy with the Mercantils who have been selling weapons to both the Paonese and the Batmarsh planet, the letter of whom are in conflict with power, trying to expand due to new dynasties. The Mercantils have sold the Brumbo dynasty superior equipment. And it looks like they intend to conduct raids on Pao.

The Mercantil tried to distract with some new toys, like an optical device that can act as a microscope or telescope. And there's some humor in examining Bustamontes nostril hairs on his "estimable nose". But attention finally turns to a stranger who's been silent at the table, a Lord Palafox, who may have a counter proposition for the Paonese. And the Mercantil representative calls him a Breakness wizard and seems in awe of him. So the Breakness institute manufactures not weapons, but knowledge and men. Aiello would rather put his trust in Palafox than the Mercantils.

Meanwhile, the son has been getting more and more quietly agitated the whole time. And as the merchants demonstrating this device to cloak an environment in total darkness, conveniently something happens to Panarch Aiello, and he's struck by something that seems like poison and dies in horrible spasms. And now, Beran, the troubled youth, is Panarch. Defined breath of the Paonese, tyrant absolute of eight continents, ocean master, soverign of the system, and acknowledged leader of the universe, among other titles. 

Bustamonte's power has obviously increased. They know that a sting missile was thrust thrust into the side of Aiello's throat. We know kind of that it's Beran the whole time who's done this. We just don't know why. The Mercantil instantly knows because he saw the object using his optic thing. But Bustamonte plays at purple rage. And now he's definitely not on the side of the Mercantils. And there's a bunch of political intrigue here that reminds me very much of "Dune", which is still to come. But I don't know, Frank Herbert and Vance were friends. And they actually dedicated a book to each other. Vance wrote "To Live Forever" in 1956. And Herbert did another one. I can't remember which one it was. But so the two of them made me did talk about some ideas together. And that is written about in some book, I think it's actually a biography of Herbert. 

The merchants are subaqueated right there by the sea. And also Aiello's body is swallowed up by the tide. Bustamonte and Palafox have brief conversation. And here Palafox muses, "the function of justice is to dissuade any who might wish to perform a like misdeed." Palafox knows what this is all about. And Beran and Aiello did not have love for one another. And the mother has been subaqueated for some mysterious and vague misdeed. So Palafox knows really this is all bullshit though. And he proposes that the child was a victim of hypnotic suggestion, and Bustamontes himself did this. 

Now he needs an ally. So while Palafox came for the former Panarch, he offers his services now. And Palafox suggests taking Beran off to Breakness. Consider it a whim, he says. And the Paonese have a superstition against killing at night. So they're not going to do anything right now, but lock up the kid in a tower somewhere.

The news of Aiello's death is already broadcast to the world, much to Bustamontes' dismay. And Palafox knew Bustamonte would try and keep it hidden. And so he spread the news himself. And they're already calling Beran the new Panarch. So yeah, he doesn't find any weird devices on the wizard. But as the guards try to drag him away, Palafox twitches and suddenly is radiating tense heat and cannot be touched. Wizardry indeed. "He will soon have need of me", Palafox pronounces, and allows himself to be marched away. 

I really love how mysterious this guy is like right from the start. And you never know quite how much he can be trusted. And in the end, you realize he can't at all. He's like willing to ally himself with people temporarily. And he pulls Beran's bacon out of the fire many, many times in the beginning. This is our main character. He's like, yeah, he's kind of fascinating and cold, and he's got plans and we don't know what they are. So we do see how powerful he is, though. And he has all sorts of subcutaneous implants and stuff to cause force needles to emerge and listen to radio broadcasts and stuff like that. 

"Do you want to live?" he asks the boy. And they escape through a window, basically go off into the night. The guards kind of get sheepishly. Looks like they dessert and everything. It's kind of funny. Next chapter describes the Paonese despite appearing uniform and culture. They actually have distinctions among the nations and contents, of course, and groups them set themselves apart, especially among their fellows. And there's a quote from a sociology work that that's made up to just put inside the text, because that's the kind of thing he does too. Bustamonte has got spies everywhere. And he hears the descent is brewing. 

Bustamonte contemplates being the servant of the young boy, grimly. But of course, Palafox has really taken the boy off Pao, as he has promised. So they fly into the night and the ship's waiting for them. And Beran is to be Palafox's ward on Breakness and attend the institute. Beran is already thinking that one day he'll return to power with all the knowledge she hopes to gain. And hopefully, technological modifications. And that's part of someone explained by Palafox. And in a very short time, they arrive at Breakness. 

So on Pao, the Mercantils cease all business with the Paonese and a Batmarsh invasion commences. The Paonese basically cannot resist at all. And Breakness now is where Beran resides. And it's quite bleak. And there's all kinds of different things that come up about the Breakness and their way of life and things like how it's inadvisable to speak of a wizard's age. 

Palafox says he has many sons. You can count them in the hundreds. And they all attend the institute. And he knows Bustamonte will be facing many troubles on Pao. And then Beran can return if he does what's required of him. So although things are rough for Bustamonte, the ruling Batmarsh lord has had enough. And basically comes down to the town where Bustamonte is staying. And they capture him. And they basically take him back to the capital. And they tell him, well, the people are like turtles. And they'll neither fight nor obey. And I want to leave. And so he puts Bustamonte in charge nominally, as long as he pays a large monetary tribute to Batmarsh.

Without much fanfare, the Brumbo clan packs up and leaves. And all I guess, all in all, Pao got off lucky from this particular invasion. But worse is arguably to come. So Breakness is very bleak and austere. And there's no social interaction at all. And everyone ignores Beran and he sees little of Palafox. Basically, Palafox has planned everything to make Beran bored and tractable. And it's time for him to start learning the language of Breakness.

Palafox requisitions a son, son number 33, Fanchiel, who of course looks just like him to tutor Beran and the man unenthusiastically complies. And we learned that Palafox is in fact head of the College of Comparative Culture. And there's also the College of Mathematics and the College of Human Anatomy. 

Beran hopes vaguely that we'll have some nice modifications. But while Fanchiel lists the impressive modifications that Palafox has, says the best Beran can hope for is probably modifications of a sexual nature, so they can rule over a "world of fecund girls". And Beran doesn't understand at all. 

So we're starting to see the obsessions of the Breakness people. And I think this is really interesting just because it's like this portrayed as this like stuffy academic world and everything's cold and bleak. And yet the people there who are like the only ones you see is men and they obviously only respect males are just so obsessed with being fertile and fecund and everything like that, that it's like this really toxic obsession that they have that drives everything about what they're doing. And I guess that's part of the imperialist angle, right? 

Fanchiel describes a language as being more than a means of communication, but an entire system of thought about learning the Breakness language. Fanchiel says, "but speaking our language, you will understand it. And if you can think as another man thinks, you cannot dislike him." 

Four years pass and Bustamonte rules on power with apparent benevolence, but he's increasingly paranoid and worried. He truculently pays his tribute to the Brumbo. And things come to a head when a young lordling shows up saying that due to some local Batmarsh conflict, he needs funds and such and casually demands a large sum. So Bustamonte decides to finally do something and disguising himself, he travels to Breakness asking for help. And he seems to think he's expected, but nobody awaits him. And nobody listens to his demands and Paonese. And he spends a bad night wandering through the Breakness bleakness. I just had to, yeah. And wind and sleet looking for shelter. 

Someone finally recognizes the name Palafox and the wizard is called in. He'll offer advice for a price. The only price of meaning on Breakness apparently, women, women who will be indentured to raise sons Breakness and then presumably leave when the contract is over. And Bustamonte asks curiously about Breakness's own daughters, but is ignored, almost like it's an impropriety. 

We learn a bit about Breakness psychology. The wizards are highly individualistic and believe in the eternal life through the siring of offspring. And they will happily work against one another for different aims as Palafox informs Bustamonte. The wizards aren't warriors, but Palafox names a number of possibilities as to how he could theoretically assist against the Batch clans. However, we know he's just playing with Bustamonte and has something of his own in mind. Palafox expresses doubt about the Paonese ability to fight at any cost, noting that 10,000 Brumbos overcame the population of 15 billion. They just took it lying down. 

"Training does not supply the desire to fight", he points out when Bustamonte pleads. "Then the desire must be supplied!" And this causes a wolfish grant because that's exactly what Palafox has had in mind, more or less. He says, "we must persuade the amenable Paonese to become fighters. How can we do this? Evidently, they must change their basic nature. They must discard passivity and easy adjustment to hardship. They must learn truculence and pride and competitiveness. Do you agree? This is no overnight process, you understand. A change of basic psychology is a formidable process." 

Indeed, it's a long game, and Bustamonte is suspicious of something in the other's manner. The project should take 20 years. Further, Palafox suggests they not only bring about fighting spirit, but industrial, so there'd be no need of buying goods from Mercantil. The main thing that's required is to change the language, change the tools available. Set aside a large swath of land for this purpose. He goes on to say, "Paonese is a passive, dispassionate language. It presents the world in two dimensions, without tension or contrast. People speaking Paonese theoretically ought to be docile, passive, without strong personality development. In fact, exactly as they are. The new language will be based on the contrast and comparison of strength. With a grammar simple and direct. To illustrate, consider the sentence, the farmer chops down a tree, literally rendered from the Paonese." 

Okay, so then he goes on to describe how this would be written in Paonese directly translated into English, which is something like, "farmer in state of exertion acts agency, tree in state of subjection to attack." In the new language, the sentence becomes, "the farmer overcomes the inertia acts. The acts breaks asunder the resistance of tree. Or perhaps the farmer vanquishes the tree using the weapon instrument of the acts." So I don't know, I thought that was really fun, just fun illustration of the concept that we were talking about earlier in the introduction. 

There's now some talk of the Breakness language. And after some years of hard training in that language and ways, Palafox deems Beran fit to fully join the Institute and thus leave his house. And he now lives in a dormitory cubicle at the Institute, where friendships are unlikely and conversation is mostly taken in the form of ideas and rhetoric with deference to logic and not emotion. None of the Breakness people die of age or corporeal illness in the subjects of age and death being taboo also. And the students do enjoy morbid conversation as a result of that. The Breakness men do grow eventually old and petulant despite the body modifications and rejuvenations. And this stage called emeritus brings about a bout of egocentric madness before they are quietly disappeared. Of course procreation is also a key topic among the Institute students. 

Prestige is not only intellectual but shown by the number of women in a man's dormitory and the number of successful sons. Lord Palafox is considered of high esteem in these regards. So now at 15, a Breakness youth is usually presented with a girl by his sire. And though Beran identifies with Palafox, he's too realistic to believe that such an honor would befall him. So this is why he hangs out at the spaceport and hopes to meet somebody interesting basically. 

He's surprised that the contingent of incoming women are Paonese. And from a girl he learns of the current situation on his erstwhile home. And he goes to confront Palafox who impartially explains the plan, attributing it almost entirely to Bustamonte, but conceding that he advises the ruler. Beran wants to protest, but just doesn't have the words. So they move on to talk about his education. And Beran says he's interested in human history and its apparent lack of patterns, which I thought was funny because it's like the opposite of Asimov and Campbell's cycle history, right? So I don't know if that was a little bit of a quiet swing at that, but it was just funny. 

The name of the girl Beran spoke to earlier is Gitan. And Palafox seems willing to introduce them. He says he must start learning about, "procreation theory". And he gets an air car and some counsel to beware mysticism and sentimentality. And with that, Palafox considers his duty to Beran discharged. And what a lovely relationship any of them would have with these Palafox wizards. 

But yeah, Gitan is devastated. And she tells Beran of how her family lost their ancient home when they refused to move and were killed. And Gitan doesn't seem that interested in Beran or his history. So Beran has decided his career now, dominate of linguistics. And he thinks that he and Gitan should have a connection. But Gitan just scoffs at this, calling the Paonese mudworms, and says she's not proud to be one of them. And she mocks Beran too for taking refuge, like all the others, on a different planet rather than a new continent. But what's the difference? She would kill Bustamonte, the tyrant, if she could. 

So mustering all his confidence, Beran goes to our man Palafox and says that he'd like to go back. And Palafox just outwits him and presents all the obstacles in his path, and finally says that if he hoped to hide from Bustamonte until he amassed resources, Palafox himself would just inform Bustamonte of his coming, since their interests currently coincide. And now the cards are on the table and Palafox says Beran was just a tool, a possible lever to use against Bustamonte.

Beran though is determined, especially because of Gitan, to overcome the passivity that she thinks the Paonese largely possess, and says he'll just go without Palafox's blessing. And Gitan of course doesn't know this whole time that she's been with the true Panarch. But I guess it doesn't matter because yeah, it's just another Breakness boy now. And it's not going to be easy to get off. 

After some months Gitan says she's pregnant, and Beran is very confident that he's the father, but the prenatal clinic people are skeptical for various reasons that they're sort of vague about, but we kind of get the idea. So they dispassionately say into the laboratory with you, and Gitan is very frightened. And justifiably so, because they're going to test for genetic discords and abnormalities, which they can then eliminate. But no, the results are good, and the father is Palafox, and she's horrified, and she runs out wildly, and in a really horrendous horrible scene, she throws herself down a long flight of stairs, and the child dies instantly, and Palafox is really disgusted. More importantly though, Gitan herself is seriously injured, and dies alone soon after. Beran doesn't even learn the truth, instead believes she's just gone over to Palafox. And yeah, I guess he could have done more to find out more about that. I think he does learn eventually, but we don't get too much grief on that. But I don't know, I guess a lot of this relationship is pretty much described as it's like very awkward and not that fulfilling. It's his first attempt at a relationship too, and I don't know how seriously either of them were really taking it. 

Nate:

She's a sex slave pretty much. So I mean, there's like a massive power dynamic imbalance. 

JM:

Yeah, but he had like he had these kind of, I don't know, like boyish feelings about it that it was more than that. And I think she was like, not under that kind of illusion, maybe that she wasn't even attracted to him. 

But years past, Palafox is now cold and angry towards Beran, for the incident with Gitan has caused him to lose prestige. And one day at the spaceport, Beran sees a group of men and they're apparently apprentice linguists from Pao, "today on Pao one must know five languages merely to ask for a glass of wine", a newcomer opines. And Beran has this wild spur of the moment idea. And he disguises himself, and he presents himself at the registration desk on her false name. Surprisingly, this goes all without a hitch. No, retina scans, DNA identification, nothing of the sort. It's the 50s. Sometimes you just go, okay, we can circumvent that stuff just like we could nowadays, right? Nowadays being 1958, of course, when maybe it was a lot easier to just disguise yourself and disappear. 

But yeah, so he's got a new passport. And so off he goes to language school the next day, taught by another one of Palafox sons. And he outlines what's basically the Sapir-Whorf hypothesis of language here. And the teacher seems to recognize Beran, who is now attempting to lead a sort of double life at the Institute. But he has no interest in bothering him. But it is a pretty intense year. And during this time, Beran learns the language of Valiant, the language of Technicant, and the Cogitant. Cogitant is easy, because it's very much like the language of Breakness. Only it seems less solipsistic. And although Beran doesn't have time for socializing or games, you know, some of the students make up a kind of bastard language of their own, in jest, out of all the languages they are aware of, including Mercantil and Batch. And they call this Pastiche. This was cool. I love how, even though, again, this is not one of the things that's fully explored, we never really get to see what Pastiche really sounds like or anything like that. But just the way he keeps coming back to this, I think is cool. 

On Pao, there's still a lot of upheaval, violence, and the misery of refugee camps. And hearing of the deprivations on his homeland, Beran really learns to hate for the first time. And at the end of linguistics training, hopefully he'll return. He's extremely nervous, and then who should address the graduating class but Lord Palafox himself. But he either doesn't notice or just doesn't care, even though Beran spends the whole time like a rabbit attempting to avoid the gaze of an eagle. He thinks he'll be subaqueated on his return immediately too, but he decides it doesn't matter and decides he'll stay on Pao forever and die there whenever. 

Nevertheless, he thinks, "I am changed. Palafox did his worst upon me. I love Pao, but I am no longer Paonese. I am tainted with the flavor of Breakness. I can never be truly and wholly a part of this world again, or of any other world. I am dispossessed, eclectic. I am Pastiche." 

At the capital, Beran joins the other linguists at an inn, and they're assigned two places. He goes to the Technicants and a school there. And the students are looked after, but only given the bare essentials. So they work to earn extra privileges and equipment and such by producing small, useful articles, hence the beginning of our new industry. And the dons at the new school are all young sons of Palafox, but the director is a Paonese appointed by Bustamonte, and Beran is his interpreter. Beran gets to live in a nice cottage, gets a decent salary, and a flashy new uniform. And one day, Beran visits the desolated homeland of Gitan, and he reflects on the millions who were shipped away, those who died there, and the women sent off to Breakness to pay Bustamonte's debt. And he wonders how he could re-assert his authority as Panarch and rectify the situation.

So he goes to the capital, and he seems to care little for risk at this point. He stays in and in across from the Grand Palace under the Paraio name, and goes to the library, and he finds the last record of himself as Medallion, son of Aiello Panasper, poisoned by alien assassins. Time continues to pass. The Technicants are becoming established and bringing about various industrial and manufacturing programs.

So Beran's routine is interrupted by an unexpected transfer to another continent, Nonamand, which is the bleak southernmost place. And the settlement there is described as very isolated and barren again. Everything about it reminds him of Breakness, including the Cogitants he's now expected to use and speak. And there's a simplified Breakness language, as well as the students reside a bunch of Bustamonte's under ministers, and Beran is supposed to be coordinator. And again, his old tutor, Finisterle, who's the son of Palafox, is there, but Beran still doesn't seem to understand that the Breakness just don't have any interest in giving him away. It's like he's beneath their notice, even if they recognize him, or maybe they just can't tell the Paonese apart. It's hard to say. 

But he meets Palafox himself, and though he is surprised to see him, they have a sort of talk in which Beran justifies his actions through individuation, and uses an argument Palafox could understand in his remote and aloof way, sympathized with too. And he does concede there may be some advantage to himself and Beran being here.

"Please continue to neglect me and your calculations. I have come to enjoy the sense of free action," says Beran, which elicits an atypical laugh from the other. But there's a hint that change is in the air, and Bustamonte is becoming headstrong and difficult. So once again, Beran has to move, and he's in a new place now with the soldiers, the Valiants. It's an ancient city on Pao, evacuated earlier, of two million inhabitants, and now place of training and preparation for the Valiants. So those ones place inordinate value on rank, pomp, and ceremony, and they conduct war games in which it already considered an honor to die and become a legend. And there seems to be a rumor that Beran Panasper is alive and well, waiting quietly, somewhere for a moment to strike the untrue ruler. This legend may already have some power for the Valiants. And he supposedly camped out on an island with a band of metallic warriors. 

The really dark side to this is that the secret police are about looking everywhere and looking for young men to execute as possible candidates with little discrimination. Sitting at an end, Beran almost encounters these police, conspicuous by their attire. But who should also show up once again, but the mastermind of this whole thing, Lord Palafox? He helps Beran to escape once again, acknowledging his desire to become Panarch. So they go back to Pon, temporary allies once again. And Palafox offers to give Beran a body modification. And after playing with him for a while, and getting to make possible choices, firmly asserts levitation would probably be the best gift. Queue Hawkwind's song now. 

Nate:

Yeah!

JM:

But there's a complex operation and it's carried out. And Beran's anesthetized and somehow frozen flesh. And hastily, Palafox instructs Beran in his new ability to levitate. Well, fly. And it's cool. However, Palafox's aims are still unknown, aside from the fact that soon Beran is to replace Bustamonte as Panarch. Beran's naturally not happy about being in the dark about what Palafox's goals are, and how he can best enact his own aims. Palafox will arrange to have Beran revealed at the ceremonial drones, which, the kind of mass group chanting, I guess, recounting epic tradition. His face and words will be carried across the world by TV. Palafox has even prepared a short speech for the other to say. But Beran wants no violence.

So the chant begins, and it's very solemn and long and lasts all day. At noon, after many subtle variations in which a hint of contempt for Bustamonte may perhaps be detected, there's a break, and that's when Beran appears in the sky above Bustamonte, demanding that he acknowledge him as Panarch. And someone uses some kind of energy lance against him. But it turns out that was just an image. 

Bustamonte forgets to turn his mic off, and a classic DJ mistake that I often made myself, when he tells the guards to summon back up and seal the area, and that the imposter must be killed. The police craft show up, and there's mass panic, and everyone eventually disperses. Beran feels guilty, but Palafox says, sternly, that he should not become infected with emotion. That a thousand deaths are not so much different from one that everyone dies. Bustamonte seems to know the trouble originates from Pon, so he puts a blockade around it and attacks. 

Palafox's team uses sonic weapons or something against the Mamarone warriors. And where are the Valiants? Well, Beran flies around and visits all the continents. And Bustamonte can do nothing, but randomly kill people, and cause atrocities. Beran is horrified and rails against Palafox, who calmly says, "it's time for your second modification." And it's one of those finger energy projector things. And he flies into Bustamonte's window one night and does the deed, grimly and quickly. 

There's no fanfare about their confrontation. No speeches. He flicks open the door and announces, so they gather Neutroloids, "I am Beran Panasper, Panarch of Pao!" So Beran, of course, wants to enact lots of changes, kill Palafox and Bustamonte's program, etc. But Palafox isn't worried at all, and adopts a laissez-faire attitude. Beran fixes the penal system and the corrupted tax system. 

Finally, who should show up but Buzbek the Batmarsh? I'd pretty much forgotten the bat, but they of course act like they own the place, and they have no clue what's been happening on Pao. Typical distant imperial overlords, I suppose. But they're also portrayed as being kind of like barbarians, I guess. Nate, you said that you misreminded you of some Romans and Germans, was it? 

Nate:

No, the Batmarsh, I guess, language looked a little bit more Turkic or even Hungarian to me, whereas everybody else seemed to be some amalgamation of like Romance languages. But I don't know what Vance specifically had in mind for the characters.

JM:

So Beran pays the tribute reluctantly, almost blasting the Brumbos with his power fingers. And suddenly there seems a need for the Valiants after all. And Palafox reminds him of the equally prepared traders and industrialists, and shows a completed spaceship, the first ever built on Pao. In time, Pao will have its independence, from Batmarsh, that are also no need for Mercantil. Maybe Bustamonte did something good after all.

But things go well on Pao. Society prospers, and the enclaves of the specialists also expand quietly. And after a year, Buzbek's ship returns, and this time they are greeted with some coldness Buzbek doesn't want them to trade for technical goods or build spaceships. That's outrageous.

When Beran protests, Buzbek slaps him haughtily in the face. And now it's serious. It's a "how dare you sir!!!" moment. And Beran orders to suddenly arrive Mamarone guards to subaqueate the retinue. And there's some empty threats, but ultimately Buzbek chooses peace over death. But once again, once he's away, he vows to return to Pao with an army, and seek his head. 

And yes, it only takes three months, and they come in force and land. And there seems to be a game played where the Paonese defenses appear insufficient to deal with the threat. But it's toying time, and the Batmarsh raise their battle platforms unaware that mechanical moles have tunneled underneath the affixed mines. They all explode, and there's a brief but vicious battle. And while all this happens, Pao has already visited Batmarsh and the Brumbo homeland. So they storm the place and take all the treasures, all the valuable loot, I guess, that the clans amassed. That is to the soul of the Brumbos is the loot that they have. 

So they make it back at home in time to display some of this loot when Buzbek's men try to storm the Grand Palace. And here we have a typical science fiction situation where, I guess you see it in some other things too, like the Game of Thrones TV show, where you're not really sure, based on the geography of things, if the timeline is quite possible. There's all this flitting back and forth between the planets, and no one party observing the other. It seems pretty outlandish, but well, they do it. 

The Valiant Myrmidons have the upper hand, and Buzbek surrenders in disgrace. And the Paonese generously give him back all his clan stuff. So the trade and Technicant groups flourish and the Cogitants and Valiants more slowly. Pastiche even gets around as a spoken language. And Beran reluctantly continues to support the program during a decade and a half of prosperity. And Palafox has a lonely castle built on a desolate crag. 

So Beran starts to investigate the concubine methods of the cogitants. And now there's less need for indentured servitude among women, but somehow they keep getting them cloistered in their dormitories. So Palafox himself is involved and protests quickly. And they basically do this thing where it's like, okay, every woman who actually wants to should appear for a contract. And everything else is kidnapping. So Beran starts to worry about Palafox and his vast amount of offspring, many of whom teach at the various institutes. What about the Valiants? Are they loyal? Beran thinks his initial idea of re-assimilating the various groups was the right one. 

So at the newly erected pavillion, obviously the contract business doesn't go very well for Palafox and he's very upset. And they have a confrontation with Beran and there's a challenge. And Palafox tries to kill him. Beran in self defense uses his projector energy against Palafox. And now basically, they're at basically completely at odds now as you knew it was inevitable. But Palafox seems to have left his home and only his son's there and he's an oddly sympathetic one, Finisterle, his old teacher. 

Palafox has gone to Breakness, his arms ruined, and Finisterle and apparently everyone on Breakness knows that Palafox has entered the emeritus stage when a Breakness wizard gets old and faint and even the modifications and repairs can't fix him. And it's time for him to retire. Finisterle said his mad ambition was to outbreed the Paonese with his own sons and descendants. Oh 15 billion of them. No Paonese, but only Palafoxians. 

Beran says he will demolish the Cogitant Institute the very next day. Even Finisterle's taken aback. And so first though, he visits the Marshall of the Valiants, a naked man named Esteban. And just, I know that's a random, are you listening thing? But yeah, that's the way it was presented. He just gotten out of a swim or something like that. And he was butt naked the entire time. He says he's going to blow up the Institute. And the Cogitants mostly settle in the capital and become Bohemian into Legencia. And they mostly speak Pastiche now. And Beran goes to disperse the Valiants and doesn't go well. The Marshall is very unhappy. And so basically they don't want to break up the central monopolies. So their inclination is to resist. But Beran doesn't want a coup. And he prevents any notion of this by marching straight into the camp with the full band of Mamarone. 

Beran seems to trust Finisterle. And the Breakness man indeed saves his life when the Valiants tried to rally. And there's a battle and many are killed. And the Neutraloids, more than hold their own, which makes me wonder why they weren't used more effectively in the first place. But there you go. They're all eventually killed, though. And of course, Beran almost anticipated this. He goes back to the capital, and Palafox, not in his dotes yet, but now undoubtedly emeritus. Palafox's men disable Beran and remove his modifications.

Palafox gloats that it is once again she who will save the troubled Pao. The Myrmidons are bent on victory and conquest. Palafox is utterly obsessed with fecundity. And the madness is almost hallucinatory for Beran. But something inside Palafox is broken and his finger beams won't fire. And his sons decide his enough is enough and stop obeying. And Beran wisely speaks to the in Pastiche, their own real language. And it's almost a battle of the languages now. Breakness, the language of "insulated intelligence", and Pastiche, the language of human service. Palafox is killed mostly by his own seed. 

The Valiants have arrived, though. And yeah, the Grand Marshal leads the Myrmidons, and they express their own megalomania, declaring that henceforth, the Grand Marshal of the Myrmidons shall be Panarch of Pao. And suddenly, though, the need of the Cogitants is clear. There are no interpreters. The Valiants only speak Valiants, and the Technicants only Technicant. So I guess no one or a few of the others speak Paonese now. A language still spoken by, well, that was spoken by nearly 15 billion people.

The Marshal actually agrees rather quickly. So everyone on Pao should learn Pastiche. The Marshal decides not to kill Beran so long as he remains obedient. Beran's exhausted, but feels odd that he has basically achieved a lot of his ambitions today. And obviously, there are steps to be taken to unify Pao, though maybe not in the way he had hoped. Finisterle and Beran drink some much-needed wine, and Finisterle is amused by the Valiants, knowing he could kill them at any moment. In 20 years, everyone will speak Pastiche, the language of service. And that's pretty much where the book ends. 

(music: robot chanting)

spoiler discussion

JM:

It's not really the most decisive of endings, because we don't know exactly what's going to happen next, but we kind of have it spilled out. It seems like there's an uneasy piece between the factions, because they realize, yeah, they kind of need each other now. Even though I guess it's an imported language, I still kind of like the idea of Pastiche being the new language spoken. Because it is one that they themselves have generated, not one that's been imposed upon them.

Gretchen:

I think that's what's interesting is Vance refers to it as the language of service, but it's also the language of resistance. Because even when they're learning it, and the Breakness professors at the Institute are the ones that are discouraging students from speaking this language. So it's like the very existence of this language is already sort of this act of rebellion against the authorities that have colonized Pao. 

JM:

Yeah, and the way they did it was very insidious with the manipulation and so on. Basically bringing all these people, educating them, which obviously many people in all walks of life would consider that a good thing, but it also is the classic technique of the colonial, right? It's like, well, we'll take you to our schools and we'll give you a really good proper education. And you'll come back and you'll have all the good knowledge from our place. And you could be reasonable with us, basically. 

Gretchen:

Yeah, I think what's really interesting because, as I mentioned before, the summary, of course, this novel has a lot to do with the Sapir-Whorf hypothesis. But I think what is really interesting is that the linguistic concepts around colonialism and thinking particularly about this aspect of it, where it's an interesting reversal where usually when we see this sort of reeducation under a colonizer, you know, I think of like with indigenous Americans or with Indians in an English school system, usually the idea is teaching, reeducating the native speakers to speak this colonizer language and to have this like central language. But here it's this disruption of like a uniform language so that they can like divide and conquer. And it's this unifying language of the Pastiche that ends up bringing them back together. 

JM:

Right. And there's like invention of Pastiche, even though it's not really gone into a whole lot, but it's made pretty clear that that's pretty much in the end will be the instrument of their independence and unification. Because it's funny because it's this, I don't know, kind of Creole that's created as a joke, almost. But in the end, it's like, hey, this is as good a language as any. And we have rules. We have rules and grammar. And we have all the terms we could ever possibly need. Right. And in 20 years, there won't be need for all these separate languages. And like, everybody will just speak the one. I don't know. I guess because I mean, again, I suppose they'll always be the ancient remnants that speak the original Paonese. That it seems like over time, they will probably be overcome, which might be unfortunate. Hopefully there'll be the study of Paonese, the school of Paonese studies, still to come in the future. 

But yeah, that angle is definitely worth pursuing. But again, the, the fun descriptions, I just wanted to read of Bustamonte early on, "bulging his eyes, protruding his lips, Bustamonte contrived to become a grotesque hybrid of ape and frog." And it's like, again, these really fun grotesque descriptions of characters. And I'm just rereading the "Rhialto the Marvellous", which is the last of the "Dying Earth" books that Vance wrote. It's all about the specifically about a lot of the wizard characters in one of the final eons, and a lot of them are very eccentric and weird, and just the way he describes that there's a lot of that kind of grotesquery and strangeness about the, the visual, but also psychological descriptions. It's fun.

My summary was pretty long, but there was a lot of things that I didn't bring up about the things that he's kind of come up with, describing the worlds, especially Pao and the different cultures and geographies and the different places that they go to and stuff like that. Even though there was actually less traveling in this, maybe that in some other Vance books, you still get a sense of a large place with a lot of different things going on and different climates and different ways of living and different people and so on. There's all kinds of little side conversations that add a lot to the, not just the atmosphere, but the context of the world and so on. I enjoy that aspect a lot. 

Not much on the footnotes here. There's a couple. 

Gretchen:

This is one of the Vance with footnotes and I, I love some good footnotes, so I was glad to see those. 

JM:

Yeah, there definitely goes heavier on that and some of the other ones. "The Demon Princes" famously has not only footnotes and end notes, but kind of like in "Dune", each chapter starts with a, like an excerpt from something that the people in that world would experience and know about. It could be a book, it could be a media program, it could be a poem, just really cool background detail that doesn't feel gratuitous at all.

Vance is space travel. Spaceships, they're really just like boats. He even calls them space boats. This is very, definitely not something that Vance is interested in going into very much.

Gretchen:

Yeah, he really did like boats, so. 

JM:

Yeah. So I definitely noticed in a lot of his worlds, and in this book especially too, identity is very changeable. Yeah, there's advanced technology, but there's, it seems like it's, maybe again, it's kind of interesting too because when I think of Blake's 7, I kind of think of the same thing where it seems like even though it's an advanced society that spans the galaxy and all that, people can just disappear without chase and like change their identity. That's kind of hard to imagine. I guess the modern context, the way technology is developing now, seems to be all about like surveillance and keeping track of people and making sure we know where everyone is and who they are and an interesting contrast, I think. 

Nate:

Yeah, smartphones will definitely record a lot of data about you, that's for sure. 

JM:

Yeah. Yeah. Just one of those things where, oh, you could say like maybe that's dated, but on the other hand, who knows what kind of galaxy spanning culture there will be. I mean, we're kind of assuming there'll be something like the internet, right? But how do we know that? There's even all this stuff coming out now about how much the internet is changing and will change over the next few decades. I don't know, it could become a lot more compartmentalized. Who knows, we may have a time again where somebody who's formerly registered in all the social ways and now in a country like the ones we live in who can just disappear and never be found again. I guess if you pay somebody the right amount of money, maybe you can still do that. 

But just really interesting too, because like Vance just does this a lot. Like "The Demon Princes" basically are five galactic criminals who organize things together sometimes, but are mostly at odds. The main character wants to kill them all because they destroyed his homeworld and his family and everything. So each book is him tracing down another of these master criminals. But nobody knows what they look like, even though they're galactically famous. It doesn't seem like any, there's any like clear indication of who they are. So they're basically detective stories about how the main character has to figure out who these people are and trace them somehow so we can do away with them. 

The books start out quite simple, but by the time we get to book four or five, they're quite complex and intricate. So it's definitely one of my favorite series of his. But again, we we see that a lot. The main character has to mask his identity all the time. Obviously, the five luminary figures who we never, they're interplanetarily known, but yet not known. 

Also can't help but think of of Blake's 7 again and how Servalan comes back during the last season, but apparently nobody is supposed to recognize her. And they're like, okay, we can explain that she brainwashed the entire population. You never saw the president never. 

I had a pretty good time with this, as you all can tell, I'm aware that it has a few faults and you know, there's a few things that I laugh at a little bit. Like again, you know, quickly, the space travel happens. And it's right under their nose, you know, they've moving from planet to planet and stuff like that. And yeah, like, I don't know, the sex slave angle is one that's difficult to talk about, I guess, but I think that it's well enough handled that it's not like, maybe I can see it bothering somebody, but it wasn't really like, it's just, it's something that happens. And something crappy that happened that certainly the main character is rather naive. But he knows that it's very much not great. And wants to do something about it. 

Nate:

Yeah, I don't know the solution that "Oh, it's okay if the sex slaves agree to be sex slaves." I don't know. It's again, it reminded me of the end of "Ringworld", where just like, yeah, I don't know. 

JM:

I actually didn't read that. I meant to mention that when you were talking about it. I haven't read that. 

Nate:

Okay. Well, yeah, the same kind of issues there. I mean, it is, I think I like this a little bit more than "Ringworld". "Ringworld" is one of those novels where, yeah, it's a really cool idea. It's like technological utopianism, not like societal utopianism, where he just spends like all this detail, like describing like how awesome this mega structure it is. And yeah, it is pretty awesome. But I don't know the plot is a little thin in place.

JM:

It was like over twice as long as this one, right?

Nate:

No, they're probably about the same amount of it's definitely a little bit longer, but it's not like substantially longer than this, I don't think. 

JM:

Yeah, it's certainly one I've considered reading. I did enjoy a few of his short stories. And I know that one did win the Hugo and such, and it's been on my radar, but

Nate:

Oh, yeah, it's massively, massively popular. It's probably one of the most popular science fiction novels of all time, still. 

JM:

Right. Yeah. 

Gretchen:

It has been one that I have been meaning to check out just because of its popularity and hearing about it. 

Nate:

Yeah, I mean, there's definitely positive elements of that. I think this one is again, a little bit more even if it is flawed. I mean, you do have to take an account that it was written in the 1950s.

Gretchen:

Yeah, I still feel like it does interrogate at least the toxic masculinity and this sexist reasoning behind this and kind of connecting that with the impulse of wanting to build empire and wanting to overtake a population, like there's this linking of those two impulses that I feel like a lot of other science fiction at this time probably wouldn't have have done that connection and they maybe wouldn't have done it in this way. So I kind of respect that even if again, it does have its flaws, I think that maybe the portrayal of the female characters that this is actually happening to may not be the best. I still think that the exploration of this topic is done in a way that I can kind of forgive it for those flaws. 

Nate:

Yeah, I mean, he does make an effort, which I guess is more than a lot of other 1950s science fiction authors, even if it does come out a little clumsy and maybe... 

JM:

It's certainly not gore or anything either. 

Gretchen:

It could have been done more delicately and maybe more in a less clumsy way. But I still think it is an interesting angle that I don't really see other works from this time covering. 

Nate:

Yeah, exactly. I mean, I guess when you compare it to other works from the 1950s, it does try to make some sort of effort even if it doesn't 100% read well in the modern day. It still presents a lot of interesting ideas, especially with regards to language and culture and how that could be used as a form of colonial resistance, even though again, not only the time scale of how to get from place to place, but the time scale as far as like linguistic evolution seems a little fast. But you know, those are just like minor nitpicky details. 

Gretchen:

Yeah. 

JM:

Yeah. I think I do want to get back to that briefly in that though, the that one scene Gitan is like, she throws herself down the stairs and the child dies and everything. I do think that's a really horrible scene. And like, this is the second time I read this. The first time, I think was like early 2009 or something like that. I remembered a little bit of this book. I remembered the basic concept, obviously, the different languages and everything. I remembered there was some political intrigue, but it wasn't like coming back to a familiar friend, you know, like it was still a little bit like it's been a long time since I read this. So I definitely need to refresh myself. But that scene is the one full scene that I vividly remembered. I remember thinking at the time, oh, that's horrible. And yeah, it's still, you know, this is still that way. So I mean, you know, I think it's obviously meant to be horrible. 

Nate:

Yeah, I mean, it's also the classic woman in the refrigerator trope, which I'm not the big fan of where the woman's purpose in the novel is basically just to die and make the main character feel sad. But it's kind of hard to see that she has too much more of a purpose other than the novel than that, especially considering like how she's really not in the novel for that long time. So I don't know. I mean, he is a good writer. He is a good prose stylist, just some other context surrounding those scenes. Again, again, it's a 1950s novel, and they probably weren't thinking about the tropes in terms of yeah...

Gretchen:

JM, you had mentioned that he does write other women characters and in his other works. I'd be curious to see what those are like and, you know, to see how that differs in sort of a different situation than this one, where I feel like because of that theme, it's just not handled in maybe the best way.

JM:

He does write quite a few things from there's the first Lyonesse book, "Suldrun's Garden", which is about a girl named Suldrun. And she's like, again, I'm reminding a lot of Gormenghast by that series and just that it's how she lives her life and stuff. And she's a point of view character for a lot of it. And unfortunately, her story is also very tragic in the end. And there's this one really fun story I read by him from a woman's point of view called "The Phantom Milkman". And it's set in a contemporary time. And that one is just a fun first person narration from this woman trying to get away from abusive relationship, experiencing some supernatural phenomenon. It's pretty fun and not tragic. But yeah, like, definitely the most vivid woman character I can remember him coming out with is Suldrun from "Suldrun's Garden." That's a very, very bleak story that trilogy does move on. And there's other important women characters throughout that trilogy. But that first book, it's a real tragedy. But he does it with a lot of pathos. And it's very like, it's more than just "Oh, she fell down the stairs and died", you know, like, it's very sad and moving. 

But yeah, he talks about all the mystery novels written by women. And I'm sure he's a big fan of all the classic British mysteries and stuff like that. And he likes writing. He's a couple of other stories that are from the female perspective. And so it's just something that you didn't want to get too deeply into with this book, I guess. 

So yeah, definitely the language angle is cool. And I'm glad that we started getting Vance on here. I'd like to do another at some point. But I don't know when that will be. We decide that we want to cover a series at some point, we have enough time for that, you know, something like "The Demon Princes." But that's probably a long way off. But I'm glad that you all at least enjoyed this. Yeah, it's again, an author that I really enjoy a lot. So I know I've gone on a lot tonight and babbled your ears off. And I know there are some fans on the internet of Vance. I feel like he's talked about maybe a little bit more than he was when I first discovered him. Maybe thanks to people really getting into this stuff and doing videos on YouTube and all that. And every now and then you come across something like somebody reviews a Vance book or something. Usually it's "Dying Earth". It's like, yeah, cool. I'm glad people are discovering this.

I found a lot of his books in used bookstores. So besides the Vance Integral Edition, which is this, I guess, I'm not sure how they're associated, but I'm not sure if Jack's son was involved in it at some point, but it's this company called Spatterlight Press that has basically reissued all of the complete Vance ouvre, basically. They have really nice editions. I don't know how many of them are still available. The original ones were like really, really slick hard covers and you could buy the whole set for like a vast amount of money. But now I think they do have some paperbacks out and you can get some audiobooks and stuff like that. So they've kind of become slightly opened up to the less elite collectors over time. And of course, some of his books are in the College Masterworks series and stuff like that. And I'm sure if you scour used bookstores, you'll still find a lot of Ace books and so on and different things. I know I have a small collection of old Vance paperbacks over here right now. So the stuff is out there. And there's "The Dying Earth Omnibus" is one of my most treasured ones for sure, because that's like includes all the dying earth stories. Nice, nice thick one. 

But yeah, we're going to discuss Samuel Delany next. 

Bibliography:

Vance, Jack - "This is Me, Jack Vance" (2009)