Quotes:

Fair was immensely stimulated. The notes assured him that he was on the right track and further indicated a number of blind alleys from which Fair profited by avoiding. He applied himself so successfully that before the week was out he had evoked a sprite of the green cycle. It appeared in the semblance of a man with green glass eyes and a thatch of young eucalyptus leaves in the place of hair. It greeted Fair with cool courtesy, would not seat itself, and ignored Fair’s proffer of coffee. After wandering around the apartment inspecting Fair’s books and curios with an air of negligent amusement, it agreed to respond to Fair’s questions.

He found Gerald McIntyre at a wayside service station in the heart of the South Dakota prairie. McIntyre was sitting in an old wooden chair, tilted back against the peeling yellow paint of the service station, a straw hat shading his eyes from the sun. He was a magnetically handsome man, blond of hair, brown of skin, with blue eyes whose gaze stung like the touch of an icicle.

Republised in The Moon Moth and Other Stories, Spatterlight, 2012

Foreverness indicates that at the time of writing (1970) Vance was in Ireland. [ref]

The first publication in The Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction (February and March 1971) involved a version that was shorter than the novel. (ref: colophon Durdane, 1976 Meulenhof)

The first book publication was as The Anome in 1973 by Dell Publishing. [ref]

The first publication in French was also serialized (in three parts, 1973). [ref]

Plot intro from Wikipedia:

It tells the story of a boy growing to manhood in the land of Shant, a society composed of many different, and wildly individual cantons, some of which are run by cults. Each adult wears an explosive torc which can be detonated by remote command, bringing about instant death by decapitation. The torcs are controlled by an anonymous dictator, the Anome, whose identity is literally unknown. Because those whose heads are exploded are selected primarily by the cantonal leaders, for violations of local law, the Anome is able to operate with only a handful of assistants, or ‘Benevolences’, who themselves do not know his identity. (accessed 7 March 2019)

First publication was in The Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction, May and July 1973. (ref: colophon Durdane, 1976 Meulenhof)

First book publication in 1974 by Dell Publishing. [ref]