Ports of Call | |||||||||||||
Jack Vance | |||||||||||||
Tor Books, 300 pages | |||||||||||||
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A review by Greg L. Johnson
What it does have are the two qualities that Vance excels at;
story-telling and a grand sense of style. Ports of Call tells the story of
Myron Taney, a young man who feels trapped by the future his family has
laid out for him. Through a bit of conniving, he sets out with his aunt to
tour the interesting planets of the Gaen Reach. Soon after departure, Dame
Hester throws Myron off her ship, forcing him to find a new way to travel,
which he does by hiring on the Glicca, a merchant vessel also touring the
Gaen Reach. The adventures of the crew and passengers of the Glicca are the
concern of Ports of Call.
Readers of Jack Vance will recognize the Gaen Reach as the setting
for several earlier novels, including Maske: Thaery, and Ecce and Old
Earth. Ports of Call differs from some of Vance's earlier work in that Myron is
a fairly happy-go-lucky guy, especially when compared to obsessed
characters like Beran Panasper of The Languages of Pao, or Kerth Gersen of
the Demon Prince stories. What it shares with his other books is a vision
of the universe as a collection of planets occupied by strangely neurotic
and always amusing societies.
As the Glicca travels from planet to planet, the crew, also
neurotic and amusing, embark to meet the local inhabitants, always odd,
sometimes dangerous, all certain that their way of life is the best
conceivable. Much attention is paid to cuisine; few SF novels devote so
much time to the description of food. The effect is similar to that of joining a tour
group of affable oddballs. This is not high-action adventure or drama. It's
more of a low-key entertainment, the right kind of book for a lazy Summer
afternoon. It is only near the end that we learn enough of all the
characters to suspect they may be up to more than a casual voyage.
There is a kind of story that has been told throughout human
history. In it, the hero or heroine voyages to far-away lands full of
wonders, and peopled only by the story-teller's imagination. Jack Vance is a
master of this kind of story-telling, and the pleasure of Ports of Call is
how effortlessly he invents one exotic society after another.
Ports of Call will not be remembered as Jack Vance's greatest
novel. But it has enough of the qualities that make him a Grand Master to
make it worth reading, and will have fans looking forward to the
continuing story of Myron Taney and his journey on the Glicca.
Greg L. Johnson lives in Minneapolis, whose inhabitants are much too normal to be part of the Gaen Reach. |
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