Product Details
Would you like to update product info or give feedback on images?
|
|
Share your thoughts with other customers:
|
||||||||||||||||||||||
|
Most Helpful Customer Reviews
5 of 5 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
Best of the good "Demon Princes" series,
By Michael Scudder (Amherst, Massachusetts) - See all my reviews
This review is from: The Killing Machine (The Demon Princes, Book 2) (Mass Market Paperback)
I count this (the second book of the 5 book Demon Princes series) as one of Jack Vance's best works and one of the all time best space operas. I think it is better than the first book of the series, "The Star King", for which he won the Hugo. The Introduction of the heroine is a wondrous conceit, the hero's adventures have a thoroughly satisfying taste, and there is stunning boldness to the plot. And, as is usual with Vance, you are treated to imaginative cultures and a rich linquistic taste. This read is a wonderful memory.
1 of 1 people found the following review helpful:
4.0 out of 5 stars
The Heroic Duty of Revenge,
By
This review is from: The Killing Machine (The Demon Princes, Book 2) (Mass Market Paperback)
_The Killing Machine_ (1964) is the second novel in Jack Vance's Demon Princes series of novels. [The first novel in the series is _The Star King_ (1963).] It has a bit of an unusual publishing history. Fred Pohl bought the novel for _If_ magazine, and it was duly announced in the Coming Next Month section of the magazine. But Berkley Books, the original book publishers, jumped the gun and published the novel before the January, 1964 issue of _If_. The magazine serial was dropped and replaced by Fred Pohl and Jack Williamson's _Starchild_. As Pohl regretfully explained, magazine policy was that of NO REPRINTS... even accidental ones.
Most of the chapters in _The Killing Machine_ are preceeded by excerpts of future histories, biographies, encyclopedia articles, reviews, newspaper interviews, guides, manuals, works of philosophy, and the like. These pieces are a throwback to the footnotes to stories that routinely appeared in science fiction magazines in the 1930s and 1940s. I am fully aware that there are readers who will find that these excerpts are tiresome and will quickly skip to the main action of the story. But you are cheating yourself if you do. These non-fact items do much to capture the splash and color of Vance's galactic setting, and there are sometimes foreshadowings of upcoming events in later novels. The Demon Prince novels are a series of revenge dramas. Five Demon Princes collaborated in a planetary massacre at Mount Pleasant. Among the few survivors are nine year old Kirth Gerson and his grandfather. Gerson's grandfather trains Gerson to become an instrument of revenge. His life will be devoted to tracking down and destroying the Demon Princes, one by one. At the opening of this adventure, a routine job interview with a police agent from the IPCC puts Gerson on the trail of a man who might be connected with Kokor Hekkus, aka The Killing Machine. His first attempt at a contact goes askew: "The aftermath was a period of depression, during which Gerson spent long mornings and afternoons on the Avente Esplanade, gazing out over the Thaumaturge Ocean" (19). But gradually, Gerson pulls himself together, looks for new connections, and moves closer and closer to his elusive enemy. His search takes him from the Concourse of Rigel, to Interchange (where kidnap victims are held for barter), to an encounter with an eccentric and amoral engineer, to an alliance with a beautiful woman, to an encounter with a ferocious war robot: The head was equipped with six scythe-like mandibles and a collar of long barbed prongs. The eye was a single faceted band; the ingestion oriface was a conical maw at the top of its head with a pair of jointed arms at either side. Behind were eighteen segments, each suspended from a pair of high-rising, jointed legs, these encased in a rugose yellow skin. At the far stern was a nubbin like a second head, equipped with another eye and barbed prongs. (63-64) _The Killing Machine_ is not Vance at his very best, but it is high-class, colorful space opera-- first rate entertainment.
Share your thoughts with other customers: Create your own review
|
|
Tags Customers Associate with This Product(What's this?)Click on a tag to find related items, discussions, and people.
|
|
This product's forum
Active discussions in related forums
Search Customer Discussions
|
Related forums
|
