The Dragon Masters

By Jack Vance

iBooks, 2003. Originally 1962, Galaxy Publishing Corp.

Reviewed by Ryan Harvey

On the planet Aerlith, a human settlement in a lonely cosmos, the inhabitants defend themselves from regular invasions of an alien species known as the Basics. From captured Basics, the people of Aerlith breed reptilian servants called dragons, while the Basics have used their captured human stock for similar combat-breeding purposes. Aerlith's enigmatic native race, the Sacredotes, remains passive in the conflict, seeking and giving knowledge when asked, but providing it in a frustrating and elliptical way that hides their own motives. The ruler of the town of Kergan's Way, Joaz Banbeck, believes the Basic invasions arrive during the periodic passing of the star Coralyne. While seeking the aid of the Sacredotes in the invasion he believes is imminent, he also contends with the rivalry of Ervis Carcolo, another ambitious ruler of Aerlith.

Comments

Legendary speculative fiction author Jack Vance won his first Hugo Award for this short novel (the award bestowed was actually for Best Short Story, even though Dragon Masters counts more as a short novel at 34,000 words). Simon & Shuster's iBooks division has brought it back to print as part of a renaissance of Jack Vance works now returning to bookshelves. (iBooks has my eternal gratitude for their excellent editions of suspense author Cornell Woolrich's The Bride Wore Black and Phantom Lady.)

The Dragon Masters belongs to a peculiar subgenre of speculative fiction that Vance staked out as his own: 'science fantasy.' Science fantasy has its origins in the early works of Edgar Rice Burroughs, during the period before Hugo Gernsback coined the term 'science fiction' to replace 'scientific romance.' Burroughs's mixture of planetary settings with medieval weaponry and combat formed the foundation for science fantasy's medley of the futuristic and the barbaric. Fans usually call the more freewheeling and action-oriented examples of this genre 'planetary romances' or 'sword-and-planet' stories.

But Vance has always posed a difficult classification problem, and The Dragon Masters shows why. Superficially, the novel sounds like a swashbuckling tale of humans riding genetically created 'dragons' in a war against standard-issue alien invaders. The concept sounds remarkably similar to Anne McCaffrey's long-running "Dragonriders of Pern" series. Both tell epics about a human settlement on a distant planet in the far future battling an extraplanetary attack that coincides with the passing of a star. In both stories, the humans use trained flying lizard creatures--"dragons"--to combat the attack. But The Dragon Masters, within its short space, manages to transcend the genre implications of its plot description and change into something idiosyncratic and unique.

In other words, it turns into a Jack Vance novel.

The Dragon Masters provides the reader with a sense of staggering scope within the space of a literary nutshell. The struggle that occurs on Aerlith, with a meager population of humans armed with swords, black gunpowder muskets, and reptilian war chargers, attacking a ship of aliens with limited powers, takes place over the space of a mere hundred and forty pages. But in that brief span Vance gives the reader glimpses of the vastness of human existence in the stars and a history that even the most powerful cannot fathom. The people of Aerlith may be the last humans in the galaxy. Perhaps they are not. The Sacredotes may be the original humans. Perhaps they derive from some other, unknown stock. Does Eden--the original Earth--still exist? Did it ever exist in the first place? The Dragon Masters answers none of these questions; it leaves the characters and the readers only the ability to ask them. With a talented writer like Jack Vance, the glimpse can supersede the revelation.

On the level of an action tale, The Dragon Masters delivers a thrilling climax that pits the Basics and their human-bred slaves, such as 'weaponers,' against the men of Aerlith and their multitude of dragons mutated from captured Basic stock. Fitting the distant tone of the book, the battle feels like a blood-mad chess match, where pieces collide violently yet seem like no more than lifeless pawns in a game between giants.

However, the primary appeal of the novel lies not in battle but in communication. The most intriguing passages focus on the blocked and frustrating exchanges between the three groups clashing on Aerlith: humans, Sacredotes, and Basics. None of them has the mental capability to comprehend the others; they do not even see why they need comprehension. This even applies between the two opposing human groups on Aerlith, the people of Happy Valley and of Kergan's Way. When Joaz Banbeck parleys with a slave messenger sent by the Basics, the conversation moves in circles of willful misunderstandings:

Joaz threw up his hands. "Will you join us?"

"What would be the meaning of such an act?" said the Weaponeer gently. "Come then, lay down your arms, submit to the rule.... Your own Revered Ones will receive fitting treatment, have no fear on this account."

"You fool! These 'Revered Ones' are slaves, just as you are a slave to the Basics! We breed them to serve us, just as you are bred! Have at least the grace to recognize your own degradation!"

The Weaponeer blinked. "You speak in terms I do not completely understand. You will not surrender then?"

In such a setting of confused communication, no easy moral grounding emerges. The straightforward "humans vs. aliens with the help of dragons" plot changes into a more elliptical and uneasy tale. The Basics have mutated human slaves into their weapons of war; the humans have done similar mutations to captured Basics to create their dragons. Joaz Banbeck calls on a slave to recognize his degradation, but sees no irony in his role as a degrader of the slaves that he owns. This paradox festers beneath the book.

Overall, this confusion of communication and morality underlines Vance's greatest feat in The Dragon Masters: the creation of human characters whose thinking seems confoundingly alien to us. To create a convincing far distant future, writers do not need to expound on super-technology or give lengthy history lectures; they need only convince the readers that these people no longer think they same way that they do. Vance achieves this formidable task flawlessly.

To emphasize this point, the iBooks edition of The Dragon Masters also includes "The Last Castle," which received the 1967 Hugo Award for Best Novelette (this again creates confusion, since The Dragon Masters is longer than "The Last Castle," yet it won an award for a shorter form). This novella has no direct plot connection The Dragon Masters, although it occurs in a similar setting, with a few remaining humans on a lonely world battling for survival against an attacker. Hagedorn Castle, the last human fortress on an Earth repopulated after years lying fallow, struggles against a rebellious warrior species called the Meks. The humans have fallen so deeply into careless decadence that they cannot conceive of their former slaves as a threat; they do not even understand why a slave would want to revolt. Although filled with battle sequences and sieges, "The Last Castle" plays more like a fugue for a dying species whose mind has turned moribund with the passing eons. But, like its fellow classic The Dragon Masters, "The Last Castle" refuses to offer a neat and tidy moral in its surprising finale.