2016 read #83: The Star King by Jack Vance.

The Star King by Jack Vance
147 pages
Published 1964
Read from October 27 to October 31
Rating: ★★★ out of 5

This is a flawed but fascinating novel that feels far longer, and far more immersive, than its page count would suggest. Its greatest strength is the richness of its worldbuilding, touring an array of vivid and memorable worlds, from the cosmopolitan panoply of the Rigelian Concourse to a murderer's secret torture den on the dusty wastes of a dead star. It anticipates the iconic worlds of Dune and often reminded me of later space opera of the post-Dune, post-Star Wars school -- books like Hyperion or Grass, in which the planets are explored in great detail and become, in effect, main characters. As with the Dune series, the sense of a lived-in universe with an expansive history is cultivated through the judicious (and thematic) use of in-universe epigram quotations at the start of each chapter. The effect is not quite so well done in The Star King -- the quotations go on for pages at a time, distracting from the central story when they prove more interesting than it, and derailing it when the central story attains momentum. One gets the sense that this book is representative of the genre itself, fossilized in a moment of transition between the rayguns-and-libertarianism of the Ace Doubles and the nascent Serious Experimental Literature of the New Wave. But the overall effect is intriguing, enriching the story and creating an impression of a vast universe I would love to visit again.

If the worldbuilding is reminiscent of Dune, Vance's methodical revenge-assassin presages the supermen of Zelazny's fiction, though without the latter's tendency toward immortality, and with more substantial flaws than Zelazny's gods would ever bother to maintain. Kirth Gerson's lifelong single-minded quest for vengeance has left him ignorant of a range of human experiences and social interactions, which would be a promising avenue to explore in a maturing genre. Alas, this is one area which shows vestigial traces of its '50s sci-fi ancestry: A sunny departmental secretary finds herself unaccountably attracted to our assassin over the video-phone, and immediately agrees to date him, just in time to get kidnapped and provide our hero with fresh motivation.

The Star King stumbles somewhat in its second half, getting mired in a not-all-that-interesting detective story as our hero endeavors to figure out which of three departmental heads at a Rigelian university is secretly the legendary criminal mastermind Malagate the Woe. I felt the "mystery" was obvious from the moment he meets the guy who turns out to be Malagate, so the intervening pages -- again, almost half the book -- were kind of a muddle for me, detracting from the promise of the first half. This, to strain my "transitional fossil" metaphor, could be seen as a relict of '50s-style pulp plotting, but in any case, I felt it was one of the weakest elements of the novel.