Like Cabell, Vance in this book (and of course others) declined the chance at world-building, preferring instead to construct scenarios which the reader is forced to accept purely on their own terms. ... Well, that was OK, I guess, quite fun in places, but, er, so what?

Instead of a thinly rationalized displacement of the opulent East or some other mundane historical epoch to an extraterrestrial setting, Big Planet was fully thought through, its ecology, economics, technology, and political organization carefully formulated, so much so that the conviction persists that it is not the characters who serve as the book's protagonists, but rather Big Planet itself. ... Within larger contexts of idealism radically challenged and the powerful rendered powerless, Vance makes many telling points as his richly dramatic adventure story unfolds.