Big Planet

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Big Planet is the first of two stand-alone science fiction novels by Jack Vance (the other being Showboat World) which share the same setting: an immense, but metal-poor and backward world called Big Planet. Big Planet was serialized in 1952 in Startling Stories, then cut and reissued in 1957 as part of Ace double novel D-295, paired with Vance's Slaves of the Klau. It was further cut in 1958. The text was restored in 1978.

[edit] Plot summary

Spoiler warning: Plot and/or ending details follow.

Big Planet had been colonized hundreds of years prior to the start of the novel by misfits, faddists, cultists and anti-government advocates from Earth. It devolved into a large number of technologically backward societies, many of them ruled by petty tyrants and prey to internecine warfare.

Investigators from Earth, headed by protagonist Claude Glystra, arrive to start putting things right – to stop the importation of arms and halt Big Planet's slave trade – only to have their starship sabotaged. It crashes near the territory of Charley Lyssider, the Bajarnum of Beaujolais, one of the worst and most ambitious of tyrants. The survivors attempt to reach the only safe spot on Big Planet, Earth Enclave, forty thousand miles away. Already at odds with each other, the dwindling team begins to revert to the social level of the rest of Big Planet as Lyssider tries to pick them off.

Among the many societies benign or bizarre that Glystra and his companions encounter along the wind-driven monoline (their version of the Yellow Brick Road), is the society of Kirstendale. At first, it appears to be based on snobbish principles, but an odd twist reveals it to be surprisingly egalitarian.

Spoilers end here.

[edit] Comments

In Big Planet, reference is made to "one-man planets", slave societies beyond the law owned by wealthy sadists, who spend part of their time as seemingly-respectable citizens of law-abiding civilizations, and part of their time ruling over their slave subjects (many of them kidnapped from Big Planet), arguably the first germ of Vance's "Beyond" and the Demon Princes.

The theme of a vast planet riven into a large number of eccentric human societies foreshadows Vance's Gaean Reach, composed of thousands of human settled planets with cultures as eccentric as those of Big Planet.