Jack Vance 1950
———————English version
This is Jack Vance’s first real Science-Fiction novel, which he himself renamed The Rapparee* for VIE’s 2004 complete edition.
It is a true space opera in the tradition of the genre. It is a paradoxical work in which we can glimpse Vance’s future worlds and in which his style, described as « baroque », is already asserting itself, as well as his extremely fertile imagination, but with -in appearance- certain clumsinesses that in fact could be considered rather as a second degree manipulation of the stereotypes of the genre.
In 1950, Jack Vance was no longer a beginner: he had already published nearly ten short stories in various pulp magazines of the time, not to mention his collection of fantasy stories published the same year, The Dying Earth, which has now become cult. In fact, The Five Gold Bands follows the style of his first short story published in 1945: The World Thinker, reversing the roles of hero and heroine, and always in the continuity of the style of storytelling found in the « pulps » of that time. The first publication took place in the November 1950 issue of Startling Stories magazine, in which Vance used to publish. The novel was actually published in paperback in 1953 by Toby Press under another title: The Space Pirate.
The main character Paddy Blackthorn* (real name Patrick Delorcy Blackthorn from Skibbereen, County Cork) is a red-headed Irishman, chatty and rather rude with his macho or catholic expressions, but clever and competent in his job as an interplanetary bandit, he shares the spotlight with Fay Bursill, a self-assured Earth spy who is quite as clever and competent. The other characters, the villains are the five « Sons of Langtry », human aliens but transformed by their environment: the Badau, the Shauls, the Eagles, the Koton and the Loristani. They hold a monopoly on the ultra-propulsion invented by Langtry. The Earth is now only a miserable planet among others.
The novel tells the story of Paddy and Fay’s treasure quest, which will lead them on an interplanetary journey to the exotic and dangerous planets of the Sons of Langtry in search of the secret of ultra-propulsion. For Vance it is the ideal pretext for space tourism, the planets are all more eccentric than the others, as well as their inhabitants with their strange mutations.
Despite some dramatic situations (the horripilator…), the tone of the story remains « good-natured ». Even if the plot is quite linear, the environment is complex and well thought out, the suspense is constant and as ever with Vance, the descriptions have an astonishing strength in their mixture of conciseness and detail. The imagination of strange worlds and peoples will become a characteristic of Jack Vance, but in this novel it is a counterpart to the stereotype of the macho and sympathetic Irish hero and his love affair with the mischievous Earth female spy. Action and strange situations follow each other without respite: the result is pleasant to read, throughout the pages we feel a kind of prelude to the future masterpieces of the writer.
*Rapparee : Irish word without a proper equivalent that evokes an Irish irregular soldier or bandit: vagabond, plunderer or outlaw (specifically the English law…)
* The choice of this Irish name suggests John Jolbrook Vance’s interest in Irish/Celtic folklore, even though he had not yet visited that country and England, which he would do a few years later and in the 1960s with his family.
A few selected excerpts
1 – Alien races resulting from human mutation are a leitmotiv for Jack Vance:
He heard a swish, a drone, He looked up to see a shining space-boat settling almost at his head. It touched the surface, the dome swung back. The five Sons of Langtry stepped out. Silently in a formal line they advanced to the platform, the gaunt Eagle of Alpheratz A at one end, then the butter-colored Loristanese with the flickering features, the Shaul with the mottled cowl, the saucer-eyed Koton and last the stocky Badau with the short legs and hump-head.
Paddy watched them approaching with hands on hips and a curled lip. He shook his head. “And to think their grandsires were all decent Earthers such as me. See ’em now, like the menagerie in Kensington Gardens.” Chap.2
“And marvelous crops they grow here, Fay. The finest fruits and vegetables—all Earth imports, since the original growth was rank poison. And the plants have changed as much as the men when they came to be Badaus.” Chap.6
2- The mutant soldier-creatures, a Vancian invention that he will use in many of his novels:
From the rear of the boat came two others, giant Kudthus. By their purple skins Paddy knew them for the desexed nearly mindless creatures produced by surgery and forced feeding. Huge muscular creatures they were with tumescent red wattles like cocks.
They had been lobotomized to centralize their concentration and they moved like creatures in a hypnotic state. They took up posts at opposite ends of the asteroid, where they stood gigantic, quiet, blue puffball eyes fixed on Paddy. Chap.2
3-The attraction of language, its nuances and variations will inspire Vance in 1958 « the languages of Pao
“An Earther this year,” he observed cheerfully. “Occasionally they’re good linguists. They and the Shauls make the best, I believe. But there are few Shaul criminals. I wonder what this rascal’s done.”
Paddy cocked his head, squinted balefully. Then deciding that his duties had begun, he bowed to the Koton, repeated the words in the Koton tongue, did likewise for the Badau, the Eagle and the Shaul. In the final sentence however at the word “rascal” he substituted the Koton word zhaktum, equivalent to “reckless fellow”—the Badaic luad, meaning “well-appointed knight” in the Robin Hood tradition—the Pherasic a-kao-up, meaning “swift flyer”; the Shaul condosiir, derived from the old Tuscan condottiere. » Chap.2
4-A roundabout way to refine the description of a character:
WANTED—for interplanetary crime!
Paddy Blackthorn, Earther. Dangerous!
Height, six feet; weight, one hundred eighty pounds. Age, approximately thirty. Red-brown hair, hazel eyes, broken nose.
5-A neat camouflage technique:
Three hours later Paddy was a different man. His hair was black with Optichrome B. No longer was his nose broken. Instead it resembled the nose Paddy had worn during his youth. Even his fingers had been capped with new prints and his tongue had been slightly stitched, changing his voice and altering the pattern of the surface.
6-A striking example of describing alien worlds:
The Thieves’ Cluster was a group of eight suns in the Perseian Limbo which had picked up a jostling swarm of dark stars, planets, planetoids, asteroids, meteorites, and general debris. Here was end-haven for the lost men of all worlds. Among the hundred thousand satellites a man could dodge a low-boat like a rabbit ducking a dog in a mile of blackberry thicket….
There was no law in the Thieves’ Cluster except at Eleanor on the central planet Spade-Ace. Here a government of sorts existed—an order of men forced to cooperate by fear and despair, a society of the antisocial. The executive committee of the government was the Blue-nose Gang, after Blue-nose Pete, mayor of Eleanor. Chap.4
The Kotons walked with an odd loose-kneed gait like comedians mimicking secrecy. They had thick pale hair, growing straight up like candle flames. The soldier clans wore their hair shorn on a plane an inch above their heads and one man on Koto shaved his head—the Son of Langtry. Chap.12
Fumighast Ventrole was another vast chasm in the planet, nearly circular in cross-section and so deep that its bottom could not be distinguished through the haze. The sides glistened and glittered, rays of light flashing and darting in a thousand directions like glass spears—back and forth, reflecting in sprays of pure primitive color, flickering, dazzling as the boat sank on snoring old jets. Chap.10
7-A vintage flavour: the hero, in his spaceship, is looking for a place on an alien planet by consulting a paper directory!
Fay said, “When you’ve done talking like an idiot, look up Corescens in the almanac.” Chap.9
8-Small folk remarks with a hint of Irish Catholicism:
“Sacred heart! gasped Paddy. “How is this again?” Chap. 1
“It’s now time that the Holy Lord was reaching out to look after his own and I’ve been a good candle-burning Irishman my long life through.”Chap2
It gives a man the value of his existence, this life of the hare and the hound. And never a priest to help you into the blessed life to come.” Chap.9
9-heroe and women
“Of all the millions of tender-hearted women in the universe it’s you I went and picked out for a shipmate, one like the Hag of Muckish Mountains, who sold her man to the devil for a groat.”
“Now, now, my dear—”
“I’m not your dear! I’m an Earth Agent, worse luck, and if this weren’t the most important thing in my life I’d turn around and head for Earth and put you as far out of my sight and mind as I possibly could!” Chap.9
“Pish,” said Fay. “Confess to me if you want to.”
“Very well and why not? It’s the intent that swashes a man’s soul free of guilt. Now then, sister,” and Paddy studied the bulkhead, “there was a sin which occurred on the planet Maeve but it’s to be supposed I was sorely tempted.
“Ah, there’s a green garden there at Meran—a terrace where men sit under plane trees and drink the soft mouth-filling beer of the place. Then those soft-eyed girls come swinging by with their shoulders and their long brown legs bare.
“They wear pearls in their navels and emeralds in their ears and when they look those long slow looks there’s honey in a river between you and all the will for a decent Christian life flits away like gulls down the Bloody Foreland. Now then—”Chap.9
“Just one little kiss,” pleaded Paddy. “Just so that if the Shauls get us, I’ll die happy. Just a little kiss.”
“No—well, just one… oh, Paddy… All right now, get away from me or I’ll dose your food until you won’t know a woman from a barn owl.”
“Don’t you know that I’m three different men? I’m Paddy Blackthorn, the Rapparee, and I’m Patrick Blackthorn, the pride of St. Luke’s Seminary, who’ll talk you the Greek and the Romish and the Gaelic till your ear shivers for the joy of it, and I’m Patrick Delorcy Blackthorn of Skibbereen, the gentleman farmer and horse-raiser.”
“There’s also Paddy Blackthorn the great lover,” suggested Fay.
10 Typical Vancian Perspective:
The boat drifted through space at an unknown speed. Perhaps it hung motionless. There was no way of knowing. Chap.11
11- A mushy or humorous ending ?
“And then we’ll be married. We’ll buy up all of County Cork,” said Paddy with mounting enthusiasm. “We’ll build a house a mile long and as high as necessary and champagne will flow out of every spigot. We’ll raise the finest horses ever seen at Dublin Meet and the lords of the universe will tip their caps to us.”
“We’ll get fat, Paddy.” Chap.14
