Book Review: Monsters in Orbit-Jack Vance

Book Review: Monsters in Orbit-Jack Vance

Vancelot: Jack Vance in Review, TJ Jones

Ace Double, mass market paperback, 119 pages (other half 134 pages)

Release Date: 1965

Cover art: Jack Gaughan

Contents:

·       Abercrombie Station, 63 pages, novella

·       Cholwell’s Chickens, 51 pages, novella

This mass market paperback includes two novellas, Abercrombie Station (67 pages) and Cholwell’s Chickens (51 pages). It is an Ace Double, though, so when you flip the book over you will find another Vance collection called The World Between and Other Stories that includes two short stories and three novelettes.  The print in this book seems rather small even for a mass market paperback. Although this collection is out of print, used copies can easily be located. Both novellas are now available from Spatterlight Press in trade paperback editions. In addition to being in larger font, the Spatterlight releases have the advantage of being the same corrected releases that were issued under the limited and costly Vance Integral Editions (VIE). Below is a brief review of each work: 

Abercrombie Station-Jack Vance novella

Abercrombie Station is a 63 page novella that was initially published in February, 1952 in Thrilling Wonder Stories. This is one of the few Vance works that has a woman as the main character.  Jean Parlier is an attractive, vivacious, charismatic, clever sixteen year old girl who is also tough minded, very independent and street smart.  Jean is encouraged by a mysterious man to obtain a job as a housekeeper at the home of a wealthy man, Earl Abercrombie, on a private satellite which he owns called Abercrombie Station.  This is one of twenty two resort satellites.  Abercrombie is unmarried and has some terminal medical condition.  The plan is for Jean to marry Abercrombie and then, after he dies, to obtain two million dollars from the mysterious coconspirator who recruited her to do this.  Jean is a "gravity girl" from Earth, however, and the satellite she visits has no gravity and also has a much different concept of female beauty.  On this strange satellite the larger and rounder the woman is the more attractive she is considered, so most of the women living on the satellite are as wide as they are tall and float around in the air like big balloons while hired help wear magnetic shoes to keep themselves on the floor.  So Jean has a problem with attracting this billionaire because she is considered malnourished, unhealthy and scrawny by their standards and is thought to be extremely unattractive even though she is very pretty by Earth standards.  Her billionaire employer also has a large zoological collection of extremely bizarre alien creatures that he keeps in his natural history museum.  He seems to find these creatures to be more of an attraction than any of the women.  No challenge is too much for Jean, however, as she does her best to attract Abercrombie.  This is essential reading for Vance fans.  I’ve read Abercrombie Station four times and rate it a 4 (Really liked it.)

Cholwell's Chickens-Jack Vance, novella

Cholwell's Chickens is a 51 page novella that is a sequel to the novel "Abercrombie Station" although it can be read and understood on its own.  It was first published in February 1952 in Thrilling Wonder Stories magazine.  It was later published along with Abercrombie Station as a collection titled Monsters in Orbit. Abercrombie Station is actually a sequel to Cholwell’s Chicken with the same main character, Jean Parlier. "Cholwell's Chickens" is a 47 page novella that is a sequel to the novel "Abercrombie Station" although it can be read and understood on its own.  It was first published in February 1952 in Thrilling Wonder Stories magazine.  It was later published along with Abercrombie Station as a collection titled Monsters in Orbit. Abercrombie Station is actually a sequel to Cholwell’s Chicken with the same main character, Jean Parlier. Cholwell’s Chickens is one of the very few works by Vance where he portrays a stand-alone female main character, in this instance, Jean Parlier, an attractive, vivacious, charismatic, clever 17 year old girl who is also very savvy and independent. She is “wary and wild, characterized by a precocious feral quality, a recklessness that made ordinary women seem pastel and insipid.” Jean finds that the wealth she acquired in the story "Abercrombie Station" has not brought her the contentment she had anticipated.  She never knew her parents because she was abandoned in a bar and raised by the bar owner. Jean thinks that finding her parents now might bring some meaning and direction to her life so begins to make plans to try to search out who her parents might be. While visiting at her attorney's office (he is also her guardian) she encounters a Dr. Cholwell who is “lean, bright-eyed, elegant in a jerky bird-like manner” and has an unusual scheme for becoming rich on his home planet raising chickens.  He needs an investor so tries to convince Jean and her guardian that his chicken ranch would make a great investment. Jean is planning to fly to the town where she was born in an effort to locate her long lost mother who abandoned her in a bar and Cholwell's ranch is on the same planet so he invites her to visit.  While there Jean finds out that it is not chickens Cholwell is raising but something far different.  In attempting to locate her mother, and possibly her father, Jean also finds herself.  More accurately she finds "her selves" as she encounters some mysterious secrets and conspiracies that have remained hidden for many years. This is a very odd story. I’ve read it three times and rated it a 4 (Really liked it.)

Note: Cholwell’s Chickens is near the border between being a novella or a novelette but The Internet Speculative Fiction Data Base lists is as a “novella.”  The standards for the Science Fiction Writers of America also lists novellas as usually being between 53 and 121 pages, although the standard goes by words rather than pages. Cholwell’s Chicken is only 47/50 pages long in my copies. But because it is on the border and the ISFDB lists it as a novella it is listed here too as a novella.