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Most Helpful Customer Reviews
4 of 4 people found the following review helpful:
4.0 out of 5 stars
The Dirty Works of the Basilisk,
By
This review is from: Vandals of the Void (The Gregg Press Science Fiction Series) (Hardcover)
_Vandals of the Void_ (1953) by Jack Vance was originally an entry in the Winston science fiction line for young readers. It has been ressurected in an expensive edition by Gregg Press. Perhaps the first thing to be said about the book is that it is a novel about space pirates. This means that it is a piece of unabashed blood-and-thunder space opera. In an introduction, Vance toys with the idea that some young readers may actually live to see an age of space piracy. "I hope that none of you serve with the pirates," he says with a poker face. "If you do, I'm sure you'll regret it. The pay might not be so good in the Space Navy, but you'll live longer" (vii). But Vance knows perfectly well the real reason that young readers will be drawn to this book is not for moral edification. The real reason is that space pirates are fun. They are fun because they are so ruthless and violent. And so we eagerly follow young Dick Murdock from the Devil's Citadel on Venus to an interplanetary rocket in the Graveyard of Space to the caverns of the Moon to the sands of Mars as he pits his wits against the pirates of the mysterious Basilisk.
Ah, but who is the Basilisk? Not the talkative Mr. Kirdy, who quickly dies under Suspicious Circumstances. But what about the bluff, bulldoggish Captain Henshaw? Or could it be the enigmatic Mr. Sende with his knife-slash mouth, who turns up in all sorts of odd places? Or could it be Crazy Sam Baxter, the lunar prospector who claims that there are aliens living in the moon? Or is it one of the astronomers on the luna base? John Teranabe, the good-humored Japanese-- who doesn't always tell everything he knows? The dark-eyed and haughty Professor Frederick Dexter? Or Dick's father, Dr. Murdock? No, no. Surely not. And yet... There follow adventures with a killer telescope, an abandoned citadel, lunar caverns, various spaceships, and an elaborately ingenious code before the villain is finally revealed. Vance is one of the best stylists in science fiction. Here is a sample of his writing as Dick makes a discovery on Luna: A stratum of denseblack stone angled down across the porphyry. At the plane of intersection he noticed that the porphyry seemed stained, soft, almost like old putty. With the sharp end of his pick he pried at a chunk of the metamorphosed porphyry. It came loose, dropped down to the ledge, slow as a baloon under the weak lunar gravity. Dick started to turn back toward the raft, but first gave the chunk a rap for luck. It broke open like an egg. Colored fire, a flash of pure purple, caught Dick's eye. Slowly, in wonder and awe, he bent over, picked up the jewel, a perfect, many-sided crystal, twice as large as his thumb nail and glowing with purple as rich and intense as Tyrian dye. (65) _Vandals of the Void_ has movement, color, wit and style. It is one of the very best of the Winston juveniles, and it deserves further life as a paperback reprint.
2 of 2 people found the following review helpful:
3.0 out of 5 stars
Not bad for early 1950's young adult soap opera,
By avoraciousreader (Somewhere in the Space Time Continuum) - See all my reviews
This review is from: Vandals of the void, (A Science fiction novel) (Hardcover)
Vandals of the Void
Jack Vance, 1953 Not bad for early 1950's young adult soap opera 3* Let's be up front about it -- this book is almost painful to read at points. The real question is "why?", since Vance is certainly a good, even stylish, writer. First off, this is one of his earliest works, although I don't recall that some others of the same vintage (e.g. 1950's The Dying Earth, 1952's (in serial form) Big Planet, 1958's The Languages of Pao) are as crude; on the other hand it's been decades since I've read those. Most of his best known work was from the 1960s through the 80's, giving him a decade to hit his stride. Another factor is that "Vandals" is a definite departure from the norm for Vance -- as far as I can tell, he wrote no other juveniles, as they were called then, and few if any other hard science fiction works. Trying to write in the juvenile mode seems to make his language somewhat stilted, alternately gushing and talking down to the reader. And hard SF -- by which I mean dealing with the nitty gritty details of the space environment, near future space transportation, living in vacuum, orbital mechanics, etc. -- is definitely not his forte'. Although one has to make due allowance for the state of knowledge at the time (it was still a matter of debate whether the Moon's craters were caused by volcanoes or meteors, for instance), and a general lack of experience with and exposition of even projected space travel, the book has a few downright howlers, but more uneasy moments where you feel Vance just doesn't get it, as if he had poorly absorbed whatever popular accounts of space travel were around at the time, but didn't have the math and physics background to really "grok" them. (Much to my surprise, I learn from his Wikipedia bio that he did study mining engineering and physics, as well as journalism and English, at UC Berkeley in the 1930's and early 40's.) This ain't Heinlein's "The Rolling Stones," for instance, with its careful use of orbital mechanics, published a year earlier. On the other hand, few of those 50's juvies were, and this is about par for the course. So why even 3 *'s? And who might want to get one of the outrageously priced copies of this book floating around? In spite of the awkward writing and the rather loose "science," the plot is pretty good for a juvenile of the period and does keep one going. And primarily, for those of us old enough to have read it in the 50's or even 60's, when it was fresh and not hopelessly out of date, it can be a fun trip down memory lane. I especially enjoy my copy, a discard from my old town library with the original "library binding" which has the dust jacket design imprinted on a heavy duty cover, possibly the very copy I checked out (repeatedly I'm sure) so many years ago. Without this nostalgia, or at least a sense of its historical context, I might even give this one 2*'s. Someone with a hard-core fan, or scholarly, interest in Vance might be interested in Vandals to see the development of his style, but the everyday fan of Lyonesse, The Dying Earth or the Demon Princes series would likely be disappointed (especially at $50 or 100 and up!). I won't give any plot summary. That has been been well done by other, more enthusiastic, reviewers.
1 of 1 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
A Great Kid's Read,
This review is from: Vandals of the Void (The Gregg Press Science Fiction Series) (Hardcover)
I read Vandals of the Void back in 1963, when I was in 5th grade. Several kids in my class read it, and we all loved it. We talked about it for weeks, calling teachers we didn't like "Basilisks" and so on. Over the course of my school years I read it five more times. I do not remember doing this with any other book. About three years ago I thought about this book, and made a request for it at our local library. It took some weeks, but they finally located an obtainable copy from another library. I sat and read it one evening. Sure, as a much older adult, I recognize this book was written for young readers, but I still loved it. Along with other early sci-fi meant for young readers from the 1950s-1970s (by such authors as Lester DelRey, Ben Bova, Andre Norton, and of course Isaac Asimov), Vandals of the Void was an exciting, imaginative read that sparked yearnings for space travel and adventure. Yearnings today's young people seem to have lost.
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