City of the Chasch

This first book of the Planet of Adventure tetrology is a wonderful opening. Here you find classic Vance--not only the otherworldly ecosystems and alien life forms, but also the epic struggles, the heroics, the humor, and the no holds barred grit and violence--all peppered with Jack Vance's masterly prose. Welcome to the Planet of Adventure! For those of us who've become hooked on Vance, anything by him would do. For those yet ignorant of his vast canon, here is as good a place to start as any. I think "City of the Chasch" will just whet your appetite. This book is also available in the omnibus version, "Planet of Adventure", which contains all four novels in the series.

Jack Vance is truly an American treasure. A prolific writer of science fiction, fantasy and mystery stories which are consistently readable and often remarkable. My own experience with Vance started with two of his most influential series, 'The Demon Princes' and 'Planet of Adventure,' of which this book is the first. In them, the author demonstrates a fine talent for the building of worlds and the peoples that inhabit them, never quite venturing into the improbable, and often making the unlikely more real than this world of our own.When the Explorator IV is dispatched to Carina 4269 to investigate a distress signal, Adam Reith is one of the scouts on the mission. Quiet and competent, he is still unprepared when the Explorator IV is destroyed by a missile from the planet's surface, and his scout ship plummets to the surface. Reith survives (barely) and is found by a dour nomadic people called the Kruthe, or Emblem Men. Reith quickly discovers that Tschai, as the world is called, is like no other.Four non-human races make up the rulers of Tschai, the Chasch, the Dirdir, the Wankh, and the Pnume (with their close relatives the Phung). In this complicated environment humans seem to have appeared by accident. On Tschai, humanity is an underclass, providing services to the other races, or wandering the planet like Reith's nomads. In this alien world Reith must find a way to return home and report his findings.This will be far from easy. In this volume, Reith must escape from the Kruthe and make his way to Dadiche, the city where his scout ship was taken. Ruled by the Blue Chasch and their human servants, Dadiche is inhospitable at best, and often deadly dangerous. Reith's adventures along the way are many, as we gradually learn that he is a man of ingenuity and principle, to the woe of those who work against him. He makes loyal friends and challenges social inequities with the same aplomb that he rescues fair maidens like the lovely Ylin Ylan, the flower of Cath.This slim volume is the beginning of a story that ably demonstrates Vance's fertile imagination and delightful narrative style. Never too wordy, his language is still descriptively rich and his sense of humor wry. Reith, like other Vance heroes, is quietly competent, soft spoken, and peculiarly romantic. The other characters are brought to life with the use of rapid descriptive brush strokes and dialog that often amuses as it reveals. Seek this series out and prepare for much enjoyment and delight.

I recommend to read the 4 books to get the whole picture.The style is efficientand fluent, the idea is innovative, the adventure is really captivating, the geo-politic of Tschaï is quiet complex to avoid a boring story. To have in your collection.

If you don't fall in love with SF reading Tschai, you neverwill. Tschai is magnificent. SIX stars!

The creation of this series of books must have been mind-boggling. An awesome book I keep reading over and over again.