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This novel is dedicated "To Mike Berro and all the gang on the Jack Vance bbs"; and in a whole bunch of ways it could be a minor Jack Vance novel itself. Which is high praise; a minor Jack Vance novel is a very good thing.
It has all sorts of Vancian elements, including funny character names, a far-future Earth setting, a feeling of long and layered history, and the technique of making the future feel foreign by making it look in various ways like the past (somewhat stilted diction, elaborate quasi-Victorian machines and vehicles, and so on). It's funny in Vancian ways, and interesting in Vancian ways.
I won't go into any detail on the plot. The basic premise is that a wet-behind-the-ears detective type (a "scroot"; a member of the Bureau of Scrutiny or something like that) is sent off, teamed up with a recently-captured con man, to capture another con man who used to be the latter's partner. They go to interesting places and see interesting things, and what's actually going on turns out to be quite different than at first it seemed.
But really this novel, at least for me, isn't about plot; it's about setting and character and general sense of strangeness and wonder. The big wheeled ship driven by the wind across the blasted-flat ground of some ancient war, the semi-magical means by which one may (with training, and with risk) enter and explore the shared unconscious of humanity, the marvelous "brillion" formed by centuries of compression of the strange stuff that former civilizations left lying around, and all told with the sort of tongue maybe (or maybe not) half in cheek style that's so much like so many Vance stories.
Hughes does an amazing job of channeling here. Whether he decides to keep it up and give us more Vancian stuff (yay!), or strike off on his own and do something entirely else (also yay!), or decides to turn to llama-breeding (perhaps not quite as yay), I'm glad he did this one; it was fun.
This web page is licensed under a
Creative Commons License.