Servants of the Wankh by Jack Vance

This book, in recent years, has tended to be published as The Wannek, and the Vance estate likes to pretend that we never pronounced the alien race in the title as it was spelled for almost fifty years. But the edition I have - the Tor '90s omnibus Planet of Adventure, still available and my recommendation as the best way to read this series - proudly lists the second included novel as Servants of the Wankh, as it had been since the novel was first published in 1969.

So that's the title I will use, and if there are any snickering '60s British schoolboys about, well, I guess good for them for keeping their essential youth all these years later.

The overall Tschai series comprises four novels, published quickly from 1968 to 1970, telling a continuous story about Earthman Adam Reith on that planet, where four alien races and the human sub-species they have enslaved and/or co-opted and/or bred over hundreds of generations have been fighting, mostly in a low-key, occasional way, for thousands of years. The first one was City of the Chasch, where Reith was the sole survivor of a Earth expedition to this alien system. From about the middle of that book, Reith has been trying to obtain a spaceship any way he can, so he can warn his people that this planet exists and has a previously-unknown population of these various kinds of humans. And, of course, also the four alien races, two of them spacefaring and all moderately hostile to each other and at least potentially hostile to Earth.

Servants of the Wankh is, if you think of the overall Tschai series as a cruise-ship company, the repositioning cruise. Chasch took place on one continent, but Reith and his compatriots - he's gathered a couple of allies from different human sub-species on this planet in the first book, plus a not-exactly-princess he rescued and was taking home - are off to a major human city on another continent, on the other side of the planet. Most of the book is travel, which is pleasant and works to a lot of Vance's strengths - random moments, interesting cultural tidbits, local color, descriptions of scenery and types of people - but may be unexpected for people reading a four-book series with "Adventure" prominently in the title.

The plan is to return that "princess" - Ylin-Ylan, the Flower of Cath - to her home city of Cath, on the coast of the Charchan continent, where her noble father will, Reith hopes, be gratified enough to help Reith find or build a starship. Cath was the source of a signal sent out into space about a hundred and fifty years ago, so this hope has some factual backing behind it. They first set out in an air-car, hoping to zip across a mountain range, cross a narrow northern strait to Charchan and then zip down the coast to Cath. But the air-car is old and in bad repair, so they have to divert south and take ship on a much longer and more complicated journey across the Draschade Ocean.

Ylin-Ylan's father had sent out various envoys to find his missing daughter - or, rather, publicized that he would grant a boon to whoever did so, causing a bunch of the usual young and plucky sons of the nobility to set off to adventure in quest of her. One of them, Dordolio, meets them in the port, and they take ship together. Dordolio's plans for reuniting Ylin-Ylan with her father do not entirely correspond with Reith's, unfortunately, and Ylin-Ylan, now that rescue is closer, starts to be concerned about everything that has happened to her and what her place will be in society once she returns.

Cath is one of those complex Vancean societies, full of social pitfalls and things that are never said and tight strictures on everything - the kind full of pressures that burst out, not all that uncommonly, with Cathites launching a violent spree called awaile. During the long sea voyage, Dordolio tries to provoke Reith into fighting, Ylin-Ylan sinks into a depression, and then it all blows up.

(There are other events and characters as well - this book is somewhat a travelogue - but that's the main plot, and what connects to the rest of the series.)

Reith and company - what's left of it - does arrive in Cath, and does get caught up in more scheming there. Reith gathers a crew of human workers, and has a plausible scheme to steal a Wankh spaceship, which fails for reasons outside his control and leaves his band in the hands of the Wankhmen. I suppose it's not a spoiler to say that the hero manages to get away from them in this, the second of four books: he does. And he ends with a better sense of more parts of Tschai society, the satisfaction of having disrupted the society of a second alien race, and his health undamaged - but he's not any closer to having a ship to get off this planet.

Good thing there are two novels left!

This is a short book, and very much a middle one. It also has, as I said, essentially a travelogue plot, without as much of the action that readers may want in a late-60s paperback SF book. On the other hand, it's deeply Vancean, deeply entertaining, and full of lovely moments and descriptions. If you like Vance, read this whole series, and hit this one in the middle. If you like Vance in travelogue mode - there may be people like that - this is a good short example of his strengths in that area, and it works outside the series context on that level.