Customer Reviews

Planet of Adventure

5 star:		(42)
4 star:		(9)
3 star:		(3)
2 star:		(1)
1 star:		(0)

 

 

There is something strangely beautiful about the way Jack Vance writes dialogue-his characters all sound stately and formal, using language best described as courtly, deadpan explicit, absurdly erudite... oh heck! it's really hard to explain it, but you will notice it right away. This typical Vance style is not as pronounced as it is in his "Dying Earth" series, but it's there, adding an unlooked for source of humor and fun to his stories of shipwrecked spaceman, Adam Reith. Besides a pronounced writing style, Vance is a superb story teller, as anyone who has read his "Demon Princes" stories will attest. So, I am primarilly writing this for Vance fans who haven't yet read the Tschai series-you won't be disappointed, this is Jack Vance at his best. But if you've never read anything by the author, I suspect you will find this book entertaining and just a plain fun read. A perfect book to go to sleep with, to read from cover to cover, over and over again. I absolutely loved it, from the first time I read the series, to now.

I typed in "Jack Vance" figuring that only a few of his books would still be in print--and John Clute's review in the NY Review of SF had alerted me to the appearance of yet another Vance novel, Lurulu. I was surprised to see Planet of Adventure still around.

Wow, 35 reviews for this collection of 4 novels and the absolute worst review is 4 stars! And I bet every single reviewer is a guy, too! Women do not seem to care for Vance.

Anyway, it's as other reviewers say--this is can't-put-it-down adventure with an occasional touch of humor. Adam Reith, a Star-Trek style human, crash-lands on the planet Tschai and overcomes a staggeringly stacked deck to free himself from the planet. There's that word, "free," and while Vance's works all grapple with it, I think he explores the meaning of freedom most fully in this series.

The four alien races that rule their portions of the E-type planet have human slaves. And the slave mentality, encouraged at times by various myths promulgated by the alien masters, is what Adam encounters. No human has any clue that he is a member of something called the human race, and that humans are a powerful force in the universe. Each group of humans adapts to slavery in a different way, most contemptibly by some humans' surgically modifying themselves to be more like their masters, the Dirdir.

All of the books are readable, but The Dirdir is my fave. The aliens, code-of-honor guys (think Samurai, Trojans, Marines) are believably and even sympathetically developed. As always, Adam is able to figure out a way to defeat them. The last time I read this one I was struck by a number of points of comparison between Adam and the 9/11 terrorists, if one were to look at it from the POV of the dominent Dirdir culture. Food for thought.

In each of the groups of humans, Adam encounters one person who is persuaded by Adam's example to join forces with him. The ways in which they work to cast off their conceptual chains give each one real dimension of character (the emblem-bearer is the first and best-developed of these freedom-seekers).

I didn't think about any of this stuff the first time I read these novels. I was just swept away by the compelling action. Warning: Do NOT start one of these novels after dinner or you are going to be one sorry, sleep-deprived individual by the next day.

Planet of Adventure is a brilliant book. This is not a phrase I use lightly. It well and truley deserves this moniker. I have read thousands of science fiction and fantasy books but only a few scale the heights of Planet of Adventure. I consider it Jack Vances best work. Its one of those books that you will re-read several times in the course of ones life. Its that good. Five stars does not do it justice. It is probably one of the 20 best science fiction books ever written and definitely in the top 100.

It has that power to totally absorb you - the way only great books can.

It's hard for me to describe Planet of Adventure. The book is in many ways amateurish and below the standards I'm used to from Jack Vance; the editing was poor (there were numerous errors), the names were often cheesy (the "Dirdir" figure prominently), and the plot seemed almost formulaic. His main character, Adam Reith, is the same taciturn hero we saw in Night Lamp, The Demon Princes, or any of his other novels, who for some reason can never be defeated in single combat. These shortcomings nearly moved me to put it down for good after about 40 pages.

But despite this, in many ways the mixture of science fiction and fantasy in Planet of Adventure lets Vance shine brighter than in any other book of his which I have read. Planet of Adventure is peppered with ingenious situations and highly entertaining side plots. I found his alien cultures incredibly well conceived - the Emblem men, who pass their personalities intergenerationally via emblems they wear, the Khor, who each own "two souls which come and go with dawn and sunset," and the enigmatic Pnume, who lurk beneath the surface of Tschai.

Although Vance always finds some way to mark his supporting characters as unique, if only through their physical description, Vance's characters in Planet of Adventure are even more memorable than usual because they all have a great deal of emotional depth which is further enhanced through Vance's minimalist style. In most of his other books Vance uses sentimental understatement and sparse emotional language to project a sense of melancholy wistfulness onto the reader, but never does it come across more powerfully than in Planet of Adventure.

In short, while not perfect, Planet of Adventure is phenomenally imaginative, poignantly dramatic, and altogether a haunting novel.

While the Demon Princes may be a more "mature" work (although with Vance, you are dealing with an author who produces material that is orders of magnitude better than almost every other author out there) Planet of Adventure is, in my humble opinion, the finest pure sci-fi adventure I have ever read (knocking "The Stars My Destination off its perch" and the aforementioned "Demon Princes").

If, while reading Planet of Adventure, you don't fall in love once or twice, find yourself gripping the pages with horror or fascination every twenty or thirty minutes, or feverishly search for further sequels when you are finished.....there is something wrong with you.

As a youth I enjoyed the stories of H.P. Lovecraft and Clark Ashton Smith tremendously in their ability of transporting the reader to strange worlds with colorful, prosaic descriptions. A freind recently turned me on to Vance's Planet of Adventure series and once again, in the great traditional style, he succeeds. However my greatest delight was in discovering what a crack-up his side characters are. For instance, in most of Vance's books there are Innkeepers who take great elaborate pains to extract money from travellers in some of the most clever negotiations I've ever read. At times pages are devoted to these Monty Pythonesque transactions! Does Vance hold a beef on Innkeepers or what? Great Books!

Jack Vance is the master when it comes to the creation of vivid, baroque alien worlds, and in the Tschai series he gives us a grand tour. Reith is one of Vance's most likable protagonists, and (unlike some other still fine works) here Vance manages to keep the plot rolling and eventually gives us a satisfying ending.

The real treat, though, is the trip through Vance's exotic, mad, philosophical alien and human cultures, and the marvelous soundtrack of Vancean dialogue. Vance's imaginative power and polished prose is backed up genuine insight--for instance, the power structure on Tschai is complex enough to be plausible, and the equation is not strictly one of "scientific/military might = real power." Reith, in many ways the archetypal SF "man of action" is not without an introspective side, and admits "Logic doesn't always work," while remaining an eminently reasonable man.

It's very rare to get this much entertainment out of 500 pages. This is science fiction at its best, as all the 5 star reviews below attest.

This book contains 4 excellent short SF novels by the masterful Jack Vance. Vance's descriptions and distinctive, elegant dialog combine to take the reader to an alternate reality in ways that very few writers can match. These books are perhaps my favorites by Vance. The alien beings depicted here are strange and fascinating, and Adam Reith is a resourceful, inspiring hero.

If you're a fan of Jack Vance, this may be his best series. If not, this is an excellent introduction to this master of adventure SF and fantasy. In the first ten pages of the first book, Terran explorer Adam Reith's ship is destroyed by mysterious missiles, and he is stranded on the unknown planet Tschai. Tschai has been colonized by several mutually antagonistic alien races; they have imported primitive humans for use as servants; over millenia, several human subspecies have evolved, symbiotic to the various breeds of alien. Our hero gets to spend the next four volumes criss-crossing the planet from one cliff-hanging adventure to another in search of an intact spacecraft that he can buy, borrow, or steal. Gorgeous prose and intricate, fully realized alien cultures raise this above the level of a simple adventure series. Highly recommended

Adam Reith, crew-member of the Earth spaceship Explorator IV, finds himself marooned on a planet known as Tschai after hostile planetary forces destroy both his ship and the rest of the crew.

Reith virtually hits the ground running, and the pace never relents for an instant as he strives to find a way to recover the Explorator IV's life-boat and return to Earth in order to bear warning of Tschai's hostile alien inhabitants.

In addition to its human inhabitants, Tschai hosts four alien species: the Chasch, the Dirdir, the Wanhk and the Pnume. These races have the human populace virtually enslaved, and Reith finds it just as necessary to help his fellow humans find the strength and determination to throw off their servitude to these interlopers as to find his lost lifeboat.

This is a space-opera in the best and highest sense of the word. Once you have visited Tschai, "Planet of Adventure," you will find it very hard to forget! I cannot recommend this highly enough.