Four more stories by Jack Vance from The Augmented Agent and Other Stories

Paperback editions from 1988 and 1989; the cover illustration on the 1988 printing has nothing to 
do with Vance's work--it originally appeared on Barrington Bayley's Rod of Light

Here at MPoricus Fiction Log we are reading 1986's The Augmented Agent and Other Stories, a collection of 1950s and 1960s stories by SF Grandmaster Jack Vance, the brilliant stylist behind such famous series as the Dying Earth and the Demon Princes.  I often think about rereading the three Alastor books and the three Cadwal books (I've already read the second and third Dying Earth books and all five Demon Princes books multiple times) but today I explore four Vance tales that I have never read before.  Having examined the first four of the volume's eight tales over the last two blog posts, today we'll be finishing up with my hardcover copy of The Augmented Agent and Other Stories.

"Crusade to Maxus" (1951)

In our last blog post I complained that Vance failed to convey to the reader the emotions of the protagonists of 1951's "Golden Girl," and that that story lacked any thrills that might hold the reader's attention.  Things are quite different in this 1951 story.  You see, Maxus is a planet to which slaves are brought, to be sold to the "Overmen" who employ most of them in vast industrial complexes which produce top-of-the-line electronics and machinery that are critical to the economy of the entire galaxy!  Travec has rushed to this world because his family has been captured by the space raider Arman and brought to Maxus to be sold to the highest bidder!  Without going overboard or getting too manipulative, but instead with economic understatement that is compelling, Vance depicts Travec's desperation and frustration as he hurries to the slave market to buy back his own flesh and blood and is delayed by all manner of bureaucratic red tape and demands for bribes.  Agony follows as he finds upon his arrival at the "Slave Distribute" that his mother Iardeth has died and his sister Thalla has been sold to some overweight aristocrat.  There is also melodrama and grue as fate decrees that, in the icy morgue where rests Iardeth Travec's corpse, Travec get into a fight with the noble who has purchased his sister--in the fracas a stray energy blast from the aristo's pistol kills Thalla!

Before she was killed, Thalla told Travec of another captive, a young woman named Mardien who was kind to her.  Following the tragedy in the morgue, Travec purchases Mardien at the slave auction.  He also goes to see a Maxus official, the High Commissioner, in hopes of purchasing his brother and a younger sister, who were sold before Travec arrived.  The High Commisioner offers to hand over Travec's siblings if Travec can deliver to him, dead or alive, the renegade son of a Maxus noble and a slave woman, a desperado who has committed crimes which humiliated members of the Maxus overclass--this offender is none other than Arman the slaver, somebody Travec wanted to kill anyway!

Arman is believed to be on Fell--his mother was an Oro, one of the highland people of planet Fell, all of whom the lowland people of Fell consider insane.  On their way to Fell, Mardien reveals to Travec that she is also an Oro, and that Arman is a hero to the Oros, herself included!  When Travec confronts Arman he learns that Arman, ostensibly at least, is leading the Oros in a long term plot to overthrow Maxus--they hope to build Fell into a similar industrial powerhouse and put Maxus out of business.  Part of the plan is selling to Maxus slaves like Mardien, volunteers who will conduct industrial espionage while toiling in the Maxus factories.

"Crusade to Maxus" starts off strong, but the resolution of the story is a little muddled and lacking in verve.  To me it felt sort of contrived, and much of it is related to us in a bloodless second hand fashion that is not very exciting or satisfying.

Mardien's attitudes about Arman evolve as her relationship with Travec evolves; our heroes declare their love for each other and Mardien reveals to Travec the secret of what makes the Oros so special.  The Oros are not only telepaths, but have discovered a method of achieving something like immortality, which renders them unafraid of death.  When an Oro dies he can shift his personality into the brain of a loved one, where it will merge with the primary personality and live on in a vague fashion.  I have to admit that I found this business rather unconvincing and uninteresting--it sounded to me like the consciousness of the dead person is quickly subsumed within that of the primary and quickly forgotten, and thus is not immortal at all.  Mardien absorbed her mother's soul, but it's not like she has her mother's memories or talks to her mother or has taken on her mother's likes and dislikes or anything like that--"I felt her presence for a few weeks, as if she were in the room.  Then gradually she melted completely into me."  This is not any different from when somebody you love dies in real life!  This is a half-assed concept that doesn't seem to change what death is like or change how life is lived very much at all, but seems to have been conceived by Vance as a plot device to produce people who are fearless because the plot needed a bunch of people to be fearless.  To this end, the Oros can teach people who are not telepathic the technique of shifting your consciousness into a loved one's brain as you die.

After they have killed Arman, Travec and Mardien take over the crusade against Maxus, abandoning the plan of building a rival superpower, a project that would take decades or centuries and probably be strangled in the cradle by the Maxus space navy before a Fell space navy could be cobbled together.  Our heroes, instead, direct the Oro slaves on Maxus to teach as many of the other slaves as possible the Oro soul-shifting ability.  Because their leaders can communicate telepathically, and none of the slaves fear death, the slaves can launch a campaign of spectacular suicide attacks--for example, all at once, in the space of a moment, every single slave chauffeur on the planet crashes the air car he is driving, killing over a million people.  The Maxus government crumples before such terrorism, and slavery is ended and a representative government installed.

"Crusade to Maxus" was first published as "Overlords of Maxus," a cover story in Thrilling Wonder Stories.  Prefixed to the story is a funny little note from Thrilling Wonder's editor, believed to be Sam Merwin, Jr.  It seems that some readers had written in to complain about SF stories depicting a future full of people fighting with swords and contending with slavers and so forth--surely sword fighting and slavery are anachronisms, totally out of place in a future of interstellar travel!  Merwin replies that the modern world of 1951 is full of people who believe in voodoo and is plagued by dictatorial governments who throw dissenters into forced labor camps--he avers that human cultural differences that we might call anachronisms exist now and no doubt will continue to exist in the future.

A glance at the 1951 magazine version of the Maxus story reveals many changes were made to the text for book publication in 1986--the protagonist's name is even different, changed from Gardius to Travec.  A long action sequence on Fell involving a fight with giant spiders was deleted--this section doesn't do much to move the plot forward, as it starts with Gardius, having been captured by Arman, being thrown in the woods to be eaten by the spiders, and then ends with Gardius, having slain the spiders, being captured again by Arman and this time sold into slavery on Maxus.  In the 1986 version Arman just sells Travec into slavery on Maxus immediately upon capturing him.  The 1986 version still contains the foreshadowing of the fight with the spiders--a lowlander tells Travec all about the monstrous spiders, so that the reader expects him to have to fight them, but they are never mentioned again!

"Crusade to Maxus" is like 50 pages, and I really liked the first 40 or so, which reminded me of the Demon Princes stories, but the ending is just OK.  "Crusade to Maxus" has appeared in numerous Vance collections; under the title "Kruistocht naar Alambar" (Alambar is the capital city of Maxus) it is the title story of one such Dutch collection.

"Three-Legged Joe" (1953)

This is one of those stories in which academically-trained young men with a lot of new ideas are shown up by the uneducated old-timers for whom they have contempt because they underrate the value of those old goats' accumulated lifetimes of practical experience.  In the end the newbies triumph over adversity, however.

John Milke and Oliver Paskell have just graduated from Highland Technical Institute and are going to planet Odfars to do some prospecting.  They chose Odfars because there is evidence that it is loaded with valuable minerals, but, for some reason, nobody has staked any claims on the planet.  Milke and Paskell try to find an old timer to accompany them as a hired hand, but none of the experienced prospectors they approach want to go to Odfars--these geezers even advise the boys to stay away from the place, making jocular comments about a "Three-Legged Joe" said to live there.

Milke and Paskell head to barren airless Odfars alone, making bone-headed amateurish mistakes both while preparing their expedition and while on the planet.  A mysterious three-legged creature which they can never seem to get a good look at bedevils their operations, and they try various means to destroy it; all fail, but they do manage to neutralize the creature without killing it and thus open up Odfars's deposits to exploitation that will make them rich.

This is a slight but entertaining SF story with some amusing bits and a healthy serving of science, mostly about electricity--Milke and Paskell know all about "hysteresis" and "field conflicts," the "resistance of superconductive metals at absolute zero" and "induction coils."  I don't know anything about that stuff, but I guess that is why they are rich and I consider buying a five-dollar book an extravagance.

After first appearing in Startling Stories, "Three-Legged Joe" would go on to be included in many Vance collections.  A brief skim reveals there are quite a few differences in the text of the original magazine version and the 1986 version; for example, in the magazine version Milke says "If it's liquid...I'll eat your hat" and in the hardcover book version, he says "If it's liquid...I'll eat my hat."  I'm finding the rationale behind some of the changes a little opaque.

"Sjamback" (1953) 

"Sjamback" first appeared in If, the top story of an issue in which editor James L. Quinn's editorial is devoted to complaints that his new fountain pen is too complicated and praise for the film Breaking Through the Sound Barrier.

Wilbur Murphy is a cinematographer on the TV show Know Your Universe!  One of the producers thinks the show is getting stale with all the scientific stuff they have been showing, and needs some sex, some mystery, some excitement!  So he sends Murphy to the planet Cirgamesc (the challenge of pronouncing this name is one of the story's jokes), chasing rumors of superstitions and unlikely supernatural happenings, like claims a guy rides a horse from the surface of the planet up into space to greet incoming star ships!

Cirgamesc was settled by Javanese, Arabs and Malayans, and Murphy hopes to be able to film some interesting traditions and exotic rituals, preferably involving dancing girls, but for the most part the people there seem pretty tame--the son of the Sultan of Singhalut, the city in which Murphy disembarks,  meets Murphy at the spaceport and tells him that "We left our superstitions and ancestor-worship back on Earth.  We are quiet Mohammedans and indulge in very little festivity."  One oddity does pique Murphy's interest, however: it seems that occasionally a citizen of Cirgamesc goes berserk--runs amuk--and becomes a "sjambak"--a bandit, a rebel against authority.  Such troublemakers wear a metal ornament on their chests, and to facilitate the detection of such renegades the Sultan has decreed that everybody go around bare chested...including the women, hubba hubba!

Murphy is discouraged from investigating this phenomenon by the native authorities, the common people, and by an offworld businessman who has lived on Cirgamesc for nine years--the Sultan runs a surveillance state and things don't go well for those who look too closely into the subject of the sjambaks.  A little detective work reveals that the Sultan's son is behind (or taking advantage of) the sjambak phenomenon--he wants to launch a jihad and these energetic rebels are to be his army.  Singhalut, like all the cities on airless Cirgamesc, is under a dome, which severely limits opportunities for the city to grow.  The solution, according to the atavistic (and perhaps insane) prince is to conquer some other dome cities or maybe some other planet.  (The metal thing on the chests of the sjambaks is the visible portion of a device implanted into the sjambaks that allows them to breathe on the airless planet's surface.)  In a way that is not very exciting or satisfying Murphy foils the jihad and figures out the kernel of truth behind the weird rumor of a man riding a horse in space.

("Sjamback" brought to mind those reader complaints of anachronisms mentioned by Sam Merwin, Jr. in Thrilling Wonder in 1951--when they venture outside the dome, the Sultan's soldiers wear spacesuits but are armed with crossbows and swords, and the sjamback that faces them down also wields a sword.)

"Sjamback" is just OK.  There isn't much by way of thrills, the resolution of the plot is underwhelming, and the satire of TV is a little obvious and rather gentle--Vance's depiction of TV  doesn't have the bile we see in other SF stories that address the threat posed by the idiot box, of which there are quite a few.  Ray Bradbury's Fahrenheit 451 is perhaps the most famous and sophisticated of such attacks, but during the life of this blog I have encountered many others, among them Robert F. Young's "Thirty Days Had September," Robert Bloch's "Beep No More, My Lady," Charles Beaumont's "The Monster Show," and John D. MacDonald's "Spectator Sport."  Vance made a packet of money writing for the Captain Video TV show, and so maybe he had a soft spot for the boob tube.

"Sjamback" might be of value to those interested in SF depictions of Muslims, Asians, and Arabs and Western essentialist views of nonwhites that boil peoples down to a few stereotypical characteristics: that businessman tells Murphy that the people of Cirgamesc are "schizophrenic.... They've got the docile Javanese blood, plus the Arabian elan."  A number of SF writers have mined Islamic and Arab history for ideas; I haven't actually read Dune, by Jack Vance's friend Frank Herbert (Vance, Herbert and Poul Anderson would go sailing together in a boat they built themselves--we're talking about real men here!), but it is my understanding that it is largely inspired by Arab history, Islam, and T. E. Lawrence.  Andrew Offutt integrates stuff from the Islamic world in some of his work, like King Dragon, but as I recall mostly as romantic window-dressing.

"The Augmented Agent" (1961)

Finally we come to the title story, which was first printed in Amazing Stories under the joke title "I. C. a. BeM."  It was the cover story for that issue, and, when it was reprinted in The Best from Amazing Stories under the title "The Augmented Agent" in 1973, Jack got top billing again.  (Remember how in the July 1973 issue of Fantastic editor Ted White spoke at some length about what a crummy job the publisher did putting together The Best from Amazing?)  In the interim the story had appeared, under its original title, in the Spring 1968 issue of Great Science Fiction. 
       
"The Augmented Agent" starts off like something out of Warhammer 40,000, as we learn that CIA agent James Keith has had all sort of weapons and surveillance and communications equipment integrated into his body.  It is the 1990s, the Soviet Union is still a going concern, and Adoui Shagawe, premiere of the Soviet-aligned African nation of Lakhadi, has acquired some old intercontinental ballistic missiles (they lack warheads, for now at least!)  Keith has been given the mission of infiltrating the Lakhadi government and disguised to look like Tamba Ngasi, a minister of the parliament of Lakhadi with a face that is "dark, feral and harsh: the face, literally, of a savage."  Ngasi is a tough customer, a tribal chief who murdered his own family to win his seat in the Lakhadi legislature.

We observe as Keith sneaks into Lakhadi via submarine, assassinates Tamba Ngasi with one of his high tech secret weapons, takes the man's place and travels to the capital of Lakhadi, Fejo, a city built with Soviet money in a modernistic but African style where the hotel staff address the government bigwigs staying at the hotel as "comrade."  (Here we find the inspiration for Ned Dameron's jacket illustration which mixes African designs and figures with Soviet iconography.)  Keith as Ngasi attends parliament, where the wisdom of controversial policies of purchasing the ICBMs and allying more closely with the People's Republic of China are debated.  One guy even says that Marxism is bunk!  Lakhadi's policy is not set in stone, and Western, Soviet and Chinese agents are all there in Fejo, trying to influence the Lakhadi government, and Keith discovers that the Red agents are just as augmented as he is.

Was the man Keith killed the real Tamba Ngasi, or an impostor sent by Moscow?  Is the Polish operative who mistakes Keith for a Soviet agent really working for the USSR, or is he a double agent working for Beijing?  After much espionage business and killing, Keith, in his guise as Tamba Ngasi, finds himself dictator of Lakhadi.  As the weeks and months of his regime go by, Keith begins taking on the personality of the man he is impersonating, a man who is impetuous and ruthless, and his policies begin antagonizing the Soviet Union, the Chinese, and even the United States, attracting the attention of agents from all three great powers who seek to change his policy or get him off the throne one way or another.

"The Augmented Agent" is a good Cold War spy story.  I liked all the espionage techniques and all the many high tech devices, none of which I have detailed here.  The Cold War issues addressed--e.g., How should Third World countries pursue their interests in the Cold War world?  By adopting Western governing philosophies of revolution and socialism or democracy and capitalism?  By accepting material aid from the great powers that no doubt come with strings attached?  Or by forging a philosophically and materially independent course based on indigenous traditions and culture?--are compelling.  "The Augmented Agent" lacks a neat and tidy resolution, but this reflects one of Vance's goals for the story, which is to dramatize the likelihood that conflict between different cultures is inevitable and a peaceful Earth an impossible dream.  Like "Sjamback," if you are writing your master's thesis on the depiction of nonwhites by important SF writers, "The Augmented Agent" will provide some grist for your mill.

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With a single exception, the eight stories in The Augmented Agent and Other Stories are enjoyable, and it is definitely fun to find similarities between these lesser-known Vance stories and Vance's famous novels, and to see Vance's take on real life cultures and ideologies.

Science fiction stories from the 1960s in the next installment of MPoricus Fiction Log!