Son of the Tree – Jack Vance
June 8, 2009
Son of the Tree – Jack Vance
Originally uploaded by miketransreal
I’ve just blasted through Son of the Tree, a fairly early Jack Vance novel.
I quite enjoyed it – it’s only 120 pages long, or so, and originally appeared in the early 1950s in a pulp magazine – although it’s not really that good. Druids on a distant planet worship a giant tree. They think neighbouring planets would appreciate the opportunity to do likewise!
Into the mix comes our Earthan protagonist, looking for the man who stole his girl from him back on Earth. He becomes aircar chauffeur to a highly-ranked Druid and embroiled in a plot which isn’t unravelled until right at the end, in confrontation and disaster! But he gets the girl! Well, no, not that one, a different one…
It’s one of only a couple of Vance’s books that Underwood Miller didn’t publish in hardback; looking at the cover, I wish they had! Covers like this may explain why he never became as famous as he perhaps should have!
Son of the Tree is one of my secret pleasures even though the characters and their motives are a little too two dimensional. The main reason I enjoy it is because of the societies described and how they interact.
Thanks for the comment.
I’ve read SotT several times (the first time in 1974 when this Mayflower edition came out) and have enjoyed it every time. Elsewhere someone recently made a comparison to the Dumarest series by E.C.Tubb – Earth is all but forgotten, jack-of-all-trades hero travelling in cold-sleep between planets on his quest, an so on – and certainly this time around these points were very noticable. Within Vance’s own work, the interchange and the discussions in the ship’s lounge reminded me of, um, Spa of the Stars, I think; one of the Magnus Riddolph stories anyway…
It’s funny how a story can still speak to you even when you are cognizant of all its flaws. Son of the Tree has always been a favorite of mine. I’m glad to see it’s one of yours, too.
I never equated the Dumarest stories of E.C. Tubb with any of Jack Vance’s writing, but it’s been more than 20 years since I read any of them and I’m having trouble remembering them. You’ve made me curious.
Hi Paul; guess your new connection working fine…
I think it was Doc George on the Vance Board that first drew my attention to possible parallels with the Tubb series. A search there would throw up a bit more, maybe.
This time around I was reading it with that somewhat in mind, so the similarities stood out a bit more. But maybe a lot of it was just shared genre tropes and nothing more.
I also comment on Vance a bit on the ‘Covers with Comments’ set on my Flickr site, if you’re interested… Most of what I’ve read so far this year is there. You’ll be aghast!