Araminta Station (Cadwal Chronicles, Vol 1)

by Jack Vance

Hardcover, 1988

Status

Available

Call number

813.54

Publication

Tor Books (1988), 554 pages

Description

"The planet Cadwal is forever set aside as a natural preserve, owned and administered by the Naturalist Society of Earth, and inhabited by a very limited number of skilled human scientists and their families. But this system has been complicated by the passing centuries, and has become a byzantine culture where every place in the Houses of Cadwal is the object of savage competition." --provided by Goodreads.

User reviews

LibraryThing member wirkman

I've read this long novel twice. It appears that I can forgive Jack Vance nearly anything. This book has all the plot elements and structure of a Stratemeyer Factory kids' adventure book. And yet the prose, perspective, and even characterizations -- and general inventiveness -- causes the reader to

be drawn in. This is light reading, but suffused, somehow, with greatness. It's not quite like most other popular genre fiction. It is, in fact, almost as if the author had read a how-to manual on contemporary genre fiction, but had no models at hand, other than a few works by Lord Dunsany, James Branch Cabell, and, perhaps, a Ken Holt mystery. Very odd. Very good.

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LibraryThing member clong

An interesting book, despite what for me felt like a bit of a slow start. I kept waiting for it to turn into an all out "good guys fight guerrilla war against bad guys who have usurped control of a distant planetary colony" story, but it remained at its heart a mystery, while raising surprisingly

nuanced ethical questions. Some of the plotting felt predictable, and some aspects of the resolution felt rushed and superficial, and just about all of the characters seem to speak with the same voice, but all that aside, an entertaining and even thought provoking read.

The general consensus seems to be that this series goes downhill from here, but I plan to eventually move on to books 2 and 3.

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LibraryThing member Caomhghin

A rather poor effort which never manages to get together a coherent plot - first it wanders here, then there. The characters talk in a most strange way. A potboiler thrown together.

LibraryThing member BMorrisAllen

Araminta Station has less of the wordplay that makes so many Vance books great fun to read. That's not to say it's not classic Vance - there are strict societies, dispassionate characters, and alien landscapes galore. But the verbiage is somewhat tamer than in other books. At the same time, Vance

focuses more on the detective aspect than usual. In short, this is an excellent SF crime mystery handled with Jack Vance style and panache.

The hero, Glawen Clattuc, is more approachable and 'normal' than many Vance protagonists, but true normality is reserved for Eustace Chilke, a supporting character. This book establishes the setting of the Cadwal Conservancy (a protected planet) and the pressures it faces. However, the scale of the story is mostly focused on Glawen and his struggles with rivals, love, and society. It's probably more of a 3.5 than a 4 on a Vance scale, but really anything by Vance is in a class by itself.

CVIE edition

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LibraryThing member iansales

I first read this many years ago, probably soon after it was published in 1989, which was a few years before I started recording the books I read. For some reason, I never got around to picking up copies of the two sequels, Ecce and Old Earth and Throy, until many, many years later… Then I never

got around to actually reading them. And now, of course, they’re in storage. Happily, all three books of the trilogy are available as ebooks from the SF Gateway, so I picked up the first as a reread. The planet of Cadwal has been declared off-limits to development and is ostensibly policed by a group based at the eponymous station. Which has existed so long its workings have come to define its society. Glawen Clattuc is a teenager likely to take a middling position in the Araminta bureaucracy. But enemies of his father arrange for him to be given a much lower ranking than he deserves. He goes to work for the station’s police force. At a festival, Glawen’s girlfriend disappears, believed murdered and her body shipped off-world in a wine cask. There’s a suspect, but no evidence to charge him. There’s also a plot brewing in Yipton, an offshore community composed entirely of Yips, a human subspecies used as temporary labour at Araminta Station. All of which results in Glawen being sent on a mission to another world, where he ends up imprisoned in a monastery. And that, and the plot in Yipton, seems to link into mutterings about opening up Cadwal for development… I remember reading Vance’s last couple of sf novels in the late 1990s and early 2000s, and being disappointed by them. And the Cadwal Chronicles trilogy were the novels published prior to those. So my expectations weren’t especially high. Happily, Araminta Station proved to be Vance on fine form. It’s busier than most of his other novels, but it’s also better plotted. The characterisation also seemed less arbitrary than I recalled in other novels. And the comic lines were good too.

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LibraryThing member markm2315

A longish space opera that is, essentially, a string of boy's adventures some of which are like those of John Carter himself. Many resemble a police procedural. This is the number one volume of the book seller's delight, a trilogy, and I will read on. All of the plot lines are tied up, but one is

added in the last adventure that serves as a lead into volume 2.
It is always interesting to see how our view of the future is limited by the present. This book is copyright 1988, just before the internet became widely available and before the mobile phone took off. The characters in this book send written letters across space and in one adventure they search for a telephone.

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