This has a less predictable story than early Vance (say, The Demon Princes) and rather less surreal prose and scenery.
The cultural background is a multiplanetary, generations-old ecological group which has decayed from its original cause, has long dispensed bureaucratic entitlement by inheritance leavened by meritocracy, and is increasingly vulnerable to the temptation to become an aristocratic estate. The idea that each form of government carries the seeds of its own decay is old, of course, but given the recent Nature Conservancy embarrassments this is timely - though it was published in 1988.
ISBN: 0-812-55709-3
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