Jack Vance published Araminta Station in 1988, 38 years after his first major work, the massively influential Dying Earth. Araminta Station, the first part of the Cadwal Chronicles trilogy, narrates the adventures of Glawen Clattuc, a young man of the local gentry on a wilderness-preserve planet — Cadwal — in a distant future where mankind has settled most of the galaxy in a loosely-governed “Gaean Reach”. Vance writes in his characteristic style with the assurance and deliberation of a well-earned maturity. Do I recommend it? Absolutely, although it’s not a good place to start with the author and doesn’t quite rise to the level of Vance’s immediately preceding work, Lyonesse.
Known to the dork masses as the originator of Dungeons & Dragons’s somewhat peculiar magic mechanics, Jack Vance has a small but fanatically dedicated following that includes a fan press devoted to keeping his work in print. A master of dialogue and description, his stories typically feature protagonists solving mysteries, seeking revenge, and escaping trouble across distant planets, strange lands, and stranger societies, grappling equally with arms and witty repartee worthy of Dumas. Araminta Station is no exception.
Araminta shares a setting with the better-known Demon Princes, although at a much later date. The “Gaean Reach” of human interstellar settlement is vast enough that anything can happen, old enough that anything has, and rough enough to still be dangerous. Glawen Clattuc, like most of Vance’s heroes a well-adjusted loner, grows up in a small backwater society based on an ancient forest ranger service on the wild planet Cadwal. Like Harry Potter, he dreams of being a police officer (and over the course of the novel becomes one), although given the nature of the setting his duties involve more than just a touch of the frontier sheriff and the bush pilot.
The duty of the hereditary naturalists to preserve Cadwal’s wilderness according to their Charter conflicts with the increasing population of the “Yips”, a stowaway society confined to a small island. Motivated variously by moral principles, greed, resentment, and power, a certain faction of the ruling class wishes to discard or “update” the centuries-old Charter and solve the Yip Question by allowing them to settle on the mainland, ultimately destroying the wilderness. A smaller faction (including Glawen Clattuc) wishes to deport the Yips en masse as indentured servants. Most prefer to ignore the problem. Thus arises the principal conflict.
Vance does not shy from portraying the Yips as contemptible and even subhuman, and he presents the summary justice of the “Interworld Police Coordinating Company” with unmistakable approval. The Cadwal gentry will either deal at whatever cost with the problem they have created through previous continuing inaction or they — and the status quo they exist to preserve — will cease to exist, and the universe does not care one way or another. Vance has dealt with similar themes in other works, although not by making the merits of us-or-them ethnic cleansing a significant plot point.
While the pending Yip crisis constitutes the overarching problem of the trilogy, smaller episodic arcs play out across Araminta‘s languorous 550 pages, along with a murder mystery confined to the course of the single novel. Vance shows a practiced hand in their linkage, resolution, and in leaving a few ends dangling for the second book.
I’ll certainly read the next two books to find out what happens, although I’m in no hurry to track them down.
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