Rating: 
Summary: The best journey in the human being after Homer's Odissey
Review:
When I say Vance after Homer I mean chronologically only.
The time and the context are different but Keith Gersen is a modern Ulysses.
Both have a target to reach but the difference is that at the end of the story the Vance's hero find an empty solitude the other one find his family and his village.
Could we say, maybe, a target with no moral values is not a real target?
I've read more and more times the five chapter of Gersen's adventure and every time I've founded new interesting elements.
In the Demon Princes saga all is perfect: atmosphere, characters, narrative fluency, and so.
I particurally appreciate the big secret of 111 that to say the balance. This is a truth we often forget.
I can resume my review with:
Thankyou Mr. Vance !!!
Rating:
Summary: The best journey in the human being after Homer's Odissey
Review: When I say Vance after Homer I mean chronologically only.
The time and the context are different but Keith Gersen is a modern Ulysses. Both have a target to reach but the difference is that at the end of the story the Vance's hero find an empty solitude the other one find his family and his village.
Could we say, maybe, a target with no moral values is not a real target? I've read more and more times the five chapter of Gersen's adventure and every time I've founded new interesting elements.
In the Demon Princes saga all is perfect: atmosphere, characters, narrative fluency, and so.
I particurally appreciate the big secret of 111 that to say the balance. This is a truth we often forget. I can resume my review with:
Thankyou Mr. Vance !!!
Rating:
Summary: A sharp response to hard criticism
Review: A classic criticism of SF is that the characters are thinly-drawn caricatures. Often there is more than a grain of truth in this, and Mr. Vance himself can have been considered guilty. However, this is the 'Scream' of SF literature, in that it is a knowing response to the critique, whilst staying as fast-paced, rollicking swashbuckler, with colourful characters, inventive prose and fantastic (in the traditional sense of the word) names, giving depth to the entertainingly-realised worlds. Kirth Gersen himself, the lead character, is often caught questioning his own lack of personality depth beyond his mission, whilst displaying a not insignificant range and subtlety of emotion. Still surprising on re-reading, with great sophistication and wit, it is a fine testament to a top author.
Rating:
Summary: Magnificent adventure awaits...
Review: any reader who has a love for either science-fiction or fantasy. this work by Jack Vance is a heady blend of fantastic creatures (both human and non), intricately plotted and imagined adventure, and a command of language that is just unparalleled. I envy anyone who has stumbled upon Jack Vance for the first time--he is a living treasure, the very finest, most original writer to grace the world of fantasy and ascience fiction in the past 100 years. No hyperbole, just read on and wonder how you missed him for so long...
Rating:
Summary: Mr Gersen is my friend
Review: I always return to Jack Vance. The Demon Princes is his best. I read his books and hope my memory will vanish so I can read them again, fully fresh. I am into, I think (memory!), my fifth reread of The Demon Princes.
His Araminta Station et al, refers to this series, mostly in the form of allegations to the mad poet Navarth. How I wish to discuss with Jack Vance his imaginations of the evolution of the Gaean Reach!
Mr Gersen is a true Vance man: Polite, softspoken and deadly, but with a moral. Jack Vance has a unique talent for creating landscapes and local anthropologies. He can paint a culture with a dozen words.
Jack, please write more! What happened to Keith Gersen after "The Book of Dreams"? I would like to know!
Rating: 
Summary: Just can't put it down
Review: I can't really put my finger on exactly how he does it, but Vance really knows how to capture your attention and keep it. The characters are vivid, the scope is sweeping, and the plots are incredibly intriguing. Perhaps most fascinating is Vance's versatility. Each chapter begins with excerpts from books, reports, and other works set in the same time. These provide an excellent means of detailing this fictional universe from outside the perspective of the main character. All in all, I found this one of the more compelling reads. I strongly recommend this book to any science fiction fan.
Rating:
Summary: Just can't put it down
Review: I can't really put my finger on exactly how he does it, but Vance really knows how to capture your attention and keep it. The characters are vivid, the scope is sweeping, and the plots are incredibly intriguing. Perhaps most fascinating is Vance's versatility. Each chapter begins with excerpts from books, reports, and other works set in the same time. These provide an excellent means of detailing this fictional universe from outside the perspective of the main character. All in all, I found this one of the more compelling reads. I strongly recommend this book to any science fiction fan.
Rating:
Summary: An old friend returns to print.
Review: I was much younger when The Star King first appeared in Galaxy. I think the last of the five books (not included in this volume) appeared within the last ten years. John Holbrook Vance's style of writing is oddly stilted, but charming in these five books; the best of them, The Killing Machine, is included here, and the worst of them is no worse than very good. The Killing Machine includes fighting, killing, counterfeiting, kidnapping, theft by misdirection, and deliberate insult by the protagonist of long-established institutions (at least long-established in the future depicted), and is a story I told my children on a camping trip. Vance is now in his late 70's or 80's, and I'm not sure how many more of these treasures we may expect out of him; this makes the current volume all the more valuable. It is a collection of old friends, finally back in print; I will send the book to my fifteen-year-old daughter, who heard the story before she was ten from her father.
The Demon Princes series is a set of five novels about Kirth Gersen, whose home planet was invaded and whose inhabitants were massacred remorselessly by five arch-criminals known as the Demon Princes. His grandfather sees to his training as an assassin, and then turns him loose to find and kill each of the five. Each novel is the story of his action against one of the five.
I haven't yet laid my hands on a copy of this new volume, yet I am already looing forward to its successor
Rating:
Summary: Better than the Count of Monte Christo
Review: Jack Vance is regarded by his fans, of who I am certainly one, as a genius whose art far transcends the genres of science fiction and fantasy in which he has usually (though not always) written. His lapidary use of language is the touchstone of his writing, together with a tone which is often inadequately spoken of as ironic.
These qualities are here coupled with a revenge plot which rivals the Count of Monte Christo, the grandfather of all such tales. Over the years, I have read the Demon Princes series more times than I can count; far more times than I have ever reread any other book or books.
If you haven't read Vance, you must. It's as simple as that. And this imperative applies to all who have never picked up a so-called "science fiction" book. You will not become hooked on SF: you will become hooked on Jack Vance; and your world will expand.
Rating:
Summary: An essay on S.F. criminology
Review: Let's look at the Demon Princes series in the criminologist perspective.You'll notice that the monsters depicted fall each one in a distinct category of criminal types. 1)Attel Malagate:the cold criminal.He isn't human,a metaphor by inversion,he doesn't feel empathy with its fellow humans.Therefore,he won't mind the suffering he causes to reach his objectives. 2)Kokor Hekkus.Here ve have the necro-sadist,he is dead inside,and enjoys the suffering of others,which he causes to feel alive. 3)Viole Falushe.This is a case of psychotic reaction to inadequacy,which brings hatred and craving for revenge.He wants to control and enslave the woman who has refused him,and creates a world of fancy to suits his desires.Very similar,in some aspects,whit Isaac Asimov's Mule. 4)Lens Larque.Here we have the delirium of omnipotency,the megalomania.The revenge of the excluded. 5)Howard Alan Treesong.This is a zany combination of the precedent four.He is also obviously psychotic,his various personalities reflecting a failure to construe a real self.Like Viole Falushe,he has loved and has been rejected,so he wants to rape the world in compensation,and he his very uncaring of human feelings,like Malagate.He is sadistic and megalomaniac.Specifically,he is an anarchic individualist type of criminal. Jack Vance is not only a grat Science-Fiction writer:he is also a great mystery writer
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