The Potters of Firsk includes the majority of Vance's 'Magnus Ridolph' stories, previously collected in The Many Worlds of Magnus Ridolph. In the VIE edition this book is titled Gadget Stories.
Contents: Planet of the Black Dust, Dead Ahead ("Ultimate Quest"), Hard Luck Diggings, Sanatoris Short-cut, The Unspeakable McInch, The Howling Bounders, The King of Thieves, The Sub-standard Sardines, To B or Not to C or to D ("Cosmic Hotfoot"), Spa of the Stars, The Enchanted Princess ("The Dreamer"), The Potters of Firsk, The Visitors ("Winner Lose All"), Plagian Siphon ("The Uninhibited Robot"; "The Planet Machine"), Dover Spargill's Ghastly Floater, Sabotage on Sulfur Planet, Three Legged Joe, Four Hundred Blackbirds, Sjambak, Parapsyche, Sail 25 ("Gateway to Strangeness"; "Dust of Far Suns").
All Jack Vance titles in the SFGateway 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.
SALES POINTS
* "Only Lord Dunsany could create worlds, names, atmospheres as magical as Jack Vance s; and Vance is a better storyteller." Poul Anderson
* "You can't possibly pass up any book by Jack Vance. He has perfected the trick of creating new worlds so deceptively real that after a while your own home seems imaginary." Jerry Pournelle
* Be warned: reading Vance is addictive. George R.R. Martin
* A modern classic by one of the great fantasy and science fiction writers of the 20th Century. A rare tale of an Earth so far in the future as to be nearly unrecognisable to the contemporary reader. Raymond E. Feist