Vanceburgs, for Jack

News of Jack Vance's passing, a few days delayed, is now hitting the old-school gaming sphere. Although I could wax in already-waxed ways about his fantasy, his science fiction, or for the n-teenth time about the vision of magic in his Dying Earth novels, there's a less obvious way his fiction has influenced the world of my campaign games.

In whatever genre, Vance's fantastic fiction excelled in the creation of a specific kind of society which I'll call the Vanceburg. Assembling some elements from Robin Laws' analysis of Vance's fictional elements in the Dying Earth roleplaying game, the Vanceburg merges "Strange Customs" with a "Crafty Swindle." Specifically:

1. The community projects a fraudulent myth to outsiders and visitors.
2. The myth is shrouded in some obscure custom or activity.
3. The custom or activity is presented as advantageous to outsiders.
4. This is not the case; a situation of exploitation obtains, in which outsiders are easily ensnared.

Vanceburgs from the Dying Earth novels are legion, but include the gruesome ponzi scheme of the rat-men; the town of Vull, where Cugel is set on watch for Magnatz; and Master Twango's scale mining operation. The Planet of Adventure series arguably describes a series of Vanceburgs, from society-scale to the intimate scam of the eel-race at the end of Chasch. In Lyonesse, one is reminded of fish dishes sold at a "seasonal price."

In my own game, the memorable Vanceburg was the far northern town of Parmentell, peopled by bluff merchant factors  and evasive townsfolk, and dominated by a secretive citadel. The authorities' constant fees, levies, regulations and imprecations lent a Vancian air to the proceedings. The town billed itself as a prime base for adventuring parties to hunt the secret stores of purple worm ivory and even the Purple Worm Graveyard itself, scattering maps throughout the realms.

In reality, few adventuring parties found any ivory, but their activities concealed the actual source of the town's wealth, for the Graveyard itself lay underneath the citadel. The mysterious ceremonies were actually farewells to desperate citizens daring to descend to this vast cavern, which promised unimaginable wealth but also speedy death at the hands of lesser worm guardians and worse. Thus, a double-tiered Burg, with the townsfolk persuaded that their knowledge of the truth and chance at upward mobility gave them an advantage over the visiting rubes.

While the Vanceburg is at high risk of being overturned in one way or another by its perceptive visitors - and my campaign was no exception - I should also mention an inversion-variation on the theme that sometimes pops up in the Vance corpus. In this concept, the inhabitants of a place have themselves become deluded by their own myth, and so ripe for upending, exploitation, or outright robbery by the canny interloper. Shining examples are the villagers of Smolod who lived in the paradise granted them by the cusps of the Overlord, or the pilgrims of Gilfig on whom Cugel practiced a memorable deception. The Burgvance, perhaps?

Although I've shied away from this kind of adventure plot because it seems too easy, I'm sure it could be put to work, with the primary risk being the awakening of the inhabitants themselves ... Perhaps this is a good way to tone down the threat of monsters stronger than the party can defeat toe to toe. Imagine a society of hallucinating minotaurs, or a revival tent meeting of altruistically deluded mind flayers?

Jack Vance and False Consciousness

Seeing the first novel in Jack Vance's Planet of Adventure series put up for free download in the USA, I'm reminded of how important false consciousness is in his novels.

(Spoilers for Planet of Adventure, Emphyrio, and Nopalgarth follow.)

False consciousness is a form of sophisticated social control that depends on getting people to believe myths that obscure their own exploitation, so that they fail to identify with others who are similarly exploited. It's a term associated with Marxism, though really it can be used in any critique of a social system. For example, Nietzsche and Ayn Rand use the concept a lot, though on behalf of a different kind of oppressed people than Marx's proletariat.

Throughout his work, Vance describes schemes of exploitation with detachment and brio, whether they be the crafty swindles of his picaresques, or the society-wide swindles of his space novels. The reader is left to supply moral outrage, admiration, or cynicism, as the case may be. The larger point of Vance's dry style: it is enough to describe straightforwardly a system that obscures itself by false consciousness in order to expose it. To follow through by detailing the back-and-forth of a struggle for material and political power is more Jack London (in socialist mode) than Jack Vance.

The Planet of Adventure series presents a world that four main alien races have settled. Humans also live there, but many of them are subservient to the aliens - Chaschmen to the Chasch, Wankhmen to the Wankh (cease your snickering, they were changed to "Wannek" in later editions), and so on.

The servant humans have become genetically and psychologically altered to resemble their masters. But beyond this, each human type has a different form of false consciousness that justifies their relationship with their superiors. For example, Chaschmen have been led to believe that they are the larval form of the Chasch, while Dirdirmen live to improve themselves and eventually become indistinguishable from the Dirdir. The intriguing point here is that false consciousness can blur even the species boundary.

Emphyrio, one of Vance's most political and heroic novels, presents a similar kind of exploitative society, with an alienated aristocracy that keeps the populace of the planet Halma low-tech, ignorant, and producing artifacts of great value for a pittance. Here, false consciousness again conceals that the exploiters are not just alienated, but aliens. When this fact is revealed, a near-bloodless revolution occurs, and all is set right.

What is this theme of nonhuman exploiters all about? On the one hand, Vance could be drawing parallels with systems of exploitation and false consciousness here on earth - a radical point. On the other hand, you could also see the implicit argument that humans are basically good when left to their own devices, so oppression is something that has to be explained by tagging oppressors as nonhuman. This is a more conservative point to make in a story, although here I'm using "conservative" and "radical" in a different sense than the usual right-wing/left-wing one.

Think of the belief that the powerful people of the earth are disguised alien lizards. Such conspiracy tales don't facilitate radical action, in the sense of organizing for a power struggle. Their more usual effects are self-satisfaction at having figured things out, and frenzied desire to communicate the big secret. After all, if false consciousness can be reduced to a big secret, then your revolutionary praxis need go no further than Facebook, and the revolution will be televised, often to a stunned planet from a commandeered news station.

That's not how things work, though. Real false consciousness lets you see the facts (The government just passed tax cuts for the wealthy?), but imposes a different interpretation that is not liable to be punctured by a guerrilla broadcast (Great, I don't want to have to pay those kind of taxes when I move up to making that kind of money!)

So, peering through the dry and detached style, which side does Vance come down on? I think the key is to be found in one of his underappreciated novels, Nopalgarth, also known as The Brains of Earth. Admittedly, it's more a novel of ideas than of effective characterization or thrilling adventure. But what ideas!

Earth scientists are contacted by alien Xaxans who are fighting invisible Nopal, monsters that sit on a being's head and control their thoughts and desires. The entire population of Earth is colonized by these creatures, which the Xaxans remove from our heroes by a painful treatment. But the twist is that the aliens themselves are pawns of a more sinister intelligence, controlled by  an amoeba-like monster at war with the Nopal that sends invisible tentacles to control the Xaxans' minds. The human heroes eventually find a way to be free of both.

Written in the mid-60's at the height of the Cold War, the allegory seems obvious, though I don't know of any other commentators who have picked up on this, or even see this novel as worthy of interpretation. Marxism, Vance seems to be saying, gives you great insight into the system of oppression. But lurking behind it is an even less palatable system of mind control, centralized in the Soviet Union. This critique of the irony of radicalism is very much in the spirit of Burkean, small-c conservatism and Orwellian socialism. In the end, Vance promotes a rugged individualism in which all ideology is suspect; a message that lives beyond the death of the USSR, thanks to the timeless science-fiction setting of his writings.