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A review by cjdeboix
The Star King by Jack Vance
3.0
A rambling, pulpy story, heavy with "Aren't I, the author, so very clever" kind of exposition and cardboard characters that make it feel way longer than it actually is. Vance's protagonist is so terribly uninteresting and lazily written--he feels a lot like an early version of "empty shell" characters like Bella from Twilight or Shadow from American Gods, that supposedly let the reader insert themselves into the protagonist. GRRM apparently recommends this series to fans, and while we might chalk that up to GRRM being an old man with old man tastes, I can see how a work like this influenced him--and I don't mean that flatteringly. Since GRRM praises Vance as some kind of GOAT, we can assume Vance has had major influence on GRRM and it would seem works like this is where GRRM got his license to include some of the more regressive elements of his own worldbuilding.
What's interesting to me here is when this was published in the evolution of SF lit: 1964. Vance had just won the Hugo for a short story the year before, so you'd think he was at his best. Yet in many ways this is an incredibly unambitious, even regressive work for that time and for an author with as much experience as Vance. Vance started publishing in 1950, and here he was some 14 years later, writing lazy, conventional pulp SF that feels a decade older than it is. Why I find this interesting is what was about to happen in SF lit: New Wave, which was a very conscious break from the older pulp style of writing of the 1950s toward broader and more literary styles and elements. Over the next few years, several emerging SF authors would start to deliberately steer the course of SF away from what Vance was doing in this novel, while Vance would go on to write 4 more installments of this series, which I will assume are just as pulpy and unambitious as this one. So I don't think it's much a mystery why readers today likely know New Wave names like Ellison, Le Guin, Herbert, Lem and Zelazny, but may not have heard of Vance without a champion like GRRM.
What's interesting to me here is when this was published in the evolution of SF lit: 1964. Vance had just won the Hugo for a short story the year before, so you'd think he was at his best. Yet in many ways this is an incredibly unambitious, even regressive work for that time and for an author with as much experience as Vance. Vance started publishing in 1950, and here he was some 14 years later, writing lazy, conventional pulp SF that feels a decade older than it is. Why I find this interesting is what was about to happen in SF lit: New Wave, which was a very conscious break from the older pulp style of writing of the 1950s toward broader and more literary styles and elements. Over the next few years, several emerging SF authors would start to deliberately steer the course of SF away from what Vance was doing in this novel, while Vance would go on to write 4 more installments of this series, which I will assume are just as pulpy and unambitious as this one. So I don't think it's much a mystery why readers today likely know New Wave names like Ellison, Le Guin, Herbert, Lem and Zelazny, but may not have heard of Vance without a champion like GRRM.