Marune: Alastor 933 by Jack Vance

This is the second Alastor novel, of a three-book sequence. Some people might call it the middle book of a trilogy - and the three books are most commonly found today in a single omnibus volume.

But the three Alastor novels - he said, not having read the third one in several decades but pretty certain of his facts - are not a trilogy in any way. They all take place in the same globular cluster - thirty thousand stars, three thousand human-inhabited planets, five trillion people - near but not part of the Gaean Reach that's the background for a larger portion of Vance's mature SF output. Each novel takes place mostly on the specific planet of the title, and their connections are few and sparse.

Marune: Alastor 933 was published in paperback in 1975; it's set far enough in the future - and is by Jack Vance, who was less inclined to be grinding current-day axes than many SF writers - that it doesn't come across as particularly dated, though the relationships between the sexes are clearly 1975.

It opens in the Carfaunge spaceport, where an amnesiac young man is discovered and causes some consternation among various functionaries. He's eventually sent to a work camp on Gaswin Moor, to earn enough to pay for his passage to the Connatic's Hospital on Numenes, where his amnesia can be treated. (This may be a mid mid-centuryism to some readers, that balance between "this fellow clearly has a problem; we should send him to the place he can be helped" and "it's not my job to take care of people; let him work for his keep.")

Anyway, after a brief delay at Gaswin, where the young man gets the temporary name Pardero, he's forwarded to Numenes and treated by the staff there. His amnesia doesn't go away, but he has been gradually re-learning the ways of life, and seems to be back to his full mental capacity and intelligence. They do analyze him closely, to determine which of the three thousand worlds he may have come from, and declare that he is most likely of the Rhune people of the planet Marune, where a complex four-star system means the gradations of daylight and night have many names and meanings.

So our hero heads there, to Port Mar, the main port of this world, and learns that "his" people are a quirky aristocratic society, out in the wilderness, with strange taboos on eating in public and any expressions of affection. (The cover depicts their main official sexual interaction - during the rare times of full night, men dress up in masks and cloaks - and nothing else - and go to "visit" women, who generally have their rooms bolted tight, except perhaps against one man they have hinted they might be willing to entertain. In very Vancean fashion, it looks a lot like rape at first glance - and probably is, at least when things don't go as planned - but is much more complex and nuanced, in the ways every society has secretive things that are actually different from the ways they are officially.)

The amnesiac man learns he is Efram, by right the new Kaiark (roughly a count or duke) of Scharrode. His father [1] Jochaim has recently died, killed in a skirmish between two noble houses. (We learn this is pretty common: the Rhune people have endemic small-scale wars among these houses, leading to the deaths of a few fighters all the time.) Someone else is about to be installed in the seat rightfully his, but he goes to his family's seat - along with a local from Port Mar, a non-Rhune - and claims his rightful title.

Intrigues follow from there, as his stepmother and her two children - the son she'd planned to become Kaiark and a daughter who flirts with now-Efram for possibly-nefarious reasons - maneuver to take advantage of Efram's amnesia and possibly even to have him killed. This gets complicated for the reader due to the unique sexual prudery of the Rhune, as well as the invented titles Vance uses - they're basically dukes and their consorts and heirs and princesses, but called Kaiarks and Kraikes and Kangs and Lissolets.

Efram finds allies in his retainers, learns quickly to navigate this society, avoids at least one assassination attempt and - is there any doubt? - wins out in the end. It is a SF adventure novel from the 1970s, after all; that's how it has to end. Marune is a decent Vance novel from that era, maybe a little short for how much it tries to do and maybe having what turns out to be an extended prelude before Efram gets to Marune, but it's full of his mature language and ideas and distinctive world-building details.

[1] See the above explanation of the Rhune sexual customs, which means that no child can know their genetic father. Vance states that consequently, tracing ancestors tend to be matrilineal, but the aristocratic titles follow traditional male-line primogeniture nevertheless.