Place in Vance's Work
The first three books in the series appeared in 1964-67; there was a 12-year gap before the last two appeared in 1979 and 1981. All five books were published as individual volumes in limited editions of 700 copies each by Underwood-Miller in 1981. The collected books were published as a two volume set, The Demon Princes, in 1997. Collectively they may be regarded as among Vance's most characteristic work.
The Demon Princes books bring to its fullest flower Vance’s practice of augmenting and counterpointing his narrative by means of footnotes and, especially, lengthy or bizarre epigraphs drawn from imaginary works of literature, history, philosophy, newspaper reports, television interviews, court transcripts and so on.
Some of these bear closely upon the plot in hand: for example, the quotations from The Demon Princes by Caril Carphen (published by the Elucidarian Press, New Wexford, Aloysius, Vega), apparently the authoritative scholarly study of these five notorious individuals.
Some have tangential significance, such as the excerpts from the works of the ‘mad poet’ Navarth. Others have no logical relevance: such as the learning processes undergone by the ‘Avatar’s Apprentice’, Marmaduke, in Scroll from the Ninth Dimension (though these hint at providing a metaphorical/metaphysical comic correlative to Kirth Gersen’s progress). But they all serve to flesh out the mores, history and culture of the wide-flung future milieu in which Gersen pursues his quest.
Perhaps Vance’s most memorable creation in this stratum of the books is the aristocratic philosopher Unspiek, Baron Bodissey, who lives only in the citations from his all-embracing six-volume magnum opus, Life. (The Baron and his work are referred to in other Vance novels unrelated to the Demon Princes sequence: in his elusive person Bodissey is so to speak the combined Socrates, Aquinas, Montaigne, Hume and Nietzsche of Vance’s universe).
And Vance’s virtuosity on this plane may be illustrated by the epigraph to Chapter 10 of The Killing Machine, which consists of a citation from Volume IV of Life followed by extracts from six stylistically individuated (but uniformly negative) reviews of the Baron’s book.
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