Demon Princes
The Demon Princes is a five-book series of science fiction novels by Jack Vance, which cumulatively relate the story of one Kirth Gersen as he exacts his revenge on five notorious criminals, collectively known as the Demon Princes, who carried the people of his village off into slavery during his childhood. Each novel deals with his pursuit of one of the five Princes.
The titles, Gersen's antagonists, and a few details of their plots, in order of publication:
Significantly or not, Vance portrays each of his human criminal 'princes' (the humanoid alien Attel Malagate is the exception) as a frustrated artist, each working out his fantasies in a different medium. Much of The Book of Dreams centres on Treesong's attempt to retrieve his own youthful work of fantastic fiction (itself called The Book of Dreams): the portions reproduced in the novel could have come from one of Vance's own magical novellas. To some extent Treesong is prefigured in the repulsive yet almost pitiable protagonist of Vance's thriller Bad Ronald (1973).
The first three books in the series appeared in 1964-67 and were published in both hard cover and mass-market paperback editions under the Berkely Medallion imprint. There was a 12-year gap before the last two appeared in 1979 and 1981 and published as individual volumes in limited editions of 700 copies each by Underwood-Miller in 1981. The collected books were published as a limited edition set, The Demon Princes, in 1997.
The Demon Princes books extensively use Vance’s practice of augmenting and counterpointing his narrative by means of footnotes and, especially, lengthy or bizarre epigraphs drawn from imaginary works of literature, history, philosophy, newspaper reports, television interviews, court transcripts and so on.
Some of these bear closely upon the plot in hand: for example, the quotations from The Demon Princes by Caril Carphen (published by the Elucidarian Press, New Wexford, Aloysius, Vega), apparently the authoritative scholarly study of these five notorious individuals.
Some have tangential significance, such as the excerpts from the works of the ‘mad poet’ Navarth. Others have no logical relevance: such as the learning processes undergone by the ‘Avatar’s Apprentice’, Marmaduke, in Scroll from the Ninth Dimension (though these hint at providing a metaphorical/metaphysical comic correlative to Kirth Gersen’s progress). But they all serve to flesh out the mores, history and culture of the wide-flung future milieu in which Gersen pursues his quest.
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