Tschai, the setting for the quartet of novels which commences with The Chasch (originally City of the Chasch), is a planet inhabited by a variety of alien species coexisting uneasily with humans - the Chasch, the Wannek, the Dirdir and the Pnume.

All Jack Vance titles in the SFGateway use the author's preferred texts, as restored for the Vance Integral Edition (VIE), an extensive project masterminded by an international online community of Vance's admirers. In general, we also use the VIE titles, and have adopted the arrangement of short story collections to eliminate overlaps.