The Gray Prince

"The Gray Prince" (1974, ISBN 0672519941) is a science fiction novel by Jack Vance.

The overarching theme of the work is the morals of possession of land.

With exception of high mountains and dry deserts, for every square meter of this Earth people have fought, from the first moment that agriculture, or even hunting, came into existence until now. Jack Vance takes this idea, and the idea that such conflicts will continue forever, and explores it in the context of an invented planet called Koryphon.

Plot summary

On the planet Koryphon, several groups live in uneasy coexistence. On one continent, Gaean reach cosmopolitans live, and consider themselves the enlightened rulers of the planet. On the other continent, the descendants of conquering pirates live a pseudo-feudal existence, with earlier arrivals as the underclass, though no labour or tithes are exacted. Some members of this underclass consider their lives have improved since the arrival of the pirates, as they arranged such things as irrigation and prevented tribal wars. Others would prefer everything to go back the way it was before the arrival of the pirates. Matters are further complicated by the presence of two alien races, not considered sentient by humans.

The cosmopolitans protest the situation of the underclass, but the main characters, members of the feudal class, argue that as long as they keep members of one alien race as slaves, they have no right to speak. The main characters are right about the sentience of this alien race, but it turns out that the slaves were in fact rebels plotting to overthrow the human government and murder all members of the other groups. The main characters rescue the cosmopolitans from their slaves.

The cosmopolitans continue to argue for the land possession of the underclass, but are forced to reconsider when members of the underclass admit that they took the land from the slave aliens, whose recent rebellion was violently repressed by all humans. In an ironic twist, it is eventually revealed that the plotting aliens were not indigenous to Koryphon either but stole the land from the second, really indigenous alien race, and those aliens are degenerated beyond sentience, and are nothing but dangerous predators at the time of the novel.

The story is heavily influenced by events of the 1970's in the African country of Rhodesia.