Resurrected Review: The Dramaturges of Yan, by John Brunner

Here's another review of John Brunner, who is really one of my favorite SF writers of his era, but oddly more due to his less well-known works. These books, typically fairly short, clearly written somewhat quickly, are not nearly as serious or powerful as his most famous novels, but they are, well, more fun. At least the ones that work! -- he wrote some really weak stuff too.

This is a short review I did for my SFF Net newsgroup back in 2001. It's about a late Brunner novel, from 1972 (though it was serialized in Fantastic in 1971 -- I'm not sure if the book version is longer or not. The magazine cover, by Vaughn Bodé and Larry Todd, is much better than Chris Foss's book cover though!) I haven't made any changes to what I wrote then.

The Dramaturges of Yan, by John Brunner

a review by Rich Horton

Just this past week [back in April of 2001], I read a short John Brunner book I've had sitting around, The Dramaturges of Yan, from 1972.  Ace bills it, rather sillily, as a "worthy successor to Stand on Zanzibar".  Stand on Zanzibar does have worthy successors, but they are The Sheep Look Up, The Jagged Orbit, and The Shockwave Rider.  This book seems a bit tossed-off, maybe for relaxation.  Still, it's not too bad -- much better, for instance, than the other short Brunner book I read a few months ago: The Infinitive of Go, which I thought quite poor.

The Dramaturges of Yan is a very Jack Vance-like book.  It's set on the planet Yan, inhabited by the Yanfolk, who once had a high civilization, which crashed when some disaster, of their own doing, caused their moon to explode and become a ring.  The ensuing (somewhat implausible) rain of meteors made much of the planet uninhabitable. Some 10,000 years later, a small contingent of Earthfolk live in a city on Yan.  Earthmen have a significant interstellar society, built around a matter transmission device called the go-board.  The Yanfolk are the most intelligent aliens they have encountered.  More significantly, they are humanoid and sexually compatible with humans -- it is said that almost every human has tried sex with a Yanfolk, and two long-term relationships are ongoing, particularly that of the poet Marc Simon, translator into humanish of the Yan Mutine epics, and Shyalee.

The story revolves around the arrival of the artist Gregory Chart, whose art consists of, somehow, hypnotizing a whole society into acting out his visions for a few months, perhaps leading to a permanent change.  The conflict is between the humans who desire to welcome Chart, believing that this will enhance the position of Yan in the human galaxy, and those who fear the changes that will result.  It turns out, though, that the major players are the Yan, who have their own purposes with Chart -- they hope to rediscover the ancient powers of their "dramaturges" via Chart's efforts.

It all works out a bit unexpectedly, rather refreshingly so.  This isn't really all that good a book, but it's a nice entertainment, and rather original in some ways, despite the overt debt to Vance.