Demon Princes

The Demon Princes is a five-book series of science fiction novels by Jack Vance, which cumulatively relate the story of one Kirth Gersen as he exacts his revenge on five notorious criminals, collectively known as the Demon Princes, who carried his village off into slavery during his childhood. Each novel deals with his pursuit of one of the five Princes.

Related Topics:
Science fiction - Jack Vance

~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~

The titles, Gersen's antagonists, and a few details of their plots, in order of publication:

~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~

• The Star King (1964). The antagonist is Attel Malagate, an alien renegade masquerading as a human being. The bait Gersen uses to trap him is an undeveloped and fantastically beautiful planet whose location is known only to Gersen, and on which Malagate desires to become the father of a new race.
• The Killing Machine (1964). Kokkor Hekkus, a 'hormagaunt', has prolonged his life by the vivisection of human beings to obtain hormones and other substances from their living bodies. But eternal life can be boring, and so he has converted the lost planet Thamber into a 'stage' wherein he fulfills his fantasies by acting out various roles in scenarios of his own invention.
• The Palace of Love (1967). Viole Falushe, an impotent megalomaniac reputedly obsessed with sex (in fact, obsessed with the girl he loved in his teens, of whom he has produced several clones). This novel contains some of Vance's most compelling and unforgettable characters, such as the mad poet, Navarth, who has a central role.
• The Face (1979). Lens Larque, a supercriminal sadist and trickster. In the course of the novel the protagonist and the villain come to have certain experiences in common leading to one of the most humorous endings in all Vance's work.
• The Book of Dreams (1981). Howard Allen Treesong, a 'chaoticist', who embodies elements of all the foregoing.

Significantly or not, Vance portrays each of his human criminal 'princes' (the alien Attel Malagate is the exception) as a frustrated artist, each working out his fantasies in a different medium. Much of The Book of Dreams centres on Treesong's attempt to retrieve his own youthful work of fantastic fiction (itself called The Book of Dreams): the portions reproduced in the novel could have come from one of Vance's own magical novellas. To some extent Treesong is prefigured in the repulsive yet almost pitiable protagonist of Vance's thriller Bad Ronald (1973).

~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~

The first three books in the series appeared in 1964-67; there was a 12-year gap before the last two appeared in 1979 and 1981. The books were published as a two volume set, The Demon Princes, in 1997. Collectively they may be regarded as among Vance's most characteristic work.

~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~

The Demon Princes books bring to its fullest flower Vance?s practice of augmenting and counterpointing his narrative by means of footnotes and, especially, lengthy or bizarre epigraphs drawn from imaginary works of literature, history, philosophy, newspaper reports, television interviews, court transcripts and so on. Some of these bear closely upon the plot in hand: for example, the quotations from The Demon Princes by Caril Carphen (published by the Elucidarian Press, New Wexford, Aloysius, Vega), apparently the authoritative scholarly study of these five notorious individuals. Some have tangential significance, such as the excerpts from the works of the ?mad poet? Navarth. Others have no logical relevance: such as the learning processes undergone by the ?Avatar?s Apprentice?, Marmaduke, in Scroll from the Ninth Dimension (though these hint at providing a metaphorical/metaphysical comic correlative to Kirth Gersen?s progress). But they all serve to flesh out the mores, history and culture of the wide-flung future milieu in which Gersen pursues his quest. Perhaps Vance?s most memorable creation in this stratum of the books is the aristocratic philosopher Unspiek, Baron Bodissey, who lives only in the citations from his all-embracing six-volume magnum opus, Life. (The Baron and his work are referred to in other Vance novels unrelated to the Demon Princes sequence: in his elusive person Bodissey is so the speak the combined Socrates, Aquinas, Montaigne, Hume and Nietzsche of Vance?s universe). And Vance?s virtuosity on this plane may be illustrated by the epigraph to Chapter 10 of The Killing Machine, which consists of a citation from Volume IV of Life followed by extracts from six stylistically individuated (but uniformly negative) reviews of the Baron?s book.

Related Topics:
Navarth - Baron Bodissey - Socrates - Aquinas - Montaigne - Hume - Nietzsche

~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~