The Miracle Workers (part one)

This review was commissioned by @krinsbez


Time for another Jack Vance novella! This one was published in Astounding Science Fiction in 1958, about five years before "The Dragon Masters." This one is also illustrated, albeit a bit more sparsely and by a different (though at least as talented) artist.

Dunno what this one is about, aside from my general knowledge of Jack Vance's work. As it's fairly long, I'll be dividing it into two or three posts.


Having read the first third or so of "The Miracle Workers," I think I see why @krinsbez chose this one next. Vance might have had his favorite themes and concepts, but the setting and backdrop of this story are so similar to "The Dragon Masters" that it's hard for me to not see them as earlier versions of the same thing.

By that same token, I think that TDM benefitted from narrowing its conceptual scope. It might have had a lot going on in it, and some of the moving parts might have felt like they weighed down the story a bit more than they were worth, but "The Miracle Workers" is a much greater offender. Dragon Masters was a borderline case of "too much going on." Miracle Workers is almost a textbook case of it.

Just like last time, our setting is a lost colony settled by deserters and refugees in a losing galactic war that has since regressed to pre-industrial tech levels. Once again, the story begins with feudal warlords armed with swords, a few ancient high-tech trinkets, and a weird warfare-redefining new weapon type that their ancestors obtained sometime since planetfall, doing grimy unromantic wars of expansion to each other. Would you believe me if I told you that there was a third party of cryptic, elf-like beings off in the wilderness who hold the neo-medieval humans in contempt? Yeah, well, there is.

Where the differences come in is also where this story feels like it's doing too much at once. First, there's no bleak dread hanging over the setting because of what has been lost and how few free humans there might still be. These war-refugees are said to have been soldiers who chose to go to ground rather than surrendering, rather than civilians fleeing a genocidal conqueror. The story explicitly says that the martial nature and latent anti-intellectual tendencies of these soldiers played an important role in how their society developed going forward. Implicitly, well...

It doesn't SAY that they were war criminals. The "vengeful enemies" might have just been petty and bloodthirsty. But the way the text also specifies that the anti-intellectualism and militarism were baked into the colonist population from the beginning, well.

Related to the above is that rather than the spacefaring past of the colonists before their technological regression being seen as a long-lost golden age to be looked back on with wist and longing, these people have a very...weird...view of their own history. They have grudging respect for certain unreplaceable artifacts of the past, and they value and guard them jealously despite the respect being grudging. But only the directly weaponizable artifacts, and they also see the people who created that technology - technology that is beyond them in the present day - as primitive and savage. Both because they used outdated concepts like "empiricism," and because those dark age savages didn't have any magic.

Yeah, that's a thing in this story.

Magic is apparently a thing that they only discovered a generation or three after settling this planet and losing contact with the rest of the galaxy. Why that might have happened, the story has not yet revealed. Magic is practiced by an esteemed class of professional magicians, the most accomplished of which are given the title of "jinxman" and hold a social status somewhere between a medieval guildmaster and an early modern mercenary commander. Powerful people, sometimes essentially the power behind the throne, but - for reasons that haven't become clear yet - they never seem to sit on the throne themselves.

The elflike party in this setup isn't an older, higher-tech bunch of humans this time, but rather the native sophonts of the planet. The "first folk" as the humans call them are bizarre insect-mollusc creatures. They have only palaeolithic technology, and - curiously - no "magic" like the kind practiced by the human magicians, despite them having lived on the planet where magic was discovered for infinitely longer. Despite this, they do seem to have some kind of (possibly related?) preternatural control over the nearby plantlife, which they use to create biological defences and refuges for themselves against the human invaders. At some point after making planetfall, humans started expanding into the first folk's inhabited lands and displacing them. This led to the first folk abandoning most of their territory and hiding in the deep forests where they can better defend themselves.

See what I mean about this story having way too much going on for a seventy page novella? "The Dragon Masters" also had a lot of moving parts, but they at least mostly tied back into each other and had a common origin in the ancient human-alien war. It doesn't look like "Miracle Workers" is going to do that, and...it really don't think it's going to have enough space to give all this stuff the breathing room it needs and deserves.

I could be wrong, but I mean...I'm almost a thousand words into this review, and I've only barely managed to summarize most of the background without even getting to the plot or characters yet lol.

So, plot and characters. We start the story in the POV of one Lord Faide, who...well, he's basically the BBEG of the setting. A skilled political power-player and even more skilled military commander, Faide is about to finish the process of conquering the continent, with only one small alliance of city states still standing against him before his army reaches the coast. Faide's ambitions and pace might bring Alexander the Great to mind, but unlike him Faide seems to derive zero pleasure whatsoever from his endless conquests. In fact, he doesn't seem to derive pleasure from anything at all, and even gets annoyed at his underlings when they show too much enthusiasm or sensualism. He's dreading his final victory, because he knows he's going to need to build a new order to keep his vassals in line once the looting kickbacks stop reaching them. His conquests weren't motivated by fear of being conquered by someone else either, as best I can tell. I'm honestly not sure why Faide wanted to take over the world in the first place, and I don't think that he knows either.

If Faide seems weirdly unexcited about his own campaigns, his men are in a far worse situation. Think less Imperial Macedonia, and more Imperial Germany. The human society depicted in this story isn't intrinsically horrifying the way the dragon masters with their eugenic slavery were, but their way of prosecuting warfare is. Largely on account of the military applications of the jinxmen's magic.

The *least* bad part of it is the library of effigies that every jinxman spends their life accumulating. Knights, prominant soldiers, important bureaucrats, family members and loved ones of the ruling nobility, etc. The ruling lords themselves are protected from effigy attacks by treaty, but everyone else is fair game. Typically, before the armies clash, both armies' jinxmen will start setting effigies on fire, and both armies' commanders will do their best to bully and threaten their men into not breaking even as they feel flames licking their bodies and psychosomatic burns start to appear.

The *worst,* meanwhile, are the "demons" that the jinxmen summon. These demons seem to be artificial life forms, psionic entities created by jinxmen through a complicated process. When invokes, the demons possess the bodies of friendly soldiers and grant them superhuman strength, durability, and speed. That is, until the jinxman ends the spell. At that point, the soldiers get control of their bodies back, and all the damage that they've been ignoring and overexertion they've placed on their bodies suddenly falls on them.

Demonic possession is a death sentence; a slow, horrifying permutation of suicide bombing. Every time a major battle if fought, dozens or hundreds of men are sent to this fate by their own commanders with barely a thought.

Lord Faide has been fighting battle after battle after battle, and constantly adding to his collection of pet jinxmen for his ever-more-magic-reliant army. The fact that the men all submissively line up and go to the jinxmen to be possessed when ordered suggests that both a) an even more terrible punishment awaits those who refuse, and b) that defiance against the nobles with their wizard enforcers is known to be futile. And Faide is doing all this for...why, exactly? Seemingly just because he feels like it.

...

An army is a reflection of the civilization it belongs to. Seeing how these armies function and clash paints an incredibly bleak picture of what life is like for the common people of this society.

...

As Lord Faide's army lays siege to one of the last bastions of resistance, the protagonist role in slowly yielded to a much more sympathetic character by the name of Sam Salazar. An apprentice magician to one of Lord Faide's warmages, Sam has a deep interest in the underappreciated wonders of their people's high tech past, and a curiosity about expanding the frontiers of magic and seeking knowledge for its own sake that his culture (and Lord Faide's regime in particular) doesn't encourage. In fact, during the attack on the enemy fortress, Faide deems Sam to be unimportant enough to put on decoy duty, making him dress in his own armor and drive his heirloom hovercar around the perimeter of the battle to draw fire from the defenders' own heirloom laser cannon. Not disposable enough to put on suicidal demonhost duty (and also, being an apprentice magician, he might not be possessable), but disposable enough to be given the next worst job. Sam's own master - one of Faide's jinxmen, a particularly unpleasant demon-specialist by the name of Isak Comandore - has tired of the young man's fanciful experiments and excess of curiosity, and is barely bothered by Lord Faide's decision.

Sam Salazar survives his decoy duties, as it turns out that the defenders' laser cannon hasn't actually been functional in nearly a century. There's also a scene when he's being assigned these duties that really characterizes both him and the social context he exists in:

Another such moment, slightly earlier in the story, is when the army is approaching their target and finds that the first folk have caused a forest to spring up in the area they planned to march through. Sam is part of the party sent to parlay with the first folk (mostly just to help check for traps in the outer forest perimeter until they make contact), and it's very clear to the reader that his thoughts and musings about the situation suggest something that everyone else is missing.

First, while away from his ill-tempered master, Sam tells another, more open-minded, senior jinxman about his experiments trying to make telepathic contact with plants the same way that he can with other humans.

He was, with great effort, able to get what he thought were vague sensory impressions from the plantlife he tried it with. The older jinxman - Hein Huss - accepts that Sam might have actually done what he says he did, even if he doesn't think it's an avenue of research worth pursuing. After all, the more different a creature is from yourself, the harder it is to touch its mind by magic, and plants and humans are about as different as it gets.

Then, when they meet a party of first folk, the aliens tell them that they intend their new forest expansions to be hazardous for humans, and that the fact a human warlord is now here to complain about them is proof that it's working. They manage to appeal to the first folk's hatred of humans in their own favor, pointing out that their army is on its way to kill a lot MORE humans, so letting them through would actually help the first folk more than stopping them. Suspiciously though, the lone first folkscreature that they talk to seem to weigh their arguments and come to a decision unilaterally, in just moments.

Earlier, it was established that the first folk don't have proper magic. However, looking at all these things that Sam is noticing and pointing out, it seems like that might not actually be the case. Pretty much all the magic we see jinxmen use in these early chapters involves psychic connections - reading minds, possessing people with synthetic demon-spirits, sympathetic effigy curses, etc. First folk are weird insectoid aliens. It might just be that they and humans are too mentally different to use magic on each other, which from a human perspective might make it seem like they don't have it at all. Likewise, if Sam's tree experiments were able to get even a very partial success, then that establishes a precedent that proves the principle. Maybe the first folk have done more research on crossing the plant/animal barrier when it comes to telepathy. Maybe they're closely related enough to the trees to easily telecommunicate with them just by virtue of being born of the same planet's biosphere.

It's pretty clear that the individual they met was a first folk magician, and that it was in telepathic contact with their leadership during the conversation. They've perfected magic into something much more reliable and readily usable than what the humans have figured out, and can even use it to control plantlife. They just can't use it directly on humans.

Sam Salazar is probably beginning to figure this out, but nobody else besides the reader is.

After they cross the forest and Lord Faide wins the battle against the human resisters, Sam manages to finagle his passage out of Isak Comandore's tutelage and into the less cruel and more openminded Hein Huss'. I wouldn't call Huss a great guy or anything. He's another senior member of Lord Faide's magical warcrime squad, after all. But, he seems like the least bad of the lot, and at the very least he sees value in having Sam as an apprentice whereas Comandore is on the brink of sacrificing him or something.


Not sure where things are going from here. Like I said, there's a ton going on, and the story isn't that long.

I will say that Jack Vance's ability to exposit via action is nothing short of incredible. This story throws even more wild high-concept crap at you than TDM, but it still, somehow, even when it's at its most busy and overcooked, never crosses the line into overwhelming or impenetrable. It's all readily understandable. Everything explains itself quickly, clearly, and concisely just through demonstration, with only the very rare paragraph of third person exposition ever being needed.

Vance was an absolute master of "show don't tell." I know that that writing principle has come under scrutiny lately, but even if it isn't always the right approach Vance is a perfect example of what it can be good for.

On a random sidenote, this 1950's vintage story has the wizards refer to "mana" as a supply of mystical power that can be used up and replenish over time. The word comes from Pacific Islands shamanism of course, but my understanding is that it being a resource you expend and regain over time is not part of the source mythology. Was Jack Vance the first fantasy author to give magicians recharging spell points and call them "mana?" Did he actually introduce BOTH of fantasy gaming's go-to magic systems? Would be wild if so.

Not sure what else to say until I've read further into the story. Just explaining what it's about is work enough for now!