Winner Lose All-Jack Vance short story

Winner Lose All-Jack Vance short story

AKA: The Visitors (author’s preferred title)

The Visitors is a 15 page short story that was originally published in December 1951 in Galaxy Science Fiction under the title "Winner Lose All." This is a very imaginative story that features a very inventive, bizarre alien.  Humans visit a newly discovered planet and encounter an alien called a “unigen” who arrived before they did.  The unigen is “an intelligent organism, though its characteristics included neither form nor structure.  Its components were mobile node s of luminous substance which was neither matter nor yet energy.  There were millions of nodes and each was connected with every other node by tendrils similar to the lines of force in macroid space. The unigen might be compared to a great brain, the nodes corresponding to the gray cells, the lines of force to the nerve tissue.” While the human’s explore the planet and its vegetation, the unigen searches out sources of energy and consumes uranium deposits on the planet.  When they have contact with each other each assumes that the other is part of the natural habitat of the planet.  The unigen, for example, thinks the humans are land-worms “evidently seeking the sea-matter on which they fed.” How the humans and the unigen physically and psychologically perceive each other and the way they react provides a fascinating experience for the reader.  Vance is a master at creating other worlds and fascinating alien beings while addressing psychological, anthropological and sociological factors. This story benefits from multiple readings. I’ve read it four times so far and rated this a 4 “Really liked it.”

Included in the Jack Vance collection titled Lost Moons (1982)

Included in the Jack Vance collection titled Gadget Stories (2005) part of VIE

Included in the Vance collection Magic Highways: The Early Jack Vance, Volume 3 (2015 Subterranean)

Included in the Vance collection titled Sail 25 and Other Stories (2017 Spatterlight)