The Last Castle (part two)

Most of the story takes place in and around Hagedorn, the titular Last Castle, both before and during the time that it is in fact the last of them. Dramatis personae include useless figurehead ruler Charle, conservative dipshit advisor Garr, forward-thinking and self-hating advisor Claghorn, and man of action Xanten. From the first sign of Mek rebellion, Claghorn is talking about how he's surprised that it took this long, and that by all rights this should have happened centuries ago, while the others glare at him in shocked outrage. The story then alternates between Claghorn and Garr yelling at each other in the castle, and Xanten going off on horrifyingly brutal exploratory missions to gather intel on the mek rebels and other outside parties.

Xanten's portrayal bothers me. For a number of reasons.

I'm not saying that the author thinks he's likeable, or wants the reader to find him likeable, per se. But he does want us to think that he's an impressive badass, a great white hunter ruling the wilds like a vicious and majestic wolf. In his initial scouting mission outside of the castle, he gets into two different armed battles, one with the mek rebels and one with a tribe of nomads who he stupidly antagonizes. In both cases, he maims and kills multiple armed attackers while taking only superficial injuries himself, and somehow pulls off daring escapes - with prisoners, no less - despite there being people who should be shooting at him in both cases. With the mek, you could make the argument that they're smaller and weaker than humans and using weapons not properly designed for them. With the nomads...well...you could go out on a limb and assume that the Altairan settlers are all genetically enhanced superhumans or the like, but a) there's nothing in the text itself to this effect, and b) even if there was it would be a hard sell.

Especially once you consider the lifestyle that the gentlemen live. Sure, they see themselves as warrior aristocrats and knights and so forth, but we're told very explicitly that the *actual fighting* they do is either formalized duel bullshit, or bravely commanding meks to their death from jeep-back. When would this guy have learned how to actually fight? Let alone outfight actual, serious warriors when outnumbered by them?

Some unpleasant context for this is that Vance has - unlike in most of his stories - made a point of telling us that the gentlemen speak a future version of English. Like this footnote where he points out exactly how much he's adapting their version of English to the modern version.

When it comes to far future scifi stories like this, I always kind of assume that the characters are speaking a fictional language and the text is just giving us an English approximation. Same assumption I'd make for, eg, a historical novel written in English but set in ancient China or someplace. The gentlemen being anglophone isn't at all important to the story, certainly not any moreso than the languages of the human colonists in The Dragon Masters or The Miracle Workers was. But for some reason, this time, the reader really needs to know it. The skin color of the gentlemen, while not explicit, is pretty well implied by details such as their hair and eye hues.

In short? This strikes me as a story written by someone very critical of the Great White Hunter archetype, but who nonetheless accepts most of its underlying premises.

Anyway, while Garr and Claghorn are yelling at each other, and Charle is standing around looking pretty, Xanten goes off to check out the spaceport where they keep their centuries-unused starships. Since the meks destroyed all their land vehicles, he is borne there by a sextet of "bird" aliens, carrying a ridiculous flight-throne on carefully balanced tethers.

The birds are one of the best parts of this story, by the way. They have no ability to filter their thoughts before turning them into speech, but the gentlemen value their aerial mobility too much to get rid of them, so they're in this awkward court-jester position of being uniquely able to speak truth to power. Watching them take the piss out of Xanten while he can do little but rage and fume and make insincere threats during his journey is pretty great.

He also has some very interesting interactions with the nomad tribe he runs into, before the interaction goes south (his own damned fault) and he escapes with the chief as a hostage (sighhhh...). Seeing the numbers and practical skills of the nomads, Xanten gives them the most unappealing job offer in human history:

Remember, the gentlemen have been slaughtering these people for stealing their slaves' crops for centuries lol.

Xanten just fumbles even harder in response to the expected pushback.

See why I'm mad that they weren't able to kill this prick?

Xanten makes it back to the castle, with a captive mek with severed radio-antennae secured in the vehicle he stole back. Interrogation of the captured mek reveals a surprising catalyst for their revolt. During the recent political kerfuffle over the rulership of Castle Hagedorn that resulted in useless pretty boy Charle being chosen as a compromise candidate, the forward-thinking candidate Claghorn had mused about trying to reduce the gentlemen's reliance on slavery. In particular, he thought to return the meks to their homeworld, where they could theoretically rejoin their paleolithic kin (not sure how he planned to do that, given that the current generations of them can't survive without the syrup-sacks, but okay lol). A mek overheard this, and broadcasted it to the others, who uniformly decided that life on Earth was better than life on their homeworld (or...death of starvation on their homeworld? Vance seems to have forgotten about the implications of the syrup-dependency, in this part), and so the rebellion must be done right now before the idea can be entertained any further.

I did appreciate the giant "fuck you" that Vance is giving to the American Colonization Society and their ilk. At the same time though...well, the decision to have the only other alternative to that be a war of extermination between the rebel slaves and everyone else on Earth is...a choice. One that makes me reluctant to give him too much credit.

That said, the interrogated mek has one of the best one-liners I've ever seen, in any story, ever. In part because it's actually just a single word:

Before this point, the story abounds with long, insufferable gentlemanly models of mek behavior that justify their enslavement. Real phrenology type shit. The mek just snidely dissipating all of that with one word is incredibly satisfying. Too bad Xanten ends up killing it right after this conversation.

Eventually, the nomads and the dissident expiationists both end up taking arms against the meks, once the latter prove intractably genocidal and indiscriminate. The last few surviving gentlemen, in the castle, refuse to do anything to compromise their appearance of mastery, comfort, and dignity until the meks have literally undermined their walls and are tunneling up through the basement. A small handful of them - led by Xanten - manage to pry themselves away from the castle and join the other humans in fighting a mobile war. Conservative asshole Garr even takes potshots at Xanten and the others as they flee, out of disgust for fellow gentlemen lowering themselves so far as to abandon their property and spite for those with the will to outlive this era of history when he himself doesn't.

And...then they lay siege to the meks inside of the castle they've just taken, until the mek eventually run out of syrup and are forced to surrender. The mek agree to repair the spaceships and let the humans return them to the homeworld. Which um. Apparently they trust the humans to actually pull through on? And...I don't know if the reader is supposed to believe the humans or not. I certainly don't believe them.

...

Here are a bunch of other things that I don't believe, speaking of which.

I don't believe that the meks would start their rebellion by abandoning the castles and then attacking them from outside. They started out *in the same buildings* as the gentlemen, with exclusive knowledge of how to use most of the technology, and the gentlemen being totally oblivious to the planned revolt. I believe that what actually happened is that the meks disabled all the comms and then killed the masters in their sleep, and the rest of this story therefore never happened. I cannot think of a reason why it wouldn't have gone this way.

I don't believe that the meks, with all their demonstrated ingenuity when it comes to tunneling and earthworks, would have been trapped inside of the castle. They tunneled into it in the first place. Why the hell couldn't they just tunnel back out?

I don't believe that the meks weren't able to produce any more of the syrup, once they'd seized the castle with the equipment and supplies inside. Let alone all of the other castles that they took before this one.

I do believe that the meks are intractably genocidal, to the point where killing them all or repatriating them without any compensation for their centuries of labor, are the only options. That's plausible. However, fuck the author for deciding to make it that way.

...

The intended theme of this story is an interesting one. It's summarized most explicitly in this conversation, between Xanten and an expiationist - formerly a fellow gentleman of the castle - named Philidor.

In the end, the only people who refused to prioritize survival above all else were Garr's faction among the gentlemen. Everyone else - the dissenting gentlemen, the nomads, the expiationists, and the meks themselves - ultimately compromised their ideologies when faced with death. For the holdout gentlemen, dignity and poise were more important than their own lives. For everyone else, the act of choosing life for themselves ended up also contributing to the survival of other parties as well.

But then...the story also never really establishes what it means by "survival." Survival of the self? Of the genetic lineage? Of the in-group? Whichever of those three you take it to mean, the story ends up tripping on itself.

If personal survival is supposed to be what trumps everything, then what of the people who lost their lives in the fighting? Not the gentlemen making their quixotic last stand in the castle, I mean the other humans (and some members of the other slave races) who fought smart and were willing to sacrifice. A lot of them still died in battle against the mek, when they could have fled and tried to figure out a way offworld.

If it's genetic survival, then once again, the "best" thing to do would have been to flee with your children and tried to relocate them offworld.

If it's ingroup survival, or cultural survival, then the gentlemen were no more or less survivalist than anyone else, because death and change would have *both* been the end of their ingroup and of their culture.

The story is grasping at some sophisticated themes, but I don't think it's grasping them very well. And the contrivedness of so much of the plot, not to mention the unrelenting unpleasantness of the protagonists, makes me less than eager to give it the benefit of the doubt.


Apparently, this is one of Vance's only stories to have won serious awards, scoring both a Hugo and a Nebula. This baffles me, because not only does it have little to offer that the other (older) stories of his I've read didn't, but it also trips over itself in ways that the others don't. And they have main characters who, despite being members of societies with morals and social norms very different to our own, don't make me want them to die every time they say or do literally anything.

Vance did win one other Hugo award in his career, for "The Dragon Masters." That one, I think, was much better deserved. I really don't understand why the Nebula went to this story instead of that one too.

Maybe they just really liked the bird aliens, idk.