An interesting, complex debut novel from George RR Martin, Dying Of The Light is an old-school planetary romance that reminded me quite strongly of both Cordwainer Smith and CJ Cherryh, oddly enough, though the setting is pure Jack Vance. Worlorn is a wandering world that enjoyed a brief heydey when, passing near a specatcular star system, it was transformed into a festival world where all the primary centres of human civilisation built cities to house thousands and even millions of inhabitants in an extravagant display of wealth and technology. Now the planet is drifting back into the dark and the cold is closing in and only a few last remnants of the festival throngs remain.

One of those remnants, a former lover, summons Dirk t'Larien to Worlorn. Gwen is caught in an odd marriage to a Kavalar, a marriage that in the eyes of Kavalar society, reduces her to the status of property. Furthermore, a particular faction of a die-hard conservative Kavalar holdfast are on Worlorn hoping to revive a forbidden tradition: the hunting of humans for sport. Caught between his love for Gwen, his growing respect for her husband, who is on Worlorn to thwart the hunters and his troubled search for his own sense of self, Dirk becomes enmeshed in the struggle and the divided loyalties and the battle between the old and the new, haunted by the spectre of death on a dying planet.

Martin's strengths as a world-builder and a story-teller are on full display here. The universe he creates is far bigger, richer and deeper than the planet of Worlorn, though nearly all the action takes place there. Did he ever revisit it, I wonder? Did he intend to? His facility for conjuring history and romance and mystery out of a few brief asides and suggestive comments and names is part of what makes him such a pleasure to read. His frank examination of a martial culture, bound by codes of honour and formal bonds and the attraction it holds for both the romantically inclined and the aimless and the lost prefigures the proud medieval chivalric culture of the Seven Kingdoms, as does his unflinching study of its dark side: the horrifying misogyny and the violence inflicted on those deemed unworthy or outside that culture.

The books ends oddly: after a frantic, edge-of-the-seat hunt, there is a period of waiting and then an anti-climax, followed by a coda that ends without a resolution, though not without resolve. It fits the setting and the theme perfectly, though, and speaks to Martin's integrity as a writer and fidelity to his vision. I hope that once the Song is finished he might consider a return to science fiction. It's clearly his first love.