This brings together five of Vance's early short stories, which have (very broadly speaking) a common theme running through them:

   When the Five Moons Rise: more to this one than meets the eye, so to speak: it's about the way we perceive the world, as opposed to the way it actually is;
   Worlds of Origin: a science fiction murder mystery in which the differing traditions of alien societies—particularly their various views of 'right' and 'wrong'—are clues as to who killed the anthropologist studying them;
   A Practicle Man's Guide: a reality-altering invention (and it is 'Practicle' not 'Practical');
   The Men Return: the most surreal of the five;
   The Devil on salvation Bluff: about missionaries on an alien planet, and what is, or is not, 'mad'.

Four of these are (to my mind anyway) conventional enough. It's the title story which wowed me when I first read it decades ago, and has puzzled me a bit ever since. It is set on an Earth which is passing through a weird region of space where the usual principle of cause-and-effect is no longer reliable: as a result, familiar logic no longer applies; landscapes, air, the laws of nature themselves, are capricious and bewildering; and while there are a few human survivors, behaviour bizarre and random enough to match this random world is what now 'makes sense'.
   What I loved was how different it was from anything else I'd read up to that point (even Vance himself doesn't seem to have written anything else quite like it) and how unclassifiable: is this science fiction? Fantasy then? Or surreal fiction...magical realism...? What has puzzled me most, though, is that when first published (in Infinity SF magazine, 1957) the editor, in effect, almost apologised for including it. I've come across The Men Return a couple of times since too, in anthologies with introductions by the likes of Robert Silverberg and Brian Aldiss, who also as good as apologise ('...you'll probably think this next story mad, but...' etc., etc.)
   I mean, I had no idea there was an outer limit to fiction, beyond which an author isn't really supposed to go. Myself, I wish there was a lot more of this sort of thing out there. ( )