Jack Vance
The Dirdir

You need to be a really skilled and attentive reader if you want to navigate without getting lost in the great confusion of Jack Vance's stories and tales. The 'problem,' if we want to call it that, when dealing with this author is that you must be prepared to expect anything. Gifted with incredible imagination and a clever, ingenious mind, bordering on the artificial in the sense of fireworks, pyrotechnic explosions, and illuminations, is an understatement. Jack Vance, a writer who never creates linear plots, makes you lose yourself in his unbelievable constructions of complex and absurd alien societies, towns that are a melting pot of races from every corner of the galaxy and each time all different from each other; Jack Vance, who can literally drive you mad and lose you amidst a sunlit space desert or in the criminal alleys of a town inhabited by dangerous characters at the edge of the impossible. Jack Vance who can create on the spot, as if it were nothing, entire incredible and vast worlds and galaxies. Entire worlds built in the blink of an eye (after all, he was a particularly prolific author) and that can be parodies of the one we inhabit, where humans mingle with alien races that theoretically are so distant, yet you don't know where one ends and the other begins or vice versa; planets where only he could, or rather could, move perfectly at ease and even more so than his own characters who just like the reader, page after page, could never know, do not know even now, what awaits them. As if each time that already written plot could change and hide some unexpected trap.

Here it is: 'The Dirdir' (1969). Translated into Italian and published by Mondadori Urania with a title of classic and late-19th-century charm but at the same time always current because it is always evocative and mysterious, 'I tesori di Tschai', is what can be defined as a typical work of the writer born in San Francisco in the distant 1916 and passed away four years ago in Oakland, the city where he had lived for many years: a short adventurous sci-fi novel with typically entertaining content, an aim that is never deplorable for a literary work, and as such can be intended for an audience of all ages, but where you can still see not only his literary and linguistic skills, his great descriptive abilities and as regards introspection not only of the characters in their uniqueness but also of the behaviors of what we can at this point somehow define as the various 'species' to which the characters who appear in the story belong. His brilliant irony, a characteristic that somehow is never lacking and that more than once he also used to criticize the more conservative structures of American society.

We are faced with essentially a work that if we want to has no contents full of particular ideological meanings, quite the opposite, or that could transcend what is the content of the plot in and of itself. 'The Dirdir' is a work apparently so easy to read and understand in its content for the reader as much as I believe decidedly complicated to conceive and write for its structures and superstructures, those are the different layers necessary to set up not only an entire original story but also the characterizations and detailed aspects of each place and all the characters, both main and secondary, and they are so many that at the end, once the reading is finished, it objectively could be, can very well be difficult to remember them all. Or at least, to be honest, I certainly struggled to remember them all. I don't remember them. Maybe, who knows, because, unlike Jack Vance, growing up I lost that ability to be amazed, to daydream while reading an adventure book. That fascination that then is typical of fairy tales or 'fantasy' novels, and surely this novel could very well be associated with the genre (just as Jack Vance can very well be considered a fantasy genre author, in addition to science fiction), where the reader must actually abandon themselves and get carried away by the story and the narrative abilities, the skill in describing the particulars of this fantastic world, this fairy-tale and imaginative dimension characterized by that component that would be the 'fantasy' in every possible sense.

The plot. We are on Carina 4269, 'a yellowish star', around which orbits a single planet, Tschai, located two hundred and twelve light-years from Earth. The starship Explorator IV, sent to investigate the origin of mysterious radio signals emitted from that area, has been destroyed and its only survivor, Adam Reith, the protagonist of our story, has been saved by Traz Onmale, leader of the Emblem Men tribe and his companion in adventures along with Anakhe-at-afram-Anacho, a Sub Dirdir outlaw. Tschai is an ancient world that has been the scene of wars between three extra-human races, which could be defined as dominant on the planet's surface (since there are others, aboriginals, who live in isolated communities dug under the ruins of old cities): the Dirdir, the most dangerous, the Chasch, and Wankh. Each of the three great races has also absorbed into their communities or enslaved individuals of the human race who ended up taking on the habits and physical characteristics of the host race. The Sub Dirdir, the Sub Chasch, the Sub Wankh...

In short, to cut it short (but the premises regarding the melting pot of races populating the planet is perhaps one of the author's most interesting and enlightened passages, also in light of what recent and increasingly plausible scientific theories would be regarding the birth of life on planet Earth and what would be and would have been the 'interferences' between the biogenetic heritage of our planet and that of planet Mars), the context in which our hero, Adam Reith, moves is not the simplest. Although there is some kind of armistice between the races, they are in fact always hostile to each other, and in particular, the Dirdir among them constitute a veritable race of hunters who can, by their nature, decide to target a prey without a particular reason and make their 'hunt' more than a goal a veritable reason for living and since the main reason of the story will see Adam and his companions engaged in the quest to procure for our hero a spaceship to allow him to return to Earth, it will inevitably result in these being precisely the ones to put a spanner in the works. Especially after what will happen in the so-called 'Black Zone', a sort of free port and at the same time 'Eldorado' of Tschai and considered by the Dirdir as their own hunting territory. Where brave adventurers engage in the search for precious stones which are the common currency on the entire planet and which constitute Adam's last and only remaining possibility to earn what is necessary for him to return home.

It is inevitable to a great extent to consider this novel for what it effectively is, despite the typically science fiction settings, a fantasy novel and where the theme, that of the treasure hunt, if you like, ties in perfectly with this type of imagery. But everything, from mysterious settings to power intrigues and the power plays between the various 'races', certainly refers to that type of imagery made popular by Tolkien and which today is something universally accepted and no longer a matter and fascination for a few 'privileged' ones. And moreover, staying with the novel in question, it is precisely the part relating to this adventure in the Black Zone that is the strong part of a novel that in truth loses some ground in its second part, coming to configure, as it often can happen in Jack Vance's novels, more like a chapter of a larger and practically limitless universe, because limitless was this author's imagination and that if he had the time he would indeed have continued to write stories ad infinitum, as something 'finished' that gives full satisfaction to the reader.

Yet precisely in this sense of 'infiniteness' we can perhaps seek one of the typical reasons for this author, who perhaps today is not as popular and considered as much as other different authors of the genre, like Asimov, Philip K. Dick or Ballard, Heinlein, but who has been equally influential and as said not only for the universe of science fiction, opening himself and entire categories of readers to different and infinite horizons with a style that some have wanted to define anyway as 'mainstream', because it is accessible to every type of reader, because it is not necessarily speculative, because his stories do not require a particular cultural background to be appreciated and can be dedicated, consequently, to various subjects, belonging to different social classes, ages, genders, political ideologies, religions. Something ultimately that someone might superficially mistake, but which in his case I would instead define as universality. Inclusive literature.