Maske: Thaery

Maske:Thaery is at its heart a story of revenge and coming of age in a rich world of caste and privilege. Unlike a lot of Vance's other work, the protagonist Jubal Droad is from a disadvantaged background and family, meaning that he has to work uphill against the rigid caste system from the start. Despite his insistence on breaking every social more because of his own sense of justice, Jubal finds himself in the employ of a state funded covert intelligence agency, tracking the movements of a person from the highest caste who is suspected of nefarious activity. Political intrigue, stealth, and deception play major roles in the story.

Maske itself is a world of beautiful landscapes and complex history. Jubal is a descendant of the group who colonized a portion of Maske centuries ago, and there is still tension with the locals who resemble the Thariots but can not procreate with them. There is a strict policy against traveling off-world, and a frightening judicial system that imposes a maze of confusing and intricate laws. There is an absurd level of detail in the world building. This is perhaps Vance's strongest trait. He is creative to the point of being overwhelming in the amount of texture that he gives the world of Maske. I especially enjoyed the mysterious tree-worshiping Waels, the music-obsessed world of Eiselbar, the Seas Nationalist who somehow draw distinction from the central government but still heel to them, and the consistent naming of plants that line the streets. There's a huge learning curve to understanding this world that is somewhat aided by Vance defining some of the alien terminology in a dry footnote style formula. Vance is specifically focused on politics, caste, and social order.

I'm also a fan of Vance's style of writing. It's in turns dry, witty, and ironic. He has a broad and colorful vocabulary that he's not afraid to use every single sentence. I think this could be turn off for a lot of readers. Sometimes it feels comparative to a creative writing major using a thesaurus to punch up a half-assed story, but there's a certain ineffable quality of earnestness that Vance writes with that neutralizes this distaste for me. It's clear that this vocabulary has been earned by Vance honestly through study. Every character speaks hyper-formally at all times, which can be distracting and take me out of the story, but is also better than the boring dialogue that a lot of pulp writers tended toward.

While I love Vance's exploration of the maddening social order of the world, and the descriptive xenobiology, the plot never condensed into anything noteworthy despite its complexity. Similarly, the characters aren't necessarily bad, but never escape their surface level characterizations. Like a sad, half-inflated balloon, these elements drag the rest of the novel down, preventing it from transcending the sum of it's parts. The world is so memorable and rich though that I can't help but give Maske:Thaery a favorable rating.