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The Blue World
by Jack Vance
(Gollancz SF Collector's Edition, £9.99, 190 pages, large format paperback,
first published 1966, this edition published 20 March 2003.)
The Blue World, originally published in 1966, has been re-issued
by Gollancz in their overpriced but nevertheless welcome SF collector's
edition series, joining Big Planet in the same. The boring flat
 yellow
cover of previous years has now been upgraded to a half-cover illustration,
rather sucessfully in this case. On the other hand, the quality of the
paper remains atrocious, and the typing seems lifted from an earlier
edition. We might feign indifference to these details, as many of the
heroes of Vance's novels would surely do, given that after all this
edition rescues a very enjoyable, long unavailable title which will
delight fans of Vance's stand-alone planetary romances. As usual with
this writer, much of the novel's charm rests on the premises, highly
ironic, and on the inventive colourful writing.
The Blue World is inhabited by a rigidly-stratified caste society composed
of refugees from an earlier shipwreck, but they have had to abandon
much of the knowledge and technology of the past in order to adapt with
remarkable resourcefulness to a harsh and peculiar environment. They
all live on 'floats', which are like giant plants floating together
over the seas (imagine enormous water-lilies), with the refugees from
space living upon one such group. These floats, described with Vance's
ingenuity and linguistic creativity, allow the inhabitants to obtain
food from the sea and to produce a variety of derivate products with
which they make their clothes, dwellings, boats, communication towers,
and everything else. What the different castes maintain of their hazy
past are the names by which they were professionally known before crashing
on the sea planet: bezzlers, incendiaries, hoodwinkers, swindlers, smugglers,
peculators, etc. Needless to say, the nature of their activities has
changed dramatically, as the original settlers, the prestigious 'Firsts',
had to create an economy of survival, so that the old names have acquired
entirely new meanings with, at most, a remote metaphorical relationship
with the old ones. By a wonderul irony, this stratified society of well-organized
outcasts has no clue about its criminal origins. However, Skalr Hast,
a promising hoodwinker in charge of one of the towers by which people
communicate from float to float through an ingenious code of signals,
lovingly described, is going to have to challenge all of this. His motivation
is simple and understandable: to end the predations of mankind's only
enemy in this world, a strange sea-creature called Kragen which the
society of the floats, lacking the technology to destroy, has long sought
to appease, with disastrous consequences. The largest, most dangerous
Kragen is precisely the one who preys on the human float economy. Known
as King Kragen, and he is about to become a God.
The book begins promisingly but, as sometimes happens with Vance's
novels, as the plot unfolds it seems to lose dramatic energy, and its
initial erotic tension. It is as if the writer got bored once he has
displayed his original idea, losing interest when forced to bring the
story to a logical conclusion. The plot develops with remarkable economy
(in some ways preferable to the endless meandering of many modern multi-volume
series) but there are no real surprises at the end, and very little
character development. This is a traditional male-centered, linear narrative,
only made bearable by the fact that the hero has flaws and makes mistakes.
However, the novel is enjoyable. To a large extent Vance makes up for
the limitations of the plot with his short, sarcastic social commentary.
The novel's real strength is Vance's quasi-sociological description
of the way social rules operate in an extreme situation so as to generate
a kind of order, albeit often at the expense of truth. In fact, one
of Vance's key themes is the way mythologies and religions can grow,
to be manipulated by selfish elites at the expense of honesty and fair
play. It is the hero's task to challenge the falsehoods of the system
by challenging the ills it has produced. In a classic Vancian mode,
the young woman he loves stands rather passively as judge of his performance,
herself a seeker of truth, but horrified by the cost of the hero's enterprise,
measured in the destruction lives, social order and cherished traditions.
But ultimately the decisive judgement is a collective one, and the narrative
tension concerns in large part a political conflict, which Vance describes
masterfully with his keen (if rather cynical) account of the way collective
psychology can, or can not, be manipulated. His philosophy is anti-utopian,
individualistic and culturally relativist, with enough wisdom to realise
that anarchy will not serve either. There is also a certain concern
for human suffering and for truth behind the mask of cynical detachment.
This is vintage Vance: light, but not entirely light, reading, and in
any case highly entertaining.
Review by Joan Montserrat.
Elsewhere in infinity plus:
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