Review of Servants of the Wankh by Jack Vance

The adventures of our surly protagonist continue in this second book in the series.

He has acquired new friends and enemies, but his goal remains the same. Of course he wants to return to Earth with the knowledge he has gained – but does he stand to profit more by exploiting the natives of this backwater planet? Not when they intend to mangle and divert him at every turn. After the side-quest of rescuing the damsel in distress in the first book, he now focusses his efforts on escaping assassins, wild creatures, and navigating the complex network of socio-political factions of the planet Tschai, constantly eluding death with unshakeable luck and sheer charisma.

It’s hard to fault Vance’s sense of atmosphere, in a journey of wonder-inducing sights and jaw-dropping alien locales. He uses fantastical landscapes as a setting for scenes depicting the follies of human nature. Even though these are aliens and human cross-breeds, they act in very human ways, driven by avarice and fear, self-serving and self-sabotaging. The characters are always on the move, always accosting strangers with crazy demands and concocting far-fetched plans you know they will undoubtedly pull off somehow. A nonstop joyride for anyone who takes pleasure out of the brand of strange and dreamlike pulp science fiction of which the author was grandmaster.

Similar to the series Dying Earth, this book allows Vance’s character to play with his penchant for bargaining, conniving, and subverting expectations. The whole set up is rather convenient, how he always comes out ahead through his own ingenuity. You would think if you were actually stranded on an alien world something would actually catch you by surprise at some point.

His description of the Wankh writing system was truly inspiring. A series of rectangles, variously shaded and accented. Reading it is akin to listening to a piece of music and drawing ideas from the ideograms, which suggest rather than define meaning. One must accumulate impressions over the length of the whole piece rather than piece together segments of data. Music is comprehensible thanks to the harmony of its components. Similarly, writing is the sum of its parts, but this interplay of associations is one of the beautiful things about composition, how people will interpret a work through the lens of their experience or background. The method he elucidates would make journal writing incredibly easy, since writing paper would first be printed with a geometric array of rectangles which could be variously accented to tweak the base shape and thus impart meaning. It made me want to implement the writing system somehow.

A delightful and addictive series, like most of Vance’s work. He remains one of my favorite writers of all time.