But without Earth assistance, Big Planet devolved into a world of savage tribes, isolated cities, bizarre societies, primitive technology, frequent wars and cruel tyrants. So, for the last 500 years, Earth has sent commissions to Big Planet—commissions designed to soothe Earth consciences about Earth's inability to stop the spread of torture, terror, anarchy and war on Big Planet.

But the latest commission from Earth is different, because one of the Big Planet tyrants is different. The ruthless and ambitious Charley Lysidder, Bajarnum of Beaujolais, is illegally importing Earth weapons and technologies and using them to subjugate other parts of Big Planet. Lest the whole planet fall under Lysidder's domination, Earth has sent its new commission with new rules—and a secret mission to destroy the imperialistic Bajarnum.

The six-man commission, led by its tough and sharp-minded executive chairman, Claude Glystra, are bound for Earth Enclave, the one place on Big Planet where they will be safe. But sabotage crashes their spaceship 40,000 miles from Earth Enclave and very close to the lands of the Bajarnum of Beaujolais, who knows they are coming, and who has no plans to submit to Earth authority—or to let the Earthmen live.

Waking from fever in the Big Planet village of Jubilith, Glystra finds that his commission-men and two engine-room officers survived the crash. They all know that few (if any) of their number will survive the 40,000-mile trek across this chaos-wracked world to Earth Enclave. Too, there may be a double agent in their midst, loyal to the Bajarnum of Beaujolais. But, with the assistance of a local woman, the Earthmen set out. Soon violent natives and treachery in their own ranks ravage their numbers, and dishonest traders thieve their few belongings, leaving the survivors bereft of supplies and functioning weapons with 39,000 miles left to travel.

The big daddy of planetary romance

The classic period of that form of SF known as the "interplanetary romance" began with Edgar Rice Burroughs' A Princess of Mars (1912; book edition, 1917) and continued into the 1950s. In this period, the interplanetary romance followed Burroughs' "John Carter of Mars" model: A brave and strong Earthman, often a master swordsman, performed valiant deeds and defeated nefarious villains on another planet. Thanks to lower gravity and his steadfast heart, the hero was nearly a superhero, overcoming overwhelming odds as he repeatedly rescued a princess of incomparable beauty and purity, who rewarded him with her heart (if not necessarily her virginity; lustful feelings were reserved for villains). And, despite the subgenre's name, the interplanetary romance took place on a single planet, save perhaps for a brief opening or closing section on Earth. The interplanetary romance followed this "meet-princess, rescue-princess, marry-princess, rescue-princess" formula until 1952, when Jack Vance's second novel, Big Planet, was published.

The book broke the formula in so many ways that the first readers to encounter Big Planet may not have recognized it as an interplanetary romance. True, the novel is set on a single alien world. But the Earthman character is turned into several Earthmen, and the protagonist, Claude Glystra, is no John Carter. Though no weakling, Glystra receives no power boost from lower gravity or near-superhuman steadfastness. And, though brave, he doesn't tackle problems that cannot be solved by a handful of normal humans. When, for example, his party encounters women who view slavery as a step up from their nomadic existence, Glystra lets his men take them as concubines. He does maintain a John Carter-like fidelity to the (non-nobly-born) woman who assists their flight across Big Planet, but it's clear, between the lines, that this pair do not maintain the interplanetary-romance tradition of premarital chastity. And Glystra generally succeeds not through fisticuffs or swordplay, but through luck, more advanced weaponry, his quick intelligence or some combination of the three.

The element that most distinguishes Big Planet from its predecessors is its setting, which is far more fully developed than the mono-environmental worlds of previous interplanetary romances. In contrast to the endless dry ochre seabeds of Burroughs' Mars or the endless violet forests of his Venus, Vance's Big Planet geography ranges far more widely, from Alp-dwarfing mountains to forests, moors, swamps and steppes. Even more diverse are the inhabitants of Big Planet: the unpredictable cannibals of Nomadland, who are descended from Polynesians, Romany gypsies and Kirghiz Turkestanis. The South Cossacks, who are driven homicidally mad by the sight of naked knees. The fraudulent, child-torturing Majickers of Edelweiss, who have a monopoly on the aerial "high-line" ferry across the monster-infested River Oust. The servants and aristocrats of Kirstendale, who share a strange secret. The seers of Myrtlesee Fountain, mysterious oracles who always reveal what the seeker wants to know, yet are never the same person twice. And many other peculiar peoples and places.

In Big Planet, Vance created a profusion of human cultures more bizarre and exotic and carefully detailed—and therefore more believable—than any of the alien races of previous interplanetary romances. In doing this, Vance made Big Planet a character in his novel—one that powerfully shapes what every other character can or cannot do. And by making his planet the most important character in his interplanetary romance as he shattered the formula, Vance created the first planetary romance. This makes Big Planet the father or grandfather of Arrakis, Darkover, Gethen, Helliconia, Ringworld, Majipoor, Ammonite and so many more of SF's most vivid and well-developed alien worlds. Big Planet is one of the most influential novels in science fiction.