The Dragon Masters (part one)

This review was commissioned by @krinsbez.


Jack Vance is a name I've heard repeatedly over the course of my life, but that I'd never happened to read anything by. In modern pop culture discourse, he's probably best known as the creator of "Vancian magic," a concept introduced in his "Dying Earth" stories that was borrowed by Gary Gygax to be the basis of spellcasting game mechanics in Dungeons & Dragons. Considering how foundational DnD was to hobby gaming as a whole, Vance can be seen as a major contributor-by-proxy to the gaming medium, even though he never engaged with hobby gaming himself to the best of my knowledge.

"The Dragon Masters" is one of Vance's older works, having been originally published in Galaxy magazine in 1962 and then republished in novella form the following year. It was also the work that earned him the first of three Hugo awards he would win throughout his career. Having now read my way through about a third of the novella, I have to say, he absolutely deserved those awards. In fact - going by "The Dragon Masters'" example at least - it's a genuine shame that his works aren't better known on their own merits rather than the influence they had on other things.

Although, speaking about influence on other things, there are some aspects of this story that really, really felt like they might have precipitated Anne McCaffrey's "Dragonriders of Pern" series, the first book of which was published five years after this. The descendants of human colonists, regressed to a pre-industrial technological level who remember other worlds only as ancestral myths, who have bred an alien life form into "dragons" for use as warbeasts, while the cyclical motions of a red star overhead bring an inexorable threat. Honestly, when I put it in those words, I figure I should probably adjust that "might have precipitated" to "definitely inspired." There is no way in hell that this novella didn't inspire the Pern stories. All the way down to the "what looks like magic is actually just no-longer-understood technology" aspect that Pern gets credit for allegedly pioneering.

This story is way darker than the DoP ones, though. The mundane, unquestioning, matter-of-fact way in which the POV characters (and to a degree, the narrative itself) handled horrifying atrocities makes them simultaneously easier to stomach, and more disturbing. This is, above all, a story about slavery, and it doesn't shy away even remotely from confronting the full extent of depravity that this entails.

It's also way weirder than the McCaffrey books, which isn't a statement to make lightly. "The Dragon Masters" takes place in an incredibly detailed, complicated world with a detailed, complicated history that contains quite a number of very strange and far-out scifi elements. It also commits itself strongly to a "show don't tell" style of exposition, so the reader spends a good part of it overwhelmed by all the weirdness they're being immersed in. Despite this, it never came close to losing me. As weird and unexplained as everything was, the parcelling out of mysteries and answers is handled just tightly enough that the reader never loses track of what's going on, even if there are a couple moments toward the beginning where it comes close. It also, in the way that a lot of mid-century scifi stories did, is as much about speculative sociology as it is alien life or future technologies.

It was easier to be original back then, when there was less science fiction and fantasy already out there on the market, but reading "The Dragon Masters" makes me feel sure that there's fertile ground still waiting to be tilled by authors with sufficient imagination.


The planet Aerlith is a world of grey rocks and harsh canyons, whose long diurnal cycles ensure that violent storms take place every dawn and dusk. The indigenous life is sparse. The air is breathable though, and at least two waves of human colonists have settled here. The first were a religious organization, an order of pacifistic, fatalistic techno-monks called the Sacerdotes. The second were refugees, fleeing an interstellar war that humankind was clearly losing. The former have retained some scientific ability and working technology, albeit in highly ritualized and rigid applications. The latter have regressed to ox-ploughs and muskets. The Sacerdotes live deep underground, and keep themselves aloof from the refugee population, engaging in only minimal trade and conversation. The refugees, in turn, regard the Sacerdotes as something akin to fair folk.

It isn't just being cut off from interstellar supply lines that caused the refugees to regress so severely, though. Every few centuries, Aerlith's orbit brings it close to another planet's in the neighbouring Coralyne system. Whenever that happens, alien ships descend upon Aerlith to capture humans by the thousands, and then bomb any nascent industrial hubs or tech labs to rubble before leaving (the Sacerdotes in their hidden bunkers are mostly safe from these depredations. The low-tech refugees living on or near the surface are very much not). The captives are subjected to genetic manipulation and selective breeding to integrate them into one of several posthuman slave-races that the aliens depend on for labour.

During the last of these dread conjunctions, a human warlord pulled off a clever bit of guerilla warfare that led to his forces capturing twenty-some alien hostages. His initial goal was to negotiate for the release of the humans held aboard their ship, or the end of alien raids on Aerlith, or at least for some technology. However, with the loss of their masters, the posthuman slaves aboard the landed spacecraft panicked, and somehow ended up blowing up their ship along with all the fresh captives aboard. During this set of interactions, we get some intriguing - and disgusting - insight into how the alien slavers and the posthuman chattel see themselves and their roles in the world. Like this speech from a posthuman "weaponeer" who tries to negotiate with the Aerlithians without the freedom of thought to even know what negotiation is.

The concept of his masters - the Revered, as their slaves know them - ever having to make concessions, ever having to accept a loss or even an inconvenience - is not one that he is capable of keeping in his head. He believes that the captive Revered must be released because for a Revered to not be free and in power is a flaw in reality itself. The universe has a shape to it, and a deformation of that cosmic order threatens to annihilate all of reality in a cataclysmic chain reaction.

It is the weaponeer's failure to get the captive Revered back that causes him and his shipmates to go mad and set off the self-destruct.

After the ship is destroyed, we get a brief alien POV. It turns out that the Revered - or greph, as they are known to their peers - are also believers in the self-deifying religion they've conditioned their slaves into.

If they were defeated and made powerless, then that means they must have never actually been greph at all. Some bizarre mutation, of a metaphysical rather than biological nature.

It's a really stark illustration of how propping up unjust hierarchies requires a rejection of empirical reality. To run this insane system of theirs, the greph needed to become, themselves, insane. It just isn't obvious how far off the deep end they've gone until the cognitive dissonance actually confronts them face to face.

Also, this story comes with illustrations:

Flash centuries forward, when the next close pass with the nearby greph planet is due. Those two-dozen odd greph have decided that they aren't actually greph - aren't actually people in their culture's reckoning - and their human captors weren't inclined to argue. It also turns out that greph lay eggs en masse, and mature much more quickly than humans do, which means that the human refugees - even without any advanced biotechnology - were able to do to this handful of greph what the greph do to their own human slaves much faster and much more thoroughly and grotesquely. The incest from the founding population of 23 probably made it even worse. Full on "All Tomorrows" shit.

This one is for riding:

This one is for war:

This one is to kill the ones that are for war:

Etc.

The different breeds vary in intelligence. All of them are dumber than humans, but some can use simple tools and weapons, while others have been reduced to full-on animalism. For some reason though, while these mutants are broken and servile by day, something about Aerlith's long nighttime periods seems to trigger a latent wilfulness and resentment of their masters in the postgreph. As such, they must be kept locked up and restrained when the sun isn't overhead.

Collectively, these postgreph slaves are known as dragons, and the human warlords and princes who own large numbers of them are called dragon-masters. The novella's title is a double-entendre, referring both to the humans who own dragon slaves, and to the looming threat of the return of the baseline greph - the "dragon masters" in the other sense. "Dragons" who themselves are masters.

The main POV characters for at least the first third of the novella are noblemen from the surface-dwelling refugee humans. At least fourteen human generations have passed since the last greph raid, and ownership and use of dragons is so normalized and unquestioned by these characters. The story is incredibly mundane, down-to-earth, and normalized in its depiction of this status quo. Additionally, while the human "dragon masters" haven't defined themselves by their mastery to the degree that the greph have, we are shown that the normalization of this eugenic nightmare-slavery has nonetheless had pernicious effects on their culture and worldview. The two main POV characters for the early novella - the rival lords of two neighbouring valley-towns - communicate with one another mostly using merchant proxies, and these merchants are gleefully open in dealing in human children as well as dragon eggs.

There's one scene in particular where the more sympathetically portrayed of the two POV noblemen - a forward thinking, intellectual sort named Joaz Banbeck - has this mental aside about his concubine and sort-of audience insert:

On its own, I'd think this a typical-of-its-time creepy sexist aside by its typical-of-his-time creepy sexist author. In the context of a story about eugenic slavery though, it seems much more intentional, and implies the deep fucked-upness that the otherwise sympathetic Joaz was raised in and shaped by.

Anyway, that's all backdrop. Quite an elaborate one for a standalone novella-length work, like I said. As for the actual plot now...

Joaz Banbeck, of Banbeck Verge, and Ervis Carcolo, of Happy Valley, are heirs to longtime rival dynasties over neighbouring valley-princedoms. In recent times, the Carcolos have been investing heavily in military expansion, using an ever-growing percentage of their agricultural production to feed dragons, and moving many of their peasants out of their caves and into huts and houses among the fields on the surface to make room for more dragon breeding and containment facilities. "Happy Valley" has become an increasingly ironic name for the place, really. Joaz Banbeck, on the other hand is most concerned with the upcoming stellar conjunction, which his research suggests may herald doom from the skies as it did in ages past. Alarmingly, one morning Joaz's mistress discovers a Sacerdote poking around in his astronomy lab, in which he keeps an ancient stellar cartography device that may be one-of-a-kind on modern Aerlith. If the Sacerdotes with their greater knowledge and understanding are breaking into his fortress to look at his auto-updating spacemap, Joaz concludes, then that's strong evidence that his theory is correct; the "basic dragons," thought by some to be a mere legend, are about to attack again.

The story effectively splits in two after this point. One subplot has Joaz trying to seek out and wring information out of the Sacerdotes, to see if they know more about the greph and how to defeat them than the refugees do. The other is about Joaz trying to convince Ervis Carcolo to prepare for the impending alien attack instead of prepping for an impending attack of his own against Banbeck Verge. In both of these endeavours, Joaz has only very limited success.

The Sacerdotes have a very, very weird philosophy that seems like it might have branched off the same school of thought as the greph's own supremacist ideology. Like the greph, they have this belief in a cosmic order that challenges to would be unthinkable and ruinous. Rather than placing themselves as the divinely ordained masters though, the Sacerdote version of this religion has themselves as passive observers who are to keep their impact on the course of history to an absolute minimum as they slowly toil away at ascending to an immaterial state of being. Their creed prohibits them from not truthfully answering questions asked of them directly for some reason, but answering some questions might threaten to effect the divinely ordained course of events, so they have become adept at giving evasive, unhelpful answers and lying by omission. This, along with their aloofness and their dwelling much deeper underground, contributes to them being seen as essentially elves or fairies who give odd portents in riddles and must be tricked into helping you via arcane rules of engagement.

After ambushing and (temporarily) trapping the one who keeps breaking into his laboratory, Joaz manages to get a brief audience with their leader, in which the latter is unusually frank. Yes, the greph are coming. Yes, the Sacerdotes might be able to repel them with the hoard of ancient tech they've maintained and still know how to use. No, the Sacerdotes will not be doing so, because they've grown sick of the surface-dwelling primitives with their endless wars and slavery and materialism and are hoping that when the greph come back and see what they've done to their people, they'll exterminate the entire refugee population while the Sacerdotes sit it out underground. Good riddance.

Even more than that, the Sacerdote leader tells Joaz that this will be the seventh greph raid, each of them separated by many centuries of time, and they've heard nothing from any other humans in all that time. In all likelihood, the people of Aerlith are the last humans alive in the universe, besides the posthuman slaves of the greph. The Sacerdotes are more than okay with themselves becoming the one last tiny human culture in existence, on Aerlith or in general.

So that's great.

Meanwhile, Joaz tries to convince Ervis Carcolo that the people of Happy Valley with their low food supply and disproportionately surface-dwelling population will be very vulnerable to the greph. It would be in their best interest for Ervis to downsize his dragon herd (read: "murder most of his animalized slaves") and move his people back underground. Ervis responds by launching his attack on Banbeck Verge even sooner than he'd planned to.

Joaz's forces manage to inflict disproportionate casualties on Ervis' army, using a variation of the same guerilla tactics that their ancestors used to capture the ancestors of their "dragons" centuries ago. However, Ervis just has too many dragons and too many desperate soldiers to be defeated. Joaz's saving grace (for some value of that term...) comes when, during the final battle, Ervis receives word that a flying ship matching the ones from the legends has appeared over Happy Valley and is helping itself to the vulnerable, unsheltered populace.

If this story had been written a few decades later, I'd almost suspect this was a climate change parable.


So, that's the first third of the story, and the first of either two or three review posts for it (depending on how intricate the remaining 2/3rds are. The first part may just be frontloaded due to all the setting lore that needed explaining).

So far, I'm really impressed with this one, especially the way it balances all this high-concept nonsense on the knife's edge of "show-don't-tell" and "don't-bury-the-reader-in-unexplained-gibberish." It's a really hard thing to pull off with this kind of story, but it does it.