Night Lamp

Description

Against the backdrop of the Gaean Reach, the widely populated region of space where the full diversity of human development is revealed, the story of Jaro Fath unfolds: from wildling orphan to spaceship captain, a tale of adventure and discovery wittily told. Jaro's life is directed by an inner voice he cannot account for . . . until he returns to Kammerwelt, described in The Handbook of the Planets as the fourth world in the entourage of Robert Palmer's Star, drifting in a far-flung sector of the galaxy known as the Dragon's Maw. Jaro is haunted by memories of his dead mother's terror, and he is about to find out why . . .

John Holbrook Vance was born in 1916 and studied mining, engineering and journalism at the University of California. During the Second World War he served in the merchant navy and was torpedoed twice. He started contributing stories to the pulp magazines in the mid 1940s and published his first book, THE DYING EARTH, in 1950. Among his many books are THE DRAGON MASTERS, for which he won his first HUGO AWARD, BIG PLANET, THE ANOME, and the Lyonesse sequence. He has won the HUGO, NEBULA and WORLD FANTASY AWARDs, amongst others, and in 1997 was named a Grand Master by the Science Fiction Writers of America.

NIGHT LAMP should be cause for rejoicing among the faithful. The remarkable high consistency of Vance's poetic writing, coupled with his extraordinary visions of exotic planets, is one of the treasures of speculative fiction - WASHINGTON POST BOOK WORLD Jack Vance is a peerless creator of strange landscapes, and in NIGHT LAMP he conjures up a kind of Asia among the stars. Buy it. It's cheaper and at least as exotic as two weeks in the sun - FINANCIAL TIMES Vance is near the top of his form in this tale of interplanetary adventure and financial skulduggery ... NIGHT LAMP yields rich rewards in its humorous complexities - PUBLISHERS WEEKLY Jack Vance is the richest of stylists . . . Night Lamp ranks with his very best, the quintessential Vance novel - Interzone