The Star King by Jack Vance

Revenge is one of the oldest and most dependable plots, sure to bring the reader around quickly to the hero's side. It's a familiar lever in all sorts of more-or-less adventure fiction, whatever the setting or genre: just establish that your character is, for example, looking for the six-fingered man that killed his father, and the creator is golden.

Jack Vance built a five-book series out of revenge - I'm pretty sure I could, given time and thought, work up a substantially longer list of other Vance books also using a revenge theme, so I'm being descriptive rather than exclusive here - which he published between the mid-Sixties and 1981. The first book was 1964's The Star King, which I just re-read for the first time in a couple of decades.

The series is organized around the five targets of revenge. Some years ago, five Demon Princes - call them pirates, ganglords, something like that - combined forces to destroy the peaceful settlement of Mount Pleasant. Kirth Gersen, then a young child, was one of the few survivors, along with his grandfather, and was raised by that grandfather as a weapon to eventually seek out and destroy those five "Demon Princes." One of them is at the center of each of the book of the series: the first is Attel Malagate (the Woe).

The universe is medium-future, the human-settled Oikumene of much of this phase of Vance's career - about fifteen hundred years on, with hundreds or thousands of settled planets, sorted into the "Pale" of civilization, where planetary governments maintain order, and the wider "Beyond," where the only law is power. As typical for Vance, it's a big, complicated background: there are a few pan-system organizations, such as the Interworld Police Coordination Company (IPCC), but they have limited power and reach. Planets and their people can be very different from each other, and the levels of technology can also vary a lot.

Gersen is about thirty now; he's the equivalent of Batman at the beginning of his career - did all of the training, ready to start the actual mission. But the Demon Princes are secretive and hidden, creatures of the Beyond - more names to frighten children with than specific people with known routines and habits. They definitely exist, and still wreak havoc, but the Beyond is a vast area of space including hundreds of worlds and no law, so just finding even one of them is a trick.

But Gersen runs into the path of Malagate by accident, while stopping at a traveler's tavern that is the only building on Smade's Planet. A locator named Lugo Teehalt is also in the tavern, and strikes up a conversation with Gersen: Teehalt has learned his mission was funded by Malagate, and he's worried about what that will mean.

Malagate's goons arrive, and take Teehalt away to kill him. Because of their confusion, Gersen ends up with Teehalt's spacecraft instead of his (identical) own - but also has the recording filament of a paradisiacal planet that Teehalt discovered and that Malagate covets.

So Gersen sets out to use that lure to find Malagate and kill him - it won't be that simple, but when is a good revenge story ever simple? There are four more books in the series, so the reader can assume he succeeds.

This is prime-period Vance, so the joys of reading it are deep. He'd already started adding in-universe quotes to the beginnings of his chapters, to comment on the action or deepen the world-building, and there are some excellent examples here, such as this bit from Chapter 6, ostensibly from Men of the Oikume by Jan Holberk Vaenz LXII:

There are those who, like the author, ensconce themselves on a thunderous crag of omniscience, and with protestations of humility which are either unconvincing or totally absent, assume the obligation of appraisal, commendation, derogation or denunciation of their contemporaries. Still, by and large it is an easier job than digging a ditch.

Vance's dialogue is equally assured and amusing: wry, layered, ironic, thoughtful, and specific to the characters. He was easily the best and most distinctive prose stylist, as well as the most sophisticated in his outlook, of all the SF writers of his era, and his books still provide deep enjoyment.