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.
