Wyst: Alastor 1716 by Jack Vance

This is the third Alastor novel, from 1978. Like the first two - Trullion and Marune - it's set in the titular globular cluster, nearby but not part of the Gaean Reach of much of Vance's other SF novels. The three are entirely separate stories; the only real connecting link is the presence of the overlord of the Alastor Cluster, the Connatic, who has a somewhat larger presence in this novel than the first two.

Wyst: Alastor 1716 opens in the Connatic's palace on Lusz, where he is preparing to receive the four Whispers of Arrabus, elected leaders of the main polity of the world Wyst. Arrabus is entirely urbanized, several massive cities with billions of inhabitants - the rest of Wyst is thinly populated and doesn't seem to have much in the way of government above a village level.

A century ago, Arrabus had a revolution: the previous aristocratic rule was overthrown by a philosophy called Egalism, which seeks to make all people aggressively equal. Now, everyone lives in roughly identical apartments in giant blocks, works only a dozen hours a week at "drudge," eats the same heavily-processed food, and spends most of their time in recreation and affairs. By most accounts, Arrabins are happy, though smug about their system and punctilious about what they will or won't do - and, of course, they break some of the rules of Egalism routinely for themselves while insisting on them for others. As usual, Vance is interested in both what societies say about themselves and how they actually run on the ground - and the interesting, specific ways those two things diverge.

The Whispers are the four co-heads of what government Arrabus has, standing atop a loose system of elected block-level leaders in turn nominating sub-sets of themselves for groups covering larger and larger areas, all the way up the chain to the Whispers, each of whom represents one of Arrabus's four cities. They are coming to Lusz to invite the Connatic to attend the upcoming festival for the Centenary of Egalism, and also, the Connatic thinks, to ask for aid to adjust their system somewhat: they are overwhelmed by immigrants seeking an easy life, and their machinery has not been maintained as it should have been, which is going to come to a head quite soon if not corrected. Arrabins, of course, consider work and expertise and specialization "elitism," and that all is beneath them - so they do work grudgingly but not well, and don't want to be good at any of it.

As the Connatic turns his attention to Wyst - unspoken but implied is that most planets get very little of his time, since there are three thousand worlds of humans ostensibly under his rule - and discovers a series of increasingly-alarmed messages from his representative on Wyst, Cursor Bonamico, and Bonamico's staff. Apparently, an offworlder named Jantiff Ravesroke has gotten into some kind of trouble, which may have wider implications, and the Connatic's direct attention is desperately needed.

The book then shifts to Jantiff, who will be our main character. We get a brief sketch of his young life: he grew up in a family of skilled upper-middle-class workers in the city of Frayness on Zeck, Alastor 503, but wanted to become an artist. He won a contest for his art, which gave him the opportunity to travel to another world in the Cluster, and he chose Wyst for its famously magnificent light - and, maybe, also a bit because of its inhabitants' fabled freedoms and leisure.

He arrives in Arrabus, is assigned an apartment in the city of Uncibal, and quickly learns that Egalism is not as wonderful as he was led to believe when most of his goods are stolen while he's out of the apartment. (On the ground level, Egalism comes to mean that if anyone else has something you want but don't have, grabbing it for yourself is entirely moral.)

The rest of the novel is a slow burn from there: Jantiff lives among the locals, learning from them and influencing them in turn, and Vance quietly lays out some moments that start to explain some of the unexpected things that happened when the Connatic met with the Whispers in the first chapter and, also, those increasingly frantic messages from the Connatic's representatives on Wyst. Eventually, things get dangerous, and Jantiff goes on the run.

This is a 1978 space opera novel, so it does all end well for Jantiff. There was a major criminal conspiracy going on, which he sparked, in an odd way, and he's instrumental in both bringing it to the Conantic's attention and helping the Connatic to break that conspiracy. Wyst is slightly longer than the first two Alastor books, which gives Vance room to show Jantiff's day-to-day life in Uncibal, giving an interesting picture of the Egalistic life in both its positive and negative aspects.

Those two sides of Vance's writing - the adventure-plot and the anthropological - come together well in Wyst; a lot of his novels lean towards the former and the novellas to the latter, so it's a treat to see them so well integrated into a single whole here.