Most Helpful Customer Reviews
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5 of 5 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
Typical Vance at his best, 2 Sep 2001
By A Customer
This is a typical Vance space adventure, if you like Vance, you'll love it. Join Claude Glystra as he and his party are stranded on the aptly named Big Planet. The heros must travel 40,000 miles across a hostile planet filled with misfits exiled from Earth, to the safety of the Earth compound. Along the way they beat a variety of challenges using only their wits and determination. Vance's imagination packs this with high adventure whilst Vance's description of characters, places, smells, sights and sounds give a real feeling of being along with the survivors in their attempts to reach safety. Along the way, you'll encounter combat, romance, desparate escapes, odd technology (in a world with virtually no metal) and trickery. Great stuff.
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3 of 3 people found the following review helpful:
4.0 out of 5 stars
Vintage Vance, 4 May 2002
By A Customer
Not his strongest ever, but a great example. Have you noticed Vance's ability to create a world that is credible but nothing like Earth? This was probably his first, as this text dates back to 1952, but it hasn't aged too badly. Big Planet with its disparate societies, lack of metal and immense distances, is a definitely alien world. It's well worth a visit.
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3 of 4 people found the following review helpful:
3.0 out of 5 stars
Not really his best, 15 Feb 2005
A crew of spacefarers on a diplomatic mission crash-land on a planet many times the size of earth (but less dense, so it retains earth-like gravity), leaving them stranded, pursued by enemies, and almost 40,000 miles from their hope of rescue. As a premise, this sounds promising, but Vance really underdelivers; his trademark dialogue (superlative), and creation of exotic cultures is present in spades, but the book lacks the sense of scale (as appears in, say, Bob Shaw's 'Orbitsville') and so leaves this reader wondering why the planet is so big when the narrative makes little enough of it.
Compared with other travelogues Vance has written (Eyes of the Overworld and Cugels Saga are the obvious choices), this book doesn't stand up well: it's an early work and you can tell, as he is plainly still developing the skill and style which would flower in later books. The ending feels rushed and is, overall, just unsatisfying in comparison with the author's later work.
If this was any other writer, I'd give it four stars. For vance, three and a half because we know that he wrote other - much better - books later in his career.
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by Jack Vance
by Jack Vance
by Jack Vance
by Jack Vance
by Jack Vance
