I’ve completed a fourth draft of Barbarians of the Beyond, the authorized sequel to Jack Vance’s The Demon Princes, and have sent it off to John Vance at Spatterlight Press for his perusal.

Just to be clear, this is not the further adventures of Kirth Gersen, after his enemies “deserted” him.  It does take place mostly on the world Providence, where the community once known as Mount Pleasant has been reoccupied by a mild-manner cult from one of the worlds of the Rigel Concourse.

But the protagonist is a young woman whose parents were enslaved by the Demon Princes and ended up deep in the Beyond, in the household of a notorious pirate.  She escapes and comes to Providence on a mission to recover a precious object with which she hopes to buy her parents’ freedom.

But then, as they do, things get complicated.  The book is intended to appeal both to Vance aficionados and to my own fans, two categories that overlap in any Venn diagram.

I’m pretty proud of it, and grateful to John Vance for the opportunity to dig in his father’s garden.