City of the Chasch by Jack Vance

I've been re-reading Jack Vance books the past year or two - first the Dying Earth series, then the Demon Princes. I am vaguely lazy in this endeavor, so I've been picking things available in convenient omnibus editions. And that meant next I found the Planet of Adventure compendium, and read the 1968 first book in that series, City of the Chasch.

This is from the same era as the first Demon Princes books, but substantially less ambitious. That assumes it makes sense to talk about ambition when all of the book were disposable mass-market paperbacks published by the same small group of houses, at basically the same length, to the same audience. The Tschai books are old-school planetary adventure - and I mean they were already old-school in 1968, when Vance wrote this one. It was a solid armature for a traditional story, which Vance tells with verve and energy but doesn't get into the depth he does in Demon Princes.

Adam Reith is a scout on the starship Explorator IV. This is probably the same universe as most of Vance's SF, but it feels fairly early in the timeline - maybe before the full Oikumene is settled - because the focus is on this ship being from Earth. Because Reith and his partner had just cast off in their space-boat to explore the planet Tschai, he was the sole survivor of the expedition when missiles from the planet destroyed the ship and sent the boat crash-landing on the planet.

He soon learns that Tschai is home to four alien races - the native Pnume and the successive invaders Chasch, Wankh, and Dirdir - who have been warring for tens of thousands of years. Each of the invaders also has a caste of humans - this is the 1960s, so Vance always calls them "men" - somewhat transformed through long-term breeding programs to be more like their alien masters. They have at least a minor capacity for space travel - the invaders obviously came from other planets, once upon a time - but the low-level war seems to have kept the planet mostly stagnant for long eras, a place where small wars or sudden devastating attacks could pop up at any moment and destroy entire cities.

The series is about how Adam Reith, the mightily-thewed Earthman, tackles each of the alien races in turn, defeats them with the power of his Terranness and wit and prowess, and gives the oppressed human peoples of Tschai a vision of how they could live free from alien shackles and be reunited with the main course of humanity.

Reith starts this book with a whole bunch of injuries from the crash-landing, and gets lucky by being discovered by a tribe of non-alien-affiliated tribesmen. He befriends the chief of the tribe, Traz, retrieves some of his survival gear from the crash, upends the social structure of this tribe, and runs away with Traz, hoping to find where the Chasch have taken his space-boat.

He learns that the Chasch are divided, like Gaul, into three: the civilized Old Chasch and Blue Chasch, who are also eternally at war with reach other, and were two separate waves of invaders back in the mists of prehistory, and the Green Chasch, nomadic bands of telepathic semi-barbarians who are purely a force of destruction.

Reith and Traz save the Dirdirman Anacho - one of the human subject to the Dirdir and resembling their masters - on the way, and then join a human caravan, where Reith discovers a beautiful woman, held captive by the Priestesses of the Female Mystery and to be taken to their templet for a presumably-horrible fate. The woman turns out to have a bewildering array of names, but we can call her Ylin-Ylan.

Reith saves Ylin-Ylan from her horrible fate - two or three times, as I recall; the Priestesses are pretty determined - and all four make it to Pera, a human settlement in a ruined old Chasch city. Nearby is the current Chasch city of Dadiche, where Reith's locator tells him the space-boat is. 

Reith tries to be sneaky and reconnoiter the space-boat; that does not go well. (He also, almost incidentally, overthrows the tyrannical human leaders of Pera, and unexpectedly is himself installed as the new leader, because he has to save Ylin-Ylan once again.) The Chasch attack Pera, but Reith, now in charge of a militia he organized, takes advantage of their contempt for humans to trick and defeat them, eventually leading an attack that murders pretty much every Chasch in Dadiche, and a large number of the Chaschmen (presumably including Chaschwomen and Chaschchildren).

And the book basically stops there: Reith has the scout-boat, but it's been gutted. He can't use it to get back to Earth; even the comms equipment is gone. The story, obviously, pick right back up in the second book - good thing for modern readers that all four were published quickly more than fifty years ago.

This is Vance in adventure-story mode; it doesn't have the languidness of his better work, or the in-universe quotes that open chapters in many of his later books. Vance is good at adventure stories, and is here, as ever, interested in quirky societies and the many ways humans can be turned into slightly different sub-groups. His writing is quick and energetic, and his language not as baroque as it gets in the books I would call his best. So it's a solid but not really typical Vance book - this series could serve as a good introduction to Vance for readers more used to straightforward adventure stories, in particular.