Big Planet (Vance)

     Jack Vance Big Planet (1952) A picaresque story set on a large but low-density, metal-poor planet in some far off star system. The Earth settlers have splintered into a variety of societies, all marked by their hunger for metal. A group of Earth officials crash land, and must find their way the Earth Enclave. The book is a failed attempt at creating exotic cultures. Like most adventure-action stories it’s just one damn thing after another; there’s no plot, just a series of events. It was originally serialised in one of the 1950s SF mags, which paid by the word, and tended to edit stories down to the bare bones to minimise their costs (and to increase the number of stories per issue.) This means a loss of all that makes a story of this type interesting: not what happens, but the incidentals that give context and develop character. I stopped reading about half-way through. I just didn’t care what happened to the protagonists. Bomb