OMAC YOUR ENTHUSIASM (2)
By:
April 5, 2026
One in a series of enthusiastic posts, contributed by 25 HILOBROW friends and regulars, analyzing and celebrating our favorite… Seventies (1974–83) sci-fi novels and comics! Series edited by Josh Glenn.
THE FACE | JACK VANCE | 1979
Though he’s remembered as a maestro of space opera, Jack Vance was a lot more interested in manners, especially bad ones, than in rocket ships. He took greatest pleasure in figuring out how societies worked, the mechanics of status and face and punctilio. He didn’t have much use for the space part of the formula. His characters still send letters in envelopes across galactic distances, and further nuances of far-future technology are usually covered with vagaries like “he spoke into a mesh.” He also prefers to briskly summarize battles, chases, and other action. The rocket ships and fights are mostly just excuses for the cast to travel around and encounter each other so they can give and take offense.
In The Face, the fourth in Vance’s five-volume Demon Princes series, Kirth Gersen tracks down Lens Larque, one of the space pirates who slaughtered Gersen’s family. So it’s a revenge fantasy, but the emphasis falls on unexpected beats. Even Gersen’s name sounds a bit parodically off, as if Vance had named his manly hero Crush Thrust.
The novel devotes primary attention to a quasi-social scientific examination of Larque’s people, the Darsh — especially their repellent cuisine, manners, and entertainments, which feature the chastising of boys. Upon entering a Darsh tavern, Gersen and a companion contemplate the dubious menu — “ahagaree” sounds particularly dodgy — and a sign advertising a floor show: “Whippery Ned Ticket and his lively bungles! How they leap! How they caper! Whippery Ned sings songs of sliding leather and chides his troupe for errors or insufficient zeal, perhaps with a smart tingle of the flick!” The barmaid’s greeting is “Why do you stand like hypnotized fish?”
But Vance does not settle for depicting the Darsh as flat villains beyond redemption. Gersen’s death-grudge against Larque pales in comparison with Larque’s own extravagant campaign of grievance against an aristocrat who didn’t want him as a neighbor. Stung by the aristocrat’s remark that he had no wish to see a “great Darsh face hanging over my garden wall,” Larque plans to use colossal quantities of mining explosives to alter the appearance of the moon to resemble his own, so that the aristocrat will have to look up at his face in perpetuity. After Gersen kills Larque and is rejected by the aristocrat’s daughter, he acknowledges the merit of his dire enemy’s moon-blasting scheme by carrying it out himself.
The transmuting of the touchy offensiveness of the Darsh into a kind of heroic moral rigor, even grandeur, is the most Vancian of twists, and — here’s where the opera part of the space opera formula comes into play — very operatic. Picture the curtain descending after Gersen sings the final aria: “Un’enorme faccia di Darsh.”
OMAC YOUR ENTHUSIASM: INTRODUCTION by Josh Glenn | Mark Kingwell on RIDDLEY WALKER | Carlo Rotella on THE FACE | Sara Ryan on DREAMSNAKE | Matthew Battles on THE WORD FOR WORLD IS FOREST | Ramona Lyons on HIGH-RISE | Adam McGovern on SHADRACH IN THE FURNACE | Deb Chachra on HITCHHIKER’S GUIDE TO THE GALAXY | Tom Nealon on DHALGREN | Michael Grasso on FLOW MY TEARS, THE POLICEMAN SAID | Stephanie Burt on BRIGHTNESS FALLS FROM THE AIR | Nikhil Singh on SABRE | Gordon Dahlquist on VALIS | Miranda Mellis on THE DISPOSSESSED | Marc Weidenbaum on SOFTWARE | Peggy Nelson on THE TRANSMIGRATION OF TIMOTHY ARCHER | Josh Glenn on ENGINE SUMMER | Mimi Lipson on A SCANNER DARKLY | Douglas Wolk on THRILLER | David Hirmes on ARZACH | Anthony Miller on SHOCKWAVE RIDER | Annie Nocenti on JIMBO | Seth on MR. MACHINE | Alex Brook Lynn on JUDGE DREDD | Joe Alterio on THE INCAL | Jason Grote on JOSIE AND THE ELEVATOR.
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