Take a photo of a barcode or cover
A review by facsimiler
The Blue World by Jack Vance
5.0
This is one of Vance's more intriguing and interesting shorter novels.
On an unnamed water world, a population of a few thousand humans, descended from a group of convicts who escaped transportation to a penal colony by hijacking the transport ship (the Ship of Space) and taking it to the water world, ingeniously struggle to survive.
Their world has no known land, and they live upon a number of floats: large lily-like pads seemingly anchored to the sea-bed—although no-one has ever dived deep enough to verify the fact. The pads provide the population with most of the raw materials necessary for housing, tools, communications, heating, etc. (Fire seems to be common, but it's never made clear how they are able to ignite them.) Other resources, including food, are obtained from fishing and the growing of edible sponges. However, even the bodies of their dead must be harvested for tool-marking materials, with human bone the hardest material available to them. In particular, they have no metal except for a few oddments left by the firsts.
In a humorous running joke, society is split into a number of castes, named after the categories of criminal on the penal transport: hoodwinks, forgers, embezzlers, larcenists, etc. The firsts have left behind a number of memoria capturing their life stories and knowledge, but the full texts are confusing to their descendants due to a lack of context. Indeed, they do not even realize that their forebears were criminals. Much of the wisdom from the memoria are captured in a smaller set of widely taught analects.
What would be an already difficult challenge is made harder by the presence of the kragen—a large indigenous species of semi-intelligent aquatic life that periodically raid the floats' lagoons for food. One particular kragen, King Kragen has grown, metaphorically and physically, to special prominence. Its covenant with the humans, as defined by a cast known as the intercessors, is that it will protect the humans from other the other kragen in return for being able to exploit their food resources. Originally just slightly larger than the other kragen, it's special treatment has allowed it to grow many times bigger over the 150 years or more of its association with the humans. It is now a monster of terrifying power, capable of destroying entire floats when angered.
What Vance does excellently is to both explain the mechanism by which King Kragen reached his present dominance, and the divided human reactions to it.
On the one side, there is Sklar Hast—a hoodwinker (operating one of the chain of communication towers used to send messages between the floats) who has grown tired of seeing his food eaten by King Kragen, as well as the smaller kragen that King Kragen appears too slow to deal with. He doubts that the firsts would have escaped persecution by their oppressors (as they see the firsts' predicament) only to become the subjects of a fish.
On the other side are the intercessors including Sklar Hast's rival, Semm Voiderveg. Their role as intermediaries between the humans and King Kragen Vance equates to a kind of priesthood. They worship King Kragen and view any threats against him as almost blasphemous. Similarly, threats against the lesser kragen risks King Kragen's displeasure, since disposing of them is his sole right. The intercessors' stance is is partly out of fear for damage that an aggrieved King Kragen can wrought, but also partly because their elevated social status means that they do not have to work as hard as the other castes, and that their life of leisure would disappear if King Kragen was no more.
The plot is neither elaborate nor unpredictable, yet the detailed social structures, the ingenious use of materials, and the depths of the complex characters all make this a wonderful read.
Sklar Hast is a particularly ruthless protagonist, and one wonders whether a different personality would have helped resolve the population's problems in a more peaceful, unified manner. That he is such a difficult character just makes for a more interesting story.
All in all, a tale I can highly recommend.
On an unnamed water world, a population of a few thousand humans, descended from a group of convicts who escaped transportation to a penal colony by hijacking the transport ship (the Ship of Space) and taking it to the water world, ingeniously struggle to survive.
Their world has no known land, and they live upon a number of floats: large lily-like pads seemingly anchored to the sea-bed—although no-one has ever dived deep enough to verify the fact. The pads provide the population with most of the raw materials necessary for housing, tools, communications, heating, etc. (Fire seems to be common, but it's never made clear how they are able to ignite them.) Other resources, including food, are obtained from fishing and the growing of edible sponges. However, even the bodies of their dead must be harvested for tool-marking materials, with human bone the hardest material available to them. In particular, they have no metal except for a few oddments left by the firsts.
In a humorous running joke, society is split into a number of castes, named after the categories of criminal on the penal transport: hoodwinks, forgers, embezzlers, larcenists, etc. The firsts have left behind a number of memoria capturing their life stories and knowledge, but the full texts are confusing to their descendants due to a lack of context. Indeed, they do not even realize that their forebears were criminals. Much of the wisdom from the memoria are captured in a smaller set of widely taught analects.
What would be an already difficult challenge is made harder by the presence of the kragen—a large indigenous species of semi-intelligent aquatic life that periodically raid the floats' lagoons for food. One particular kragen, King Kragen has grown, metaphorically and physically, to special prominence. Its covenant with the humans, as defined by a cast known as the intercessors, is that it will protect the humans from other the other kragen in return for being able to exploit their food resources. Originally just slightly larger than the other kragen, it's special treatment has allowed it to grow many times bigger over the 150 years or more of its association with the humans. It is now a monster of terrifying power, capable of destroying entire floats when angered.
What Vance does excellently is to both explain the mechanism by which King Kragen reached his present dominance, and the divided human reactions to it.
On the one side, there is Sklar Hast—a hoodwinker (operating one of the chain of communication towers used to send messages between the floats) who has grown tired of seeing his food eaten by King Kragen, as well as the smaller kragen that King Kragen appears too slow to deal with. He doubts that the firsts would have escaped persecution by their oppressors (as they see the firsts' predicament) only to become the subjects of a fish.
On the other side are the intercessors including Sklar Hast's rival, Semm Voiderveg. Their role as intermediaries between the humans and King Kragen Vance equates to a kind of priesthood. They worship King Kragen and view any threats against him as almost blasphemous. Similarly, threats against the lesser kragen risks King Kragen's displeasure, since disposing of them is his sole right. The intercessors' stance is is partly out of fear for damage that an aggrieved King Kragen can wrought, but also partly because their elevated social status means that they do not have to work as hard as the other castes, and that their life of leisure would disappear if King Kragen was no more.
The plot is neither elaborate nor unpredictable, yet the detailed social structures, the ingenious use of materials, and the depths of the complex characters all make this a wonderful read.
Sklar Hast is a particularly ruthless protagonist, and one wonders whether a different personality would have helped resolve the population's problems in a more peaceful, unified manner. That he is such a difficult character just makes for a more interesting story.
All in all, a tale I can highly recommend.