The Last Castle
This review was commissioned by @krinsbez
It may just be a coincidence with these three stories, but Jack Vance is starting to strike me as a one trick pony.
Maybe not one trick, exactly. More like two or three tricks that he just keeps putting together in different arrangements. Still, the more times you've seen them, the less exciting they are, especially once you start to recognize some specific author tics.
Like, I opened this story and thought "I sure hope this isn't another planet of neo-medieval humans clinging to a few high-tech artifacts from the Before Times." And then I started reading, and it's another planet of neo-medieval humans clinging to a few high-tech artifacts from the Before Times. Oh, and would you believe that there's sapient species captured and bred into slave-castes by decadent masters? Or a central personality conflict between a small-minded conservative, and a socially conscious reformer who wants to make things more like the Before Times? There's even an anticlimactic ending where we're supposed to assume the details get hammered out offscreen!
I might come across as more negative about this story than it deserves. If this happened to have been the first Vance story I read, or the second Vance story I read, I wouldn't be as down on it. That said, I do think that this story is the weakest of the three even on its own merits, just not by as big a margin as you'd probably think from my tone.
So, our benighted planet spotted by a mere few dozen fortified neo-medievalist enclaves this time is...Earth! Thousands of years ago, Earth was all but abandoned in the chaos of an interstellar war, and it was resettled just a few centuries ago by humans from Altair (they actually refer to Altair as the human home system, despite knowing that they came originally from Sol). I saw "all but" abandoned because a handful of humans were left behind when the refugees fled, and have since eked out a struggling, low-tech existence. This...ends up barely factoring into the story at all, honestly. Frankly, I'm not sure why it's even set on a post-post-post-apocalyptic Earth rather than some other planet...
You know, I think I'll just introduce the players in this setting in bullet point form.
The "gentlemen." Altairan settlers who returned to Earth long after its abandonment, and promptly destroyed all their longranged comms and refused to let anyone else follow them to the long-lost homeworld. These were a bunch of rich romanticist assholes to begin with, and having essentially free reign of Earth for centuries has made them even worse. They've lost a lot of their technology, but it's not due to disaster or resource scarcity so much as just plain laziness and apathy. They live in these ridiculous tech-castles scattered around the still-habitable parts of Earth.
The "nomads." Descendents of humans who never left Earth, and have regressed to something along the lines of neolithic social and technological levels in the millennia since. It isn't explicitly stated, but it's strongly implied that Earth's biosphere got *majorly* fucked up in the war, thus resulting in the kind of regression we see. The nomads have since been kicked out of most of the best remaining lands by the gentlemen, who consider them vermin barely even worthy of the human label.
The slaves. Alien populations taken from a number of different planets by the proto-gentlemen and bred into compliant slave-races. Part of the reason the gentlemen have lost so much of their technical know-how is because they have enslaved aliens to do all the work that they used to automate. Even the technology that they do still have relies on enslaved alien technicians and engineers to maintain, as the gentlemen have come to see it as beneath themselves to ever pick up a tool. These enslaved aliens include small, mammalian bipeds dubbed "peasants," insectoid hive-minded "meks," winged "birds," and superficially humanlike "phanes." These aliens are all surgically implanted with nutrient "syrup" infusion sacks, and have their digestive systems crippled, in order to keep them dependent on their masters.
The Expiationists. An offshoot of the gentlemen, who have decided to stop being evil and insane. They live modest, rural, medium-to-low tech lives separate from both the gentlemen and the nomads. The gentlemen have a strict policy of keeping their own population static, in order to maintain their aristocratic status quo, so excess children that aren't euthanized generally get sent off to join the expiationists. The gentlemen see them as...semi-human, I guess.
Getting back to Vance reusing concepts, well...the gentlemen are the greph. They're humans rather than reptilian aliens this time, but in all the ways that matter, they're the greph. They even have a similar neurosis about loss of mastery being tantamount to loss of personhood, albeit less extreme.
Also, the main characters of this story are all gentlemen. Which, uh. Is a decision.
Vance is under no illusions about the gentlemen being the bad guys. As per his usual, he avoids moralizing or judging any of his characters, and lets the alienness of his invented societies' values stand free. But, just by describing everyone else's reactions to the gentlemen, he still makes it clear just how negatively they're seen by the rest of the setting, and how good the reasons for this are. For instance, when one gentleman character who we (I thiiiiiiiink?) are meant to kinda sorta root for is talking to an expiationist woman, there's just an offhand mention of her not wanting to be alone with him (despite them being childhood friends) due to what sometimes happens with male gentlemen and female anything else. Just as one example.
The thing is, investment in the story also requires you to be (as aforementioned) rooting for at least some of the gentleman characters at least some of the time. It's not structured in a way that lets the reader get by on pure schadenfreude at seeing the antiheroes get clowned on (if it was, I probably would have enjoyed it much more). To be fair to these characters, they were all born into the castle gentlemen's status quo long after its ossification, and so you can't really judge them for doing or believing the things that they do. On the other hand...you still want literally anyone besides them to win, and it's hard to be stressed overmuch about whether or not they survive.
There are also some decisions made about the plot, framing both the gentlemen and their enemies, that are...erm...questionable. In a way that the other two Vance stories weren't (or at least, not nearly as much so).
Anyway, the main event of this story is a rebellion by one of the gentlemen's slave races, the mek. The name may or may not be a human-invented one short for "mechanic," since maintaining (and, in many cases, using) the gentlemen's technology is their main purpose. Their secondary purposes include serving as disposable mook infantry in their masters' occasional crackdowns against the nomads. In said crackdowns, the gentlemen generally stay in their limited supply of vehicles behind armor, and wield their very limited supply of high tech weapons, while the meks wear little to no armor and fight with swords and pelletguns.
Physically, the mek are shorter-than-human insectoid bipeds whose antennae act as natural radiotransmitters, allowing large populations of them to communicate and coordinate instantly across large distances. This has resulted in them having a very limited concept of individuality, and...sigh...
...
I really would have preferred it have Vance had explicitly reused the First Folk, from "The Miracle Workers." The mek are described as looking sufficiently different from the FF that they couldn't be the same, but conceptually there's so little difference that I don't know why he made them different. This also extends to characterization: when we have dialogue scenes with the mek, they have the exact same sort of naive bluntness as the first folk. The exact same limitations when it comes to understanding human individuality, to virtually the exact same degree (nevermind how unlikely that misunderstanding, after the literal centuries of them living in the literal same buildings as humans). They even use similar battlefield tactics; they don't have foam-glands, but there's a scene where they recreate the *exact same siege technique,* just using earthworks rather than biomatter.
There's no reason the two stories couldn't take place in the same universe. The first folk had their planet invaded and colonized by humans in the wake of a big interstellar war. The gentlemen recolonized Earth in the wake of a big interstellar war. The crumbling old bits of technology the humans in "The Miracle Workers" had are pretty similar to the ones the gentlemen in "Last Castle" have. It would be the most intuitive thing in the world for some first folk to have been captured and sold into slavery by humans.
Reusing these aliens would add depth and complexity to both stories via the tie-in. Reinventing them, on the other hand, just makes it seem like Vance didn't have any new ideas left.
That said, I do like the mek creature design.
I also like the flabbergasted gentleman phrenologists struggling to comprehend that their slaves don't like being slaves, in this quoted section. Like I said, if the story had more schadenfreude like this throughout, I'd probably appreciate it much more.
...
Anyway, increasing negligence and complacency on the gentlemen's part, plus the meks' ability to communicate among themselves silently and at scale, leads to carefully synchronized revolts at all of the castle complexes. In all cases, the mek steal as many weapons and vehicles as they can, and sabotage as many as possible of the ones that they can't. They also steal large volumes of nutrient syrup, though (and this is something I'm going to talk more about in the next post) not the means of producing more of it. They then group up and start marching on the castles one by one, surrounding, besieging, and ultimately exterminating all remaining occupants of each.
They don't just kill the gentlemen. They also slaughter all the other enslaved aliens. Including the manual labourer "peasants" who are noted to be virtually incapable of violence. Including the friendly, semi-avianoid "birds" except for when the latter can fly away in time. Including the...erm...I guess I need to talk about the phane now.
...
So, one of the slave races that the gentlemen keep are called the phane. They're insectoid creatures with some superficially humanlike appearances. Specifically, superficially feminine humanlike appearances. Centuries of eugenic treatment by their masters has seen the phane body type change to mimic human women more closely, and the gentlemen use them for, well, yeah.
Now, by itself this would just be one more random bit of awfulness to add onto the pile for the gentlemen and their Altairan ancestors. There are two details that force me to narrow my eyes here, though.
First: the amount of description the phane get is wildly disproportionate to their role in the story. We never even get a proper description of the peasants, aside from "small" and "semi-humanoid," despite them playing a key role in a few scenes and an even more key role in the logistics of the setting. This story doesn't have nearly as many illustrations as the last two Vance novellas I read, but one of them is of a phane, and given how much description they get it's hard to fault the artist for choosing them over another type of alien.
Second: remember that ditzy concubine in "The Dragon Masters?" The one who was the feudal lord protagonist purchased from slavemongers? Okay, well, her name was "Phaid." And the phanes are described as looking and acting very, very similar to how she was written in TDM.
Now, my suspicions are somewhat allayed by the fact that there was also a "Lord Faide" in TMW. To a certain extent, it just seems like Vance was really fond of monosyllabic "fae" sounds in names for whatever reason. But...that still leaves two out of three instances being for very suspiciously similar playful, sylphlike, childlike-innocent sex slaves owned by story protagonists.
Yeahhhhhhhh.
Lord Faide's existence makes me willing to believe that Jack Vance didn't have some seriously fucked up issues involving a woman named Faye or Gae or something. But it isn't enough to make me stop suspecting it.
...
The main point is, the mek are not being discriminate. And, about midway through the story, they tell us themselves why that is so.
It's bleak, but after what they've been through it makes sense. Unfortunately, it also means that their victory in this conflict is also the worse outcome for most of Earth's inhabitants, the majority of whom are peasants.
...
On the topic of Vance's influence as a writer: I actually wonder if the creators of the Star Control games might have been inspired by this story when they came up with the ur-quan kor-ah and their Eternal Doctrine. Pretty much the same ideology, produced by pretty much the same kind of atrocious conditions.
Given that the ur-quan kor-ah were in turn the main inspiration behind Mass Effect's reapers, then IF this story was an inspiration for Star Control that would make Vance's presence throughout gaming as a medium even more pervasive than I thought. Again, it's a pretty big "if," but the parallels are strong enough that I had to mention the possibility.
...
The first scene of the story shows the destruction of The Second To Last castle by the mek, and the slaughter of all peasants, phanes, and humans within while the birds flee in terror. The POV then switches over to The Last Castle, a place known as Castle Hagedorn, and rewinds a bit in time so that we can see the castle's leadership react to each stage of the rebellion from beginning to end.
That's enough setup, I think. The second half of this review will include the plot summary. There's plenty to like in it, but also some stuff that really makes me think less of Vance as a writer. Like I said, even if it weren't for the conceptual repetition, I'd have found this the weakest of the three.
