Introduction to The Grey Prince

I have a confession to make. Few things in science fiction annoy me more than having to learn a few dozen new words and as many not-quite-human names simply to be able to work my way through a single book. And one of the things that does annoy me more is a novel with forty or fifty footnotes (or feetnote, as the late James Blish dubbed them.)

I have another confession to make: I find that I don’t mind new names, new words, or footnotes at all when a master like Jack Vance incorporates them into one of his books, such as, for example, The Grey Prince.

I first read this novel more than thirty years ago. I wasn’t aware of all the controversy it was engendering; I read it simply because I made it my business to read all of Jack’s books as they came out. I thought it was pretty typical, which is to say, a fast-paced novel with interesting characters and beautiful word-pictures, crafted by one of our master stylists.

So you can imagine my surprise when I started reading reviews and reader comments to the effect that it was racist, or a right-wing polemic, or both.

(A few years later I would be accused, by an equally small handful of critics, of writing racist and sexist tracts in my “Kirinyaga” stories, which are about the Kikuyu people of East Africa trying to form a Utopian colony on a terraformed planetoid. Oddly enough, at the same time those stories came out, I wrote a science fictional allegory of Kenya’s history titled Paradise, but although my Kikuyu analogs shared every trait and belief with the Kikuyu of “Kirinyaga,” they were alien in shape and had alien names—and not a single one of those critics thought Paradise was racist or sexist, which I think says a little more about the critics than about the author or the literature. Jack clearly made his aliens a little too human.)

This is a very tricky book, this Grey Prince. Not only did it fool some of the knee-jerk critics, but it approaches everything in a very indirect manner. (Well, why shouldn’t a wordsmith of prodigious talent be subtle?)

For example, the viewpoint character is clearly Schaine Madduc, but she is missing from large parts of the narrative, and a strong case can be made that she is too naïve for her own good.

For example, Jorjol is the title character, the Grey Prince, but he is not the viewpoint character, nor in the end is he an especially nice person, though he is surely a motivated one. There are times when you think he’s a bit of an ass who just happens to be on the side of Right and Justice, and there are times when you think he is a reasonably decent character who just happens to be dead wrong. There are as many opinions about him as there are characters in the story who know him, which is precisely as it should be (and so rarely is in a work of fiction.)

As for the true subject of the book, it’s as difficult to define in a single sentence or paragraph as the Grey Prince himself, though possibly not to the critics who claim this is a right-wing diatribe. They would tell you, when speaking of the Land-barons, that it is evil and immoral to take land from an indigenous people—and they would be right as far as that argument goes. But what Vance points out is that the “indigenous people” weren’t born there, any more than the Apaches or Commanches or Maasai or Kikuyu were born on their “ancestral land,” that they simply took it from someone else just as surely as various people took it from them.

Not so simple when viewed that way (which is to say, Jack Vance’s way), is it?

Then there’s the charge of racism.

I suppose you could make a case (or at least I could) that the book’s Nomads are Amerind analogs, that the Erjin slaves are analogs of the Negro race of perhaps two centuries ago, and so on. But again, nothing in The Grey Prince is ever quite as simple and clear-cut as it seems. You have a slaveholding culture secure in its moral superiority to the Land-baron culture that “steals” the Nomads’ land…while the Land-barons know they are the superior culture because they do not keep slaves. If you are a Nomad or an Erjin, you don’t think too highly of either of them.

And finally there are the Morphotes, the true indigenous race, who have a bone to pick with just about everybody.

I have a feeling that the critics who screamed “right-wing tract” and “racist trash” the loudest not only completely misunderstood the book, but also ignored or never understood the fact that guilt is not eternal, that after a certain number of generations have passed most people no longer feel responsible or guilty for the actions of their distant progenitors, but learn to live with the conditions as they now exist. (Actually, most people don’t feel guilty ten minutes later or they wouldn’t have done whatever it is that inspires guilt, but that has nothing to do with the point I’m making.)

I think I know which side Jack Vance is on, but he makes sure every side is represented by the arguments a believer would make. There comes a point in Patrick McGoohan’s still-popular television series of four decades back, The Prisoner, when McGoohan runs for office of the mysterious Village, promising to find out “who are the warders and who are the prisoners.” You might make a case that, below the surface sheen of exotic other-world adventure, Vance is concerned here with who are truly the oppressed and who are truly the oppressors. I think it was his temerity in even asking the question that upset that small handful of critics I mentioned earlier. After all, this is supposed to be mindless escapist fiction, or if not mindless, at least it should direct the mind to problems of science.

To which I reply: welcome to the works and worlds of Jack Vance.