Big Planet
Jack Vance
 Big Planet had been colonized hundreds of years prior to the start of the novel by misfits, faddists, cultists and anti-government advocates from Earth. It devolved into a large number of technologically backward societies, many of them ruled by petty tyrants and prey to internecine warfare. Investigators from Earth, headed by protagonist Claude Glystra, arrive to start putting things right – to stop the importation of arms and halt Big Planet's slave trade – only to have their starship sabotaged. It crashes near a quaint village called Jubilith, and Glystra, one of the survivors, awakens to the jewel-bright morning light of a flowery mountain slope--with a view "vast beyond Earthly conception." Unfortunately, Jubilith is near the territory of Charley Lysidder, the Bajarnum of Beaujolais, one of the worst and most ambitious of tyrants. The survivors attempt to reach the only safe spot on Big Planet, Earth Enclave, forty thousand miles away. Already at odds with each other, the dwindling team begins to revert to the social level of the rest of Big Planet as Lysidder tries to pick them off. Among the many societies benign or bizarre that Glystra and his companions encounter along the wind-driven monoline (their version of the yellow brick road), is the quasi-utopian society of Kirstendale. At first, it appears to be based on snobbish principles, but an odd twist reveals it to be surprisingly egalitarian.