The Star King

When 'The Star King' waltzed away with the Hugo Award in 1963, John Holbrook Vance (aka Ellery Queen) was already a noted science fiction author. However, this first in the Demon Prince series was his first award. And for me and many others, their first exposure great science fiction. Vance has always been a world creator, and in this series he let his imagination run uncheck, creating world's, galactic topologies, entire cultures and countless creatures to go with them. This was a whole order more amazing than Flash Gordon and Superman, and in short order, I was a sci-fi junkie of the first order.Forty years later, this first tale of Kirth Gerson and his quest for revenge on the five slavers that destroyed his people is still just as readable. Gerson's quest has led him to Smade's Tavern out in The Beyond. Gerson witnesses a killing that leaves him with the coordinates of an unclaimed world that is so beautiful that Attel Malagate (The Woe) is determined to have it. In a series of adventures and accidents, Gerson manages to engineer a confrontation with Malagate's henchmen and finally the Star King himself. I don't want to give away much of the plot because it's charm is in the reading, but expect many twists and turns as threads unexpectedly come together.Gerson is a complex character. Formed by his grandfather's compulsive need for revenge, the hunter/killer has never questioned his reason for being. Now as the possibility for attaining one of his goals draws near, Gerson begins to realize that there may be life after vengeance. He is not completely comfortable with his own humanity, and this will increase in importance as the series develops. In any case, Gerson is not a pure hero. In some ways, he is as evil as those he hunts. Yet his strong, no nonsense approach to the hunt and a self-consistent set of ethics makes him an extremely attractive main characterVance isn't happy to provide the reader with just a compelling plot and set of good characters. He likes to fill in all the details of the universe in which his story unfolds. Each chapter has its set of quotes, short essays, planetology reports and other tidbits that gradually build up the context of the books until it has a life of its own. In these jaded times we would no doubt find some of his ideas a bit naïve, but most are still every bit as good a literary device as they were forty years ago. Vance is one of the few writers who does not bring out a sequel because it is a year later. Instead he waits until the story is ready, making a series that is consistently delightful. This is a piece of science fiction history as well as a pure pleasure to ingest. If you like hard science fiction so finely grained that it reads like fantasy 'The Star King' is something you will come to relish and reread.

Kirth Gersen (sometimes called Keith Gersen) is a formidable bounty hunter and occasional secret agent/enforcer for an interstellar law agency. Gersen, however, has his own personal agenda: to seek out and kill the 5 super-criminals (known as the 5 Demon Princes) responsible for the raid on his home planet that left everyone but him and his grandfather dead or enslaved.To that end, Gersen has been transformed by his grandfather into the ultimate instrument of vengeance. As his grandfather told him following the raid: "Many fine things your father had planned for you: learning and useful work; a life of satisfaction and peace. All this is gone now, do you understand? But the learning you shall have - the use of your hands and mind. And useful work: the elimination of evil men. What work is more useful than this? Finally, I cannot give you peace, but I promise you ample satisfaction, for I shall teach you to crave the blood of these men more than the flesh of a woman."True to his word, the old man forges his grandson into an unstoppable instrument of vengeance. In fact, Gersen often seems more a force a nature than a human being, more machine than man in his single-minded quest for revenge. His fighting prowess and physical abilities are without peer; likewise, his mind is sharp and focused. In Gersen, Vance has created a hero in the classic mold: strong, skilled, intrepid and resourceful. Yet, he must be all of this and more as he hunts down the first Demon Prince, a member of an alien race known as "the Star Kings". The setting for all of this is the "Gaean Reach", which encompasses those areas of interstellar space to which man has gone. Gersen's agenda, however, takes him far beyond this realm into an area where man has seldom, if ever set foot.

If, as was all too possible during the years when this series was mostly out of print, you happened to have started at the wrong end of Kirth Gersen's quest for vengeance on the Demon Princes, the 5 crime lords responsible for the raid on Mount Pleasant that left all but Kirth and his grandfather dead or enslaved, you might have wondered how his quest could have taken him so long, since in the later stages he had amassed impressive resources and connections in gathering information.Well, he didn't start out that way. (Obviously not, since he and his grandfather lost everything and everyone they loved in the raid.)This book doesn't begin with the raid itself, or even with Gersen's grandfather shaping him as a tool for revenge (although Gersen's brooding on his memories serves to provide us with both). This phase of his lifelong hunt begins at Smade's Planet, owned and operated as the private preserve of Smade himself. (Practically speaking, it's a worthless hunk of uninhabited real estate, except for the area around Smade's Tavern itself, that legendary neutral ground where troublemakers are thrown into the sea - an advantage to running one's own personal planet, in this universe where interstellar law is nonexistent, certainly as far as the Beyond is concerned.) Gersen, making a precarious living as a bounty hunter while pursuing his private quest, meets Teehalt, a professional explorer who talks too much when he gets drunk. Teehalt has just found a world so beautiful that he can't bear to turn it over to his employer - Attel Malagate. Since Gersen has only just peeled back the layers insulating the Demon Princes from the Mount Pleasant raid, destiny seems to have presented him with his first target...Malagate is unlike the other Demon Princes in several ways. The Woe is the only nonhuman among them, being a Star King - that ultra-competitive species who only leave their planet if they can pass for human, and have a chance to beat humans at their own game. He alone is neither flamboyant nor given to flights of ego - which, coupled with his alien mindset, don't ease Gersen's task of hunting him down. We see little of the terrible crimes Malagate has perpetrated, apart those affecting individuals such as Gersen himself.Gersen's quest takes place in a universe wherein humans have had starflight for centuries - how many isn't at first apparent, but the reader learns from a passing weights-and-measures quotation that the calendar referenced throughout the book treats 2000 AD as its zero-point. Most chapters begin with a quote from some work within this universe - a Cosmopolis interview with Smade about his planet, for example. We learn that there is no interstellar government - and in the Beyond, the only large organization is the Deweaseling Corps, who exist to lynch all 'weasels' - agents of the Interworld Police Coordination Company (IPCC). All in all, Vance does an excellent job of creating a densely textured civilization - so much so that if the

This is not a science fiction series as much as an anthropological and sociological textbook. Vance posits a very plausible and non-utopian future. This future is detailed and so real you could well remark, "I could get killed in this book!" This is such a refreshing change from the dreary infantilism of "Star Trek". This book is, above all things, PLAUSIBLE. "Conservatives" might be expected to love this book and "liberals" to hate it. Here we have no enlightened and merciful elite but, rather, a number of contending circles and forces. No such thing as "The Federation"; simply not enough force to make a universal imperium possible. What'll get you hung on one planet will get you applauded on another. Humans remain humans, aye, but social mechanisms evolve to meet needs.

I bought this book when a student at Cambridge (England) University in 1969.The story follows Kirth Gersen, effectively orphaned by a raid on his home planet by the five 'Demon Princes' and who is brought up by his grandfather, who instils into him a thirst for revenge upon them.The book is typical of Jack Vance's quirky style, combining dry humour, action and a number of typical sixties SF inventions, some of which have come almost frighteningly true.His prologues to each chapter pre-date the foot-notes so typical of Terry Pratchett's novels (he is quoted in 'The Unseen University Challenge' quiz-book on Pratchett,s Discworld as being one of Pratchett's inspirations) and include (from memory as I am writing this in Jordan and my copy is in England) the phrase "Someone else's ignorance is bliss" and an acknowledgement to 'Herb Frankbert'.The style has the typically Vance humanitarian touch and is reminiscent of the sadly under-rated Lloyd Biggle Jr. (e.g. 'Monument' and 'The Still Small Sound of Trumpets'.In this first novel of the series, Gersen is on the track of Attel Malagate - 'Malagate the Woe' - a 'star king' belonging to a race outwardly human, but from a totally different evolutionary background and planet. The story is fast-moving, but with some very clever twists and leaves - as it should do - an opening for the rest of the series.I would dearly like to obtain a new, or nearly new copy, together with the rest of the series, as my original has now almost totally collapsed. END