The lengthiest citations from it appear, with varying degrees of apparent relevance, as epigraphs to various chapters in the Demon Princes novels.
(Vance characteristically makes use of substantial passages from imaginary writings, interviews or judicial transcripts as chapter-heading material, especially in that series.)
In a footnote in Night Lamp Vance informs us, perhaps definitively, that the Baron's great work Life consisted of twelve volumes (earlier novels suggest six or ten) and that it was in nature a ‘philosophical encyclopedia’.
Although Bodissey often expresses himself in pompous language, many of his dicta (a selection is given below) appear good sense, and it may be that he serves, at least occasionally, as a mouthpiece for Vance's personal opinions.
An overly zealous cultural anthropologist and ethnologist named Kalikari Stone, Baron Bodissey, working on a grant from the Historical Institute of Naval Research on the planet Riverain, appears in Hayford Peirce's novel The Thirteenth Majestral (1989), a pastiche written in the manner of Jack Vance.