This volume might have been titled "The Early Jack Vance," as it features stories from the first dozen years of Vance's career, when his major outlet was pulp magazines. In these stories, Vance already displays the lively imagination and mastery of the English language that came to characterize his entire career.
The World-Thinker
, Vance's first published story, features two types who would recur often in Vance's writing: the assured and competent hero, and the feisty, equally-competent heroine. They deal with an entity who, like Vance himself, creates fully-formed worlds at will.