I’ll be writing a lot of book reviews for Servusamanu over the next few weeks. After months of pushing reading back in order to get a few extra words written (Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire being a nopted divergence), I’ve got a whole stack of books to get through. With the my story finally all nice and drafted, I’m taking something of a break to finally get through.
The first on the stack is an old wilted book with yellowed pages and a creased spine. 1.75 is printed in the top corner in black letters. It looks like a small travel guide, twenty years old and dumped in an attic.
Happens to be one of the most exciting science fiction books I’ve ever read. Book, is maybe not the best classification. It’s four short stories each separate from each other all set in a distant future where society, technology, business, and exploration have long since challenged the present norms. The first story is a navy training expedition into space, a grueling year journey that is almost always lethal to a few crewmen. The second story is a 1984esque world of social classification and bureaucracy. The third is a world so crowded space and privacy are the ultimate signs of wealth. The last is about a rig, somewhat akin to an oil rig, that harvests resources from a peaceful ocean planet. It doesn’t stay peaceful for long, but the enemy is, well, not what one would expect.
Jack Vance is a well-known author and I probably should have delved into one of his books quite a bit sooner. He writes with the sparse and fast-paced style more common to the era of small books and detective paperbacks and it works very well for short stories. I must have gone through a hundred pages a minute, only stopping to digest each story before it whizzed completely by. I definitely expect to read more of his stuff. (Also George RR Martin recently helped with an anthology of his stuff.
Next book up is The Secret by Jack McDevitt.
