Customer Reviews

Star King

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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 character

Vance 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.