Demon Princes


Demon Princes is a series of five science fiction novels by Jack Vance, which cumulatively relate the story of one Kirth Gersen as he exacts his revenge on five notorious criminals, collectively known as the Demon Princes, who carried the people of his village off into slavery during his childhood. Each novel deals with his pursuit of one of the five Princes.

Book titles

The titles, Gersen's antagonists, and a few details of their plots, in order of publication:
Significantly or not, Vance portrays each of his human criminal 'princes' as a frustrated artist, each working out his fantasies in a different medium. Much of The Book of Dreams centres on Treesong's attempt to retrieve his own youthful work of fantastic fiction : the portions reproduced in the novel could have come from one of Vance's own magical novellas. To some extent Treesong is prefigured in the repulsive yet almost pitiable protagonist of Vance's thriller Bad Ronald.

Place in Vance's work

The first three books in the series appeared in 1964-67 and were published in both hard cover and mass-market paperback editions under the Berkley Medallion imprint. There was a 12-year gap before the last two appeared in 1979 and 1981 and published as individual volumes in limited editions of 700 copies each by Underwood-Miller in 1981. The collected books were published as a limited edition set, The Demon Princes, in 1997.
The Demon Princes books extensively use Vance's practice of augmenting and counterpointing his narrative by means of footnotes and, especially, lengthy or bizarre epigraphs drawn from imaginary works of literature, history, philosophy, newspaper reports, television interviews, court transcripts and so on.
Some of these bear closely upon the plot in hand: for example, the quotations from The Demon Princes by Caril Carphen, apparently the authoritative scholarly study of these five notorious individuals.
Some have tangential significance, such as the excerpts from the works of the ‘mad poet’ Navarth. Others have no logical relevance: such as the learning processes undergone by the ‘Avatar’s Apprentice’, Marmaduke, in Scroll from the Ninth Dimension. But they all serve to flesh out the mores, history and culture of the wide-flung future milieu in which Gersen pursues his quest.
Perhaps Vance's most memorable creation in this stratum of the books is the aristocratic philosopher Unspiek, Baron Bodissey, who lives only in the citations from his all-embracing six-volume magnum opus, Life. The Baron and his work are referred to in other Vance novels unrelated to the Demon Princes sequence: in his elusive person Bodissey is so to speak the combined Socrates, Aquinas, Montaigne, Hume and Nietzsche of Vance's universe.
And Vance's virtuosity on this plane may be illustrated by the epigraph to Chapter 10 of The Killing Machine, which consists of a citation from Volume IV of Life followed by extracts from six stylistically individuated reviews of the Baron's book.
One of the quasi-citations, on planetary ecology, is attributed to Herb Frankbert, a homage to Vance's friend Frank Herbert. Another friend is mentioned as scientist A.N. Der Poulson.

Setting

The Oikumene

The novels take place in the Oikumene, which is a loose confederation of the civilized planets of the galaxy. The Oikumene shares some conceptual features with the Gaean Reach, and may be a precursor to it. Earth, for example, exists in both universes, as do currencies based on unskilled labor. The majority of planets referred to in the Oikumene and Gaean Reach stories do not appear in both, however.

Language

There is a universal language; there are some variations of dialect, but in the main even the most widely travelled individual has no difficulty making himself understood on any of the worlds of the Oikumene. This is no doubt because interstellar travel is cheap and extremely fast, to the extent that the newspaper is still an effective means of dissemination, and hence there are few isolated communities likely to undergo linguistic drift.

Currency

The universal currency is the Standard Value Unit, a fiduciary issue backed by several of the Oikumene's largest banks, such as the Bank of Rigel. The SVU is also cheerfully accepted in the Beyond. The currency is generally presented in the form of notes, with coins being used for fractional units. Bank drafts are widely used for large amounts. The paper notes are validated by means of a widely available device known as a "fake-meter"; in The Killing Machine, Kirth Gersen intercepts a communication that allows him to deduce how the validation process works, and hence how to counterfeit currency.
Buying power of the SVU appears to be roughly on a par with the United States dollar or English pound sterling of the 1960s and 1970s; alcoholic beverages may cost less than one SVU, a luxury meal twenty or thirty SVU; minor officials may be effectively bribed for fifty SVU, more senior ones requiring hundreds or thousands according to the nature of the enterprise being suborned. In The Grey Prince on page 24 is a footnote defining the Standard Labour-value unit as the value of an hour of unskilled labour under standard conditions.

Worlds of the Oikumene

Many systems and planets comprise the Oikumene, including:
Law is enforced locally by each planet's own police, but is coordinated within the Oikumene by the Interworld Police Coordinating Company which also provides technical assistance if required. The IPCC sends agents to the Beyond where they are known as "weasels".

The Institute

This organisation is both educational and social, acting to control the development and dissemination of technology. It has many detractors, who operate on the assumption that but for Institute interference there would be many more technological innovations widely available and society would be Utopian. The Institute for its part holds that a certain amount of work and even suffering is necessary for the overall good of the human condition.
Students admitted to the Institute rise through a number of degrees or "phases", which are over one hundred in number. The more senior the Fellow, the more closely he aligns with the Institute's aims and ideals. Any number of Fellows may rise to degrees below the ninetieth, but there are only ever three Fellows in each rank 90 to 99. Of the higher phases up to 111, the 100th and 110th phase are always vacant, and the other phases are occupied by a single Fellow. The highest phase is 111, called the Triune for obvious reasons. The ten phases above 99 comprise the Dexad, the Institute's governing body. Promotion within the Dexad is strictly by seniority. When a vacancy in the Dexad occurs, usually by death, a 99 is selected to fill the vacancy. A new 99 is then selected from the 98s, and so on until 90. To achieve rank 89 is difficult; attaining rank 99 is much more difficult. A Fellow elected to Rank 101 has a good chance to become Triune, but a Fellow in Rank 99 who has made enemies among the Dexad may never be advanced..
Gersen rose to the eleventh degree with respectable ease, but then found that his own aims conflicted with Institute policy. However, his Institute background still admits him to the occasional company of other Fellows, who take no issue with his reluctance to commit himself further.
The typical senior Fellow is calm and serene to a fault even when his own interests are threatened, as may be seen by the conduct of Duschane Audmar in The Killing Machine.
The Institute of the Demon Princes novels very closely resembles the "Historical Institute" of Earth, in the Durdane trilogy. In that series, the Historical Institute is represented on the planet Durdane by Ifness, an Earthman. The internal politics of the Historical Institute in the Durdane novels are considerably more Byzantine, if not downright Machiavellian, than those of the Institute as described in the Demon Princes novels.

The Beyond

Outside the Oikumene is the Beyond. It includes many inhabited worlds, some of which have only a single settlement, others of which are civilized to a degree.
The Beyond is not subject to Oikumene law, but they use the SVU as currency. Many of the worlds in the Beyond have a deservedly criminal reputation. However, a fortune made there can be brought into the Oikumene with, as a rule, no questions asked; the IPCC has no jurisdiction in the Beyond, but often sends out clandestine operatives, known as "weasels", when necessary. Ironically, this has led to the emergence of the only widespread organisation of any note in the chaotic Beyond, the Deweaseling Corps, whose sole purpose is to detect and kill weasels wherever they find them.

Technology

Space travel

As stated, space travel is widely available; there are regular liner services for those who do not own their own spacecraft, and private spacecraft are extremely common and easy to use. Vance's version of FTL travel is the Jarnell intersplit, a subspace or hyperspace drive by another name. It does not muddy the waters with inconvenient relativistic effects; a traveller journeying from one end of the Oikumene to the other could synchronise watches with one who remained planet-bound meanwhile, and at the end of his journey the two watches would still be in agreement; there is no twin paradox to be considered.

Weaponry

A hand weapon known as the projac is widely used; this is a typical energy-beam weapon of the type common to science fiction. It is generally used to kill, melt or burn things, although it can also deliver a charge that only knocks down or shocks.
Sivij Suthiro at one point shows off a weapon, almost certainly illegal and possibly though not certainly of Sarkoy manufacture, that can cause a variety of unpleasant internal disorders, any of which might look like death by natural causes.
Gersen uses knives of various kinds, with all of which he shows a great facility, and is adept at unarmed hand-to-hand combat. He has an equal skill with the poisons of Sarkoy, including the dreaded cluthe, a poison which acts within seconds to paralyze and minutes to kill by means of muscle contractions. He also employs at one point a gauntlet wired to deliver electric shocks and a pistol which discharges "slivers of explosive glass". As a civilian, his ships are unarmed.
The armament of warships is not covered to any degree, but probably includes energy weapons similar to the projac but on a larger scale. The 'thribolt projector' is a projectile launcher which spits out an unguided missile driven by the same "Jarnell Intersplit" faster-than-light drive which propels spacecraft. The tip of the missile stays in the "grey zone" between normal and Jarnell space and, upon impacting the target, brings the entire projectile out into normal space for the 'hit'. A variant exists in which the warhead is replaced by nonlethal disks, to act as "Warning shots". Efforts to guide the weapon have proved futile.

Information technology

Computers are present but by no means universal, and even a manufacturing company that might be expected to have access to sophisticated technology instead keeps its records on paper and card index. However, some other instrumentation is very advanced; a space traveller can examine a planet's surface from orbit by "macroscope" and test the planet's biosphere for harmful micro-organisms before emerging from his ship. A kind of "black box" recorder known only as a "monitor" can record a spacecraft's voyages on a coded filament, enabling subsequent travellers to retrace the craft's wanderings. These are commonly used by "locators", spacefarers who search for habitable planets; such a filament is important in the plot of The Star King.