Vandals of the Void-Jack Vance novel, book review

Vandals of the Void-Jack Vance novel

Vandals of the Void is a 213 page novel published in 1953 by The John C. Winston Company. Vance mentions this novel in his autobiography where he informs us that his wife helped a great deal with the writing of it. Vandals of the Void was written as part of a series for younger readers, but adults need not shy away from it.  It is a fast paced, easy to read, engaging, space opera type novel that should be of interest to most Vance fans.  The protagonist here is a 15 year old, adventurous, precocious boy named Dick Murdock who lives on Venus with his mother but is traveling to the Earth's moon to be with his father who works there as the chief astronomer and is the founder of the "Cosmic Ray Research Institute."  En route Dick hears about a legendary monster called a "basilisk" and encounters a space ship that has been ravaged by space pirates. The tale lacks Vance's witty, engaging dialogue, the plot is fairly simple, and there is minimal character development, but the story moves along quickly and has plenty of action and intrigue. This was a difficult novel for me to locate but is now readily available in a high quality trade paperback edition by Spatterlight Press. Even though this is a very early work and is geared to younger readers, I enjoyed reading it and rated it a 3 "Liked it"