The novel “The Star King” by Jack Vance was published for the first time between December 1963 and February 1964 serialized in the magazine “Galaxy” and as a book in 1964. It’s the first book in the Demon Princes series.

Kirth Gersen meets the explorer Lugo Teehalt, who has discovered a planet of extraordinary beauty. However, he has learned that his exploit happened in the service of Attel Malagate, one of the infamous Demon Princes, and doesn’t want to reveal its location to him knowing that the planet would get exploited.

Some of Attel Malagate’s henchmen kill Lugo Teehalt and steal what they think is his spaceship to obtain the information necessary to find the planet discovered by the explorer. Actually, they stole a spaceship of the same model and Kirth Gersen takes advantage of that mistake to begin the search for Attel Malagate to carry out a personal revenge.

“The Star King” starts the Demon Princes series, in which the protagonist Kirth Gersen begins his revenge against five powerful interstellar crime bosses guilty of having exterminated his family and many inhabitants of the colony in which he lived and enslaving others. His search is made difficult by the fact that the Demon Princes use fake identities to run their criminal operations without exposing themselves.

The Demon Princes series is set in the Oikumene, a sort of federation of civilized planets inhabited by different sentient species that includes Earth and therefore humanity. Beyond the Oikumene frontier, there’s the so-called Beyond, which includes inhabited worlds that are not necessarily barbaric but still foreign to the laws of the Oikumene.

The plot based on the protagonist’s quest for personal revenge is probably one of the oldest existing. Jack Vance develops it in a science fiction setting but some parts are the same as a thousand other stories of this type. There are the typical elements of this type of plot with a protagonist who was trained to face the terrible enemies who killed his family. The strength of this author consists in creating the most spectacular worlds and civilizations around the most trite plots, obtaining results unthinkable for authors with less imagination.

This series was started with a magazine publication and consequently, the length is limited to the standards of that market. For this reason, the plot is very linear and the pace is fast, with a lot of action and the intensity of a story in which the protagonist risks his life all the time.

Few important characters have a minimum of characterization but some hide various secrets, so they reveal little or nothing of themselves. The protagonist Kirth Gersen, with his obsession for revenge against the Demon Princes, is inevitably the best-developed character. He takes many risks to get what he wants but he also has moral qualms when innocent people end up involved in his plans.

“The Star King” has its own ending but it’s the first novel of what was written from the beginning as a series that has become a classic of adventurous science fiction. The Demon Princes series has become one of Jack Vance’s best known and I recommend it to anyone who appreciates this author and this type of science fiction. It’s available on Amazon USA, UK (part 1), and Canada (part 1).