City of the Chasch
Jack Vance
172 pages
published in 1968
When I first started to discover science fiction (longer ago than I care to recall) Jack Vance was one of the more popular writers to be translated into Dutch and the local library therefore had a shitload of his books. I therefore read quite a lot of his work, including the whole Planet of Adventure/Tschai, the Mad Planet (as it was called in Dutch) tetralogy, in one of those big omnibuses Meulenhof specialised in. There’s little I remember off it, to be honest, other than that it was a typical Vancean planetary romance.
Jack Vance is of course the master of this subgenre, effortlessly creating new worlds and societies for his stories, always exotic and strange yet believable and with their own logic. Sometimes the stories he sets in these worlds disappoint, as was the case for me when I reread Big Planet two years ago. For City of the Chasch I had less expectations, just because I remembered less about it, but I was still a bit disappointed with it. Like Big Planet, the worldbuilding here is more sketched in than fleshed out, not as rich and interesting as I had hoped it would be. I had planned to read the next books in the series immediately (I’m still missing the fourth) after I’d finished this one, but now I’ll think I’ll pass.