This book was very hard to rate, since one part of it (the plot and intrigue) was very good, while another (the dialogue and characterisation) was dismal.

I didn't know this was going to be a mystery, so the sudden appearance of one gave me a new lease of interest on what had so far appeared to be the story of Glawen cruising his way through life and meeting with very little in the way of challenge.

Soon I was engrossed in the web of mysteries, which were very skillfully handled, with minor details often becoming significant only much later. This alone would give the book re-read value, if not for...

All the dialogue was written in a bafflingly verbose and obscure manner, almost as if the author were a skilled second language speaker of English with a vast vocabulary but an incomplete grasp of nuance. In fact, I actually googled the author to check if that was the case (no).

Then I thought maybe it was done on purpose to show how alien the culture of Cadwal is to our own, but then why does everyone speak this way? Why does a precocious 10-year-old girl speak the same way as a grizzled old cop, who speaks the same way as a bunch of 20-year-olds ribbing each other? I couldn't get a full sense of the characters or the personalities of the different houses because there was no variety.

Other issues were the somewhat weird ideas Jack Vance seemed to be presenting. The Yips had an air of "yellow peril" and I'm not sure the author doesn't think exterminating them wouldn't be a fine solution to the Yip "problem". The police force is a corrupt old-boys club that practices summary execution and blackmail and that seems to be promoted as a good thing. Peace and love types are mocked as daft idealists.

I'm so torn about whether I want to continue this series! I want the rest of the plot, but I definitely don't want more of the pompous jerk that Glawen seemed to morph into once he left his home planet, and I don't know if I can deal with more of that weird stilted dialogue. ( )

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. ( )

eindelijk weer eens een leuk boek van de hand van Jack Vance ( )

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. ( )

Solita grandiosa creazione di Vance, non solo un intero pianeta dal punto di vista ecologico, ma anche la complessa società della (pur piccola) stazione, una lunga serie di misteri ed intrighi e una serie di esotiche avventure del protagonista principale.
Pecca un lungo inizio molto lento ed anche noioso. Per il resto gran bella lettura. ( )