Who Goes There?

Jack Vance is one of the most influential 20th century SFF writers, and also not read nearly as much as you’d think. If the Goodreads numbers are to be believed. Vance debuted in 1945 but did not have his first major work published until 1950, with the novel (or collection of linked stories) The Dying Earth, one of the most important works of fantasy of all time. I do very much recommend The Dying Earth: it’s very short, and yet is packed with what would become Vance’s trademark baroque prose, his sarcastic sense of humor, and his seemingly limitless invention. Vance wrote the stories that make up The Dying Earth in the mid-’40s, but could not get them published for some time, and indeed these stories read like nothing else in American fantasy at the time—not even Vance’s SF from the same period. You may read, for instance, Big Planet and not suspect that the same guy wrote bejeweled far-future fantasy, if going off the prose style (or rather the lack of it) and nothing else. I had covered Big Planet last May, as a much-needed reread, but for this May I reached for one of Vance’s lesser known novels, one which is sort of a B-side to Big Planet.

Big Planet and Planet of the Damned were published mere months apart, and it’s likely they were also written in close succession. Unfortunately, as I had just implied, while Big Planet is the hit single, a real breakthrough for Vance as a world-builder, Planet of the Damned is the lower-effort B-side that smells of “second verse, same as the first.” But it’s not entirely lesser than its big (haha) brother, for there are a couple things Planet of the Damned at least tries to do better. Unfortunately this is not quite enough. Vance can either be pretty interesting or pretty dull (and honestly you have no way of knowing in advance), and this is a case of the latter.

Placing Coordinates

First published in the December 1952 issue of Space Stories, which is on the Archive. The publication of this novel is rather convoluted. The first book version is actually an abridgment, I assume so it could share one half of an Ace Double with Big Planet (that version of Big Planet was also shortened from the magazine version), and it was retitled Slaves of the Klau. We would eventually get a complete reprint of the magazine version, but it still kept the latter title. To make matters more confusing, Vance would revise it and retitle it again, this time as Gold and Iron, which is the version now in print. Have you lost track of it yet?

Enhancing Image

Humanity has come into contact with the Lekthwans, who have taken to sort of colonizing Earth benevolently, with the tradeoff being that humanity has gotten access to advanced Lekthwan technology. The Lekthwans themselves are basically humans but with golden skin, and by Earth standards are said to be conventionally attractive; it’s more their way of thinking that makes them alien, rather than their looks. The Lekthwans are sort of like proto-Vulcans, in that they see humans are lesser humanoids, given to irrationality and emotions and all those pesky things. At the very least the Lekthwans still have a sense of opulence, and they have their own conception of fun—which can’t be said for the other dominant humanoid race in the galaxy, the Klau. “The Klau are completely practical. Everything is planned for exact use, whether it makes people happy or not. There is no gaiety on the Klau worlds,” so a Lekthwan in the beginning tells us. Roy Barch is a grizzled tough guy working for Lekthwans on Earth who also happens to pine for his alien boss’s daughter, Komeitk Lelianr, who seems to take an interest in the human but who also makes it clear that said interest is not romantic. The opening section of the novel almost reads like a romance drama, and indeed bizarrely the novel could be considered a love story.

Barch and “Ellen” (the human name he gives Komeitk Lelianr) are the obligatory man-woman couple at the novel’s center, which on its own would’ve been pretty standard for early ’50s SF, but to Vance’s credit he does add a twist or two that doesn’t strictly have to do with the fact that Barch has a boner for a gold-skinned space babe. Vance is not known for his female characters, but while I’m on the side of listing positives, Ellen has to be one of Vance’s more clearly defined and assertive women, even if it shouldn’t come as a surprise how she’ll ultimately feel about Barch. Ellen is aloof and condescending in the manner typical of her race, but unlike a lot of ’50s SF women she isn’t given to screaming or shrewish rantings, nor is she a pulpy action heroine in the making; rather, uncharacteristically for the time, she comes off as the Eeyore to Barch’s Winnie the Pooh. (That’s a weird comparison, but I hope you get my meaning here.) She’s cold, even fatalistic—not because she’s cowardly but because she thinks that’s just the way the world works. When Barch takes Ellen on a “date” she more or less berates him for thinking of her as something to be gained, as opposed to someone he might share his life with. “You may feel passion, but you feel no love,” she says. And initially she might be right on that. Their relationship is one that evolves organically—or at least more so than most attempts at romance from this period of genre SF.

When the Klau raid Earth, killing most of the people around Our Heroes™ and taking the two as slaves to the labor planet Magarak, Ellen basically accepts it as her lot in life. The Klau hate the Lekthwans with a passion, but in their haste they seemed to confuse Ellen for a human, hence (probably) why she was taken prisoner. So Barch has to be the assertive one. Let’s talk about Roy Barch, or rather let’s not, since there isn’t much that can be said about him that doesn’t have to do with his relationship with Ellen or indeed his tenuous relationships with other aliens on Magarak. Barch is… more conventionally written, although that’s in the context of genre SF at the time; compared to some other Vance protagonists he’s rather unconventional. Vance’s heroes (or more often anti-heroes) tend to use their wit to get out of sticky situations, lacking the means to intimidate physically, whereas while Barch is by no means stupid, he’s certainly the brawn of the pair. He has suddenly found himself in a hostile environment, having escaped from a prison ship and taken refuge, along with Ellen, in a cave called Big Hole where other refugees hide out; and unlike someone like Cugel the Clever, Barch will have to twist some arms. And he has to deal with difference races with different cultural attitudes. “Thirteen different races, thirty-one different brains; thirteen basic mental patterns, thirty-one sub-varieties. An idea which aroused one would leave another indifferent.” Much of the novel will be concerned with this division.

I brought it up before, but unfortunately I’ll have to bring it up again since the two novels were written and published so close together, and are both planetary adventures; but Planet of the Damned sadly lacks what made Big Planet captivating, even given that novel’s flaws. In the slightly earlier novel we’re introduced to a planet with an eccentric gravitational pull, size, and geological makeup, and so we’re introduced to some eccentric locations, wildlife, and human societies. The locale is the point of the damn thing, never mind that the plot is just a string of events with a dwindling party of stock characters. Magarak is nowhere near as interesting as Big Planet, in part because Vance spends far less time describing it, which makes me wonder where much of the wordage for either novel goes. If Big Planet is maybe 60,000 words then Planet of the Damned is maybe 50,000 words or just under that. (I’m referring again to the magazine versions.) The shorter novel feels longer somehow. It took me a few days to get through Big Planet while I’d say it took me about a week to read Planet of the Damned, and I suspect it was more of a slog because there was less to chew on. Similarly to Big Planet, Planet of the Damned has a random-events plot in which there is not subplot to speak of and in which the end goal is pretty simple: get the hell back to Earth. I’ve noticed that Vance tends to structure his novels episodically, with a single overarching plot or a series of plots rather than the traditional plot-plus-subplots method.

Again, all the aliens are some flavor of humanoid, and there isn’t much in the way of encountering non-humanoid life. We get that Magarak is a shithole but we aren’t given much insight into its ecosystem or how humanoids have adapted to it. Now, you may recall there are side characters in Big Planet, some of whom are fairly memorable; the same can’t be said of the side characters in this novel. Vance implies depth and diversity with the ensemble, but we get next to no time with these characters as individuals. Clef presents himself as the closest the novel has to a flesh-and-blood antagonist, but he gets killed off rather early on. Consider that the motley crew of Big Hole at one point gets boiled down to a list:

There were the three Splangs, Tick, Chevrr, Chevrr’s small dark woman; there was Kerbol and his dour gray mate; Flatface and his two quarreling bald half-breeds; the Calbyssinians, whose sex still remained mysterious; Pedratz, taffy-colored and smelling like a bull; Sl, the double-goer; Lkandeli Szet, the musician; the six silent Modoks; five Byathids; Moses, the dwarf; the handsome youth Moranko; the cat-like Griffits, who had silently asserted rights to the first two of Clef’s women; there was [Roy Barch] and Komeitk Lelianr.

But to bring the positive vibes back, there is at least the hinting of diversity, which is something Vance can be quite good at. Vance himself was a conservative, a fact which can rear its head in his fiction at times, but he was open to depicting people and societies with values very different from his and with a minimum of judgment—or at least a minimum of sarcasm. Vance can be dryly funny, and while there are a few jokes I noticed here it’s still less humorous than more characteristic Vance material. Vance’s trademark ornate language is also absent here, as also happened with Big Planet, replaced with a much more unassuming and unadorned prose style that could be charitably called “standard ’50s SF prose.” Vance had already written The Dying Earth at this point, so it’d be inaccurate to call the blandness of style here the result of a young writer finding his voice; rather it seems like Vance is trying to pass off as a robust but disposable pulp writer.

There Be Spoilers Here

Big Planet takes place a few weeks if I remember right, whereas the plot of Planet of the Damned unravels over the course of months—and then years. The good news is that Barch and his comrades are able to construct a ship out of basically scrap metal that can get some of them off the planet, but the bad news is that at some point (I’m not sure when this would’ve happened) Barch and Ellen had sex and now she’s pregnant with his child. Apparently humans and Lekthwans are genetically similar enough that they can crossbreed; this is a bit of hand-waving, but at least it’s explained in-story as something that can happen. (At one point early on Ellen becomes a willing concubine for Clef, and it’s implied they also have sex, but due to Clef being Klau the child be his—so we’re told.) I wanna take a moment to applaud Vance for going just slightly past what would’ve been the norm with this, since it would’ve been uncommon for human characters to actually have sexual relations with aliens at this point in SF writing. There would’ve been a fair bit of titillation, but it was mostly a “look, but don’t touch” deal. This revelation pushes a wedge between Barch and Ellen and by the climax they have parted ways, and when Barch leaves the planet he doesn’t know where his not-quite-girlfriend is. Had the story ended at this point, with the slaves successfully rebelling against the Klau on Magarak, it would’ve been a perfectly bittersweet ending.

When Barch eventually returns to Earth he finds that he has become a sort of John Brown figure, a symbol of rebellion against the Klau; in that way he has become something of a celebrity. Unfortunately it’s also time now to reunite with Ellen, whom he has not seen in five years—and by extension his son, whom he has never seen before. “The child was a boy, and his skin was a pale clear gold. Komeitk Lelianr was quieter, thoughtful, though she looked a little older.” Barch and Ellen weren’t really a couple up to this point; there was always something in the way, either Ellen’s reluctance to treat Barch as an equal or simply bad circumstances. I would consider Planet of the Damned rather bland and depressingly average overall, but I do really like this ending. There’s this inversion where the main couple partake in what we think of as intimacy, but it’s only long after that initial encounter that they start to care enough about each other that they’re willing to take a big risk by raising their child together. It’s an interesting inversion of the traditional romance arc and it’s a good deal more mature than what most of the rest of the novel would lead you to believe. I would describe the ending as consciously optimistic, and that while he does phone it in for chunks of the novel, Vance does something kind of exceptional in the last handful of pages. I wonder if he had thought of the ending first and tried coming up with a serviceable plot that would get him from point A to point B.

A Step Farther Out

There’s some debate as to what counts as Vance’s first novel, since The Dying Earth is more of a short story collection, and The Five Gold Bands is more of a novella by modern standards (though for the sake of this site I’m counting it as a “complete novel”). Big Planet would then be Vance’s first “true” novel, in which case Planet of the Damned would be the sophomore slump. If you were a genre reader in the ’50s you could be reading much worse, but also there’s not much one can get from Planet of the Damned past a space adventure which even at the time must’ve seemed surface-level. It doesn’t show Vance as the unique voice that he was, nor does it build on the intricacies of Big Planet. A minor shame.

See you next time.