Book details

Book description

The Rapparee is Jack Vance's preferred title for the novel previously published as The Space Pirate and The Five Gold Bands. Five gold bracelets imprinted with cryptic messages were the clues that set Paddy Blackthorn off on a riotous galactic treasure hunt. But Paddy found himself not only the hunter but also the hunted for the armbands had been left to him by his would-be killers, the Rulers of the Five Planets. All Jack Vance titles in Gateway use the author's preferred texts, as restored for the Vance Integral Edition (VIE), an extensive project masterminded by an international online community of Vance's admirers. In general, we also use the VIE titles, and have adopted the arrangement of short story collections to eliminate overlaps. Jack Vance was born in 1916 and studied mining engineering and journalism at the University of California. During the Second World War he served in the merchant navy and was torpedoed twice. He started contributing stories to the pulp magazines in the mid 1940s and published his first book, The Dying Earth, in 1950. Among his many books are The Dragon Master, for which he won his first Hugo, Big Planet, The Anome and the Lyoness sequence.