Jack Vance

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John Holbrook Vance

Jack Vance at the helm of his boat on San Francisco Bay in the early 1980s.
Born: August 28, 1916
San Francisco, California
Occupation: Novelist, Short story writer
Nationality: United States
Genres: Fantasy, Science Fiction

John Holbrook Vance (born August 28, 1916 in San Francisco, California) is generally described as an American fantasy and science fiction author, though Vance himself has reportedly objected to such labels. Most of his work has been published under the name Jack Vance. Vance has published 11 mysteries as John Holbrook Vance and 3 as Ellery Queen. Other pen names include Alan Wade, Peter Held, John van See, Jay Kavanse.

Among his awards are: Hugo Awards, in 1963 for The Dragon Masters and in 1967 for The Last Castle; a Nebula Award in 1966, also for The Last Castle; the Jupiter Award in 1975; the World Fantasy Award in 1984 for life achievement and in 1990 for Lyonesse: Madouc; an Edgar (the mystery equivalent of the Nebula) for the best first mystery novel in 1961 for The Man in the Cage; in 1992 he was Guest of Honor at the WorldCon in Orlando, Florida; and in 1996 he was named a SFWA Grand Master.

He is generally highly regarded by critics and colleagues, some of whom have suggested that he transcends genre labels and should be regarded as an important writer by mainstream standards. Poul Anderson, for instance, once called him the greatest living American writer "in" science fiction (not "of" science fiction).

Contents

[edit] Biography

Vance's grandfather supposedly arrived in California from Michigan a decade before the Gold Rush and married a San Francisco girl. (Early family records were apparently destroyed in the fire following the 1906 San Francisco Earthquake). Vance grew up in San Francisco, and then on a farm near Oakley in the delta of the Sacramento River. He was an avid reader. He left high school early to work as a bell-hop, in a cannery, and on a dredger before entering the University of California, Berkeley where over a six-year period he studied engineering, physics, journalism and English. During this time he worked for a period as an electrician in the naval shipyards at Pearl Harbor, Hawaii.

Vance graduated in 1942 and did war service as a seaman in the Merchant Marine. Contrary to a tenacious legend, he was not torpedoed twice nor even once. This was possibly invented in the early days by an editor to enhance Vance's attraction in a blurb.[citation needed] In later years boating remained his favorite recreation; boats and voyages are a frequent theme in his work. He worked as a seaman, a rigger, a surveyor, ceramicist, and carpenter until he could establish himself fully as a writer, which did not occur until the 1970s.

Jack Vance playing the jazz banjo and kazoo in 1979 in San Francisco
Jack Vance playing the jazz banjo and kazoo in 1979 in San Francisco

From his youth Vance has been fascinated by jazz. He is an amateur of the horn and banjo. His first published writings were jazz reviews for The Daily Californian, his college paper, and music is an element in many of his works.

In 1946 Vance met and married Norma Ingold. They live, with their son, in Oakland, in a house built and extended by Vance himself over the years, which includes a hand-carved wooden ceiling from Nepal. The Vances have made several extensive world-voyages, often spending several months in places like Tahiti, Positano (in Italy) and a boat house in a lake in Kashmir.

Vance began trying to become a professional writer in the late 1940s, in the period of the San Francisco Renaissance--a movement of experimentation in literature and the arts. There are various references to this Bay Area bohemian life in his work.

Science fiction authors Frank Herbert and Poul Anderson were among Vance's closest friends. The three jointly owned a houseboat which they sailed in the Sacramento Delta. The Vances and the Herberts lived in Mexico together for a period.

Although legally blind since the 1980s, Vance has continued to write with the aid of special software, his most recent novel being Lurulu.

Vance was also a member of the Swordsmen and Sorcerers' Guild of America (SAGA), a loose-knit group of Heroic Fantasy authors founded in the 1960s, some of whose works were anthologized in Lin Carter's Flashing Swords! anthologies.

[edit] Vance’s Work: An Overview

Since his first published story, "The World-Thinker" (Thrilling Wonder Stories), in 1945, Vance has written over sixty books. His work is regarded as falling into three categories: science fiction, fantasy and mystery (though Vance himself reportedly deplores these labels).

Among Vance's earliest published fiction is a set of fantasy stories written while he served in the merchant marine during the war. They appeared in 1950, several years after Vance had started publishing science fiction in the pulp magazines, under the title The Dying Earth. (Vance's original title, and the one used for the Vance Integral Edition version (see below), is Mazirian the Magician.) Vance used the same general setting (a far distant future where the sun is dying, and where magic and high technology coexist) for two sets of picaresque adventures of the ne'er-do-well Cugel the Clever (first published as The Eyes of the Overworld and Cugel's Saga), as well as three stories about a haughty magician (collected as Rhialto the Marvellous). His other major fantasy cycle, the Lyonesse series (Suldrun’s Garden, The Green Pearl, Madouc), recounts events on the Elder Isles, an Atlantis-like archipelago in the Armorican gulf, where dynastic politics and magical doings are set in the early middle ages.

Vance's science fiction runs the gamut from stories written for pulps in the 1940s to multi-volume tales set in the space age. While Vance's stories have a wide variety of temporal settings, a majority of them belong to a period long after humanity has colonized other stars, culminating in the development of the "Gaean Reach." In its early phases (the Oikumene of the Demon Princes series), this expanding, loose and peaceable agglomerate has an aura of colonial adventure, commerce and exoticism. In its more established phases it becomes stolidly middle class.

Vance’s stories are seldom concerned directly with war. Battles do occur in various stories, but generally as a consequence of a political or diplomatic situation. (More extensive battles are described in The Dragon Masters and "The Miracle Workers," and in the Lyonesse trilogy, in which medieval-style combat abounds.) Sometimes at the far ends of the Reach, or in the lawless "Beyond," a planet is menaced or craftily exploited by an alien culture. The conflicts are rarely direct. Humans become inadvertently enmeshed in low-intensity conflicts between alien cultures; this is the case in Emphyrio, the Tschai series, the Durdane series, or the comic stories in Galactic Effectuator, featuring Miro Hetzel. Cultural, social or political conflicts are the central concerns. This is most particularly the case in the Cadwal series, though it is equally characteristic of the three Alastor books, Maske: Thaery, and, one way and another, most of the science fiction novels.

His last two books, Ports of Call and Lurulu (actually one story line stretching across two volumes), portray a picaresque and only occasionally violent voyage through a far sector of the aging Reach.

[edit] Characteristics

The attractions of Vance's writings include his language, which can range from precise and bone-dry ironic to baroque and richly evocative. One of the many charms of his work is the Shakespearean manner in which scoundrels and princes alike bargain and banter in elegant language. He can, in a few well-chosen (or invented) words, evoke alien, complex, absurd, yet thoroughly human societies.

Another of Vance's hallmarks is his use of chapter epigraphs and explanatory footnotes, which supply not only essential background information, but sidelights that have little to do with the main story-line. In the Demon Princes books, one set of epigraphs trace the adventures of one Marmaduke, quoted from The Avatar's Apprentice, a tale from A Scroll from the Ninth Dimension. A common function for a Vancean footnote is to illuminate some strange cultural practice or belief or to explain the meaning of a nearly-untranslatable word that sums up a concept central to the society described, but is likely to be quite alien to the reader.

Vance is also known for filling in the details of his worlds with music, dance, and especially food and drink, all of which are to be found in the taverns and inns that feature prominently in nearly every book. He has even invented games, notably hussade in the Alastor Cluster books and hadaul, a sport that plays a part in The Face.

Commonplace in Vance's works is a village (or planet) whose inhabitants practice with utmost sincerity a belief system that is absurd, repugnant, or both. Besides their picaresque potential, Vance uses these episodes to satirize dogmatism in general and religious dogmatism in particular. Indeed, there is a great deal of the 18th-century philosophe in Vance, who in his Lyonesse trilogy pokes particular fun at Christianity. Where so many peoples over the aeons have held so many disparate beliefs, Vance implies, who has the right to impose his dogma on others? But, in one of paradoxes so typical for Vance, nearly all his heroes are engaged in exactly that — they are constantly forcing their convictions on others, and tend to answer questions about their right to do so with a swordstroke or raygun-blast. They are not interested, however, in promoting religious beliefs, but in basic honesty and ethical behaviour.

This skepticism is tied to Vance's individualism, which is both an ethical and an aesthetic imperative for him and his characters. Thoreau's desire that there be as many different sorts of person as possible seems to be applied in practice in Vance's fiction along with the idea of a world, or a region of space, big enough to encompass all human types (as in Big Planet or the Alastor Cluster novels). His Enlightenment values appear again in his assumption that everyone should be free to realize himself in his own manner, provided that this self-realization doesn't act to the detriment of others.

Vance's villains are often grandiosely creative — and sadistic — personalities who destroy the lives or property of others in order to pursue their own obsessive visions. But after depicting their downfall, Vance sometimes leaves his readers with a lingering sense of regret. His darkly ambiguous hero Kirth Gersen, for instance, after avenging himself on Lens Larque, proceeds to complete Larque's last grand jest, and for similar motives. [1]

Vance favors aristocratic characters for the scope that status or wealth can provide, and he enjoys creating freakishly individualistic aristocratic societies, such as the Rhunes of Marune: Alastor 993 and the Ska of Lyonesse. A favorite theme of his (exemplified in The Last Castle) is the decadent society whose pursuit of aesthetic individualism has left it unable to cope with the challenges of reality, which may require cooperation and sacrifice. This tension recurs in Vance, though sometimes his protagonists find it possible to be both aesthetes and heroes.

But Vance never assumes that aristocracy automatically confers merit. He is ruthless in his satire of pompous notables who think that noble birth saves them the obligation to be gracious or interesting. Pretension is always a vice in Vance. But he always distinguishes between pretension and actual elevation.

Slavery is a common motif in Vance's books. Sometimes it is a straightforward problem: the protagonist is enslaved and must make heroic exertions to escape, as in Slaves of the Klau (also titled Gold and Iron). Elsewhere it represents extreme and pathological political, social, or economic situations. The Dragon Masters and The Last Castle both revolve around cross-species enslavement. In the former, both humans and reptilian Basics have selectively bred their captives into variant forms and treat them as domestic animals and slave-soldiers. In the latter, humans have imported a variety of alien species that they forced into servitude. Both situations generate ironic questions about the nature of freedom and authenticity.

Vance wrote a number of stories and novels that can be regarded as "political." The Brains of Earth (also titled Nopalgarth) is a complex and ironic treatment of attempts to impose rigid ideologies on societies or individuals. The Gray Prince (also titled The Domains of Koryphon) depicts the endless regress of grievances that can come into play in ethnic liberation movements. This book has been accused of political incorrectness because one character is a leader of a tribal people on a planet where interloper-ranchers control the land. But the tribal leader receives a nuanced treatment, and the book finally reveals a "joke" on settlers, revolutionaries, and liberal reformers alike: every human on the planet is an interloper of some sort, and all claims of legitimate ownership are flawed.

The second volume of the Durdane trilogy also deals, to a lesser extent, with political issues. In portraying Durdane's revolution, Vance displays a good understanding of the French revolution and the dangers of fanaticism (his hero just barely keeps things under control). In the Cadwal series, Vance shows how the ecological "Conservators" have converted their bureaucratic hierarchy into an aristocracy of birth and an overlordship of the other inhabitants of the planet. Emphyrio is in part a dystopic treatment of an oppressive pseudo-welfare state that turns out to be a front for alien exploitation.

One of Vance's most explicitly political novels is Wyst: Alastor 1716, which uses two settings to contrast utopian egalitarianism and socialism with individualism and self-reliance. It is one of a series of critical or satirical portraits of over-refined urban societies, going back as far as "Chateau d'If" and To Live Forever and including The Last Castle, "Ullward's Retreat," "Dodkin's Job," "Rumfuddle," and "Assault on a City."

Vance's emphasis on individualism prevents him from being a relativist. Indeed, his values sometimes assert themselves as socially conservative, as with his disdain for homosexual behavior: the few homosexuals in Vance's work are all villains, principally King Casmir of Lyonesse, Faude Carfilhiot and the wizard Tamurello, all from the Lyonesse trilogy. One Dying Earth story, "The Murthe," is especially explicit in insisting that women's and men's natures are different and that any deviations from one's gender norm are to be avoided. This ontological "sexual conservatism" also manifests itself in male-female relations.

Nevertheless, Vance has created lively and heroic female characters, such as Glyneth in the Lyonesse books; after Glyneth marries, she drops offstage for the last book in that trilogy, but is replaced by another assertive female character, Madouc. Further examples of female protagonists quite as capable as their male equivalents may be found in, among other titles, Monsters in Orbit, Ecce and Old Earth, A Room to Die In, The Dark Ocean, Night Lamp, and the short story "Assault on a City," which also features one of Vance's nastier male villains.

[edit] Possible Influences

Vance has spoken of his fondness for the writings of P.G. Wodehouse and a certain influence of Wodehouse can be discerned in some of Vance's writings, especially in his portrayals of overbearing aunts and their easily intimidated nephews. The Wodehouse influence, however, may not be as pronounced as that of L. Frank Baum (see Baum's Vance-like use of stilted dialogue for comic effect in The Tin Woodman of Oz). Whatever the relative weight of these and other models, Vance has proven himself a master of episodic farce in such works as Showboat World, "The Kokod Warriors" (a short story), and the celebrated chapter in the The Book of Dreams in which Howard Alan Treesong returns to his Gladbetook High School reunion to get even.

In an interview published in 1986, Vance stated that "the best way to teach someone to be a writer is to force them to read twenty books I would set out for them": he then names, in addition to Wodehouse and Baum, Cervantes's Don Quixote, Kenneth Grahame's The Wind in the Willows, Richard Adams's Watership Down and The London Times Historical Atlas ("my favourite book - I don't know of anything more clutching for the imagination").

Vance has no manifest ancestor in English-language fiction, but some intriguing parallels in tone, language, narrative structure and character could be drawn with the novels of Thomas Love Peacock and James Branch Cabell, while Vance's mordantly stylized dialogues are especially reminiscent of Ernest Bramah's Kai Lung tales. Similarities can also be discerned in some of the writings of Washington Irving, who had a Vance-like fascination with rogue personalities and an ability to describe their competition and machinations in arch language and with a wry humor. Additionately, the Zothique cycle of short stories by Clark Ashton Smith clearly influenced to some degree The Dying Earth.

[edit] Mystery fiction

Between the late 1940s and the 1960s, Vance wrote fourteen mystery novels that appeared irregularly from the mid-1950s through the 1980s. Some of them are set in and around his native San Francisco. The "Joe Bain" stories (The Fox Valley Murders, The Pleasant Grove Murders, and an unfinished outline published by the VIE) are set in an imaginary northern California county; these are the nearest to the classical mystery form, with a rural policeman as protagonist. Bird Island, by contrast, is not a mystery at all, but a Wodehousian idyll (also set near San Francisco), while The Flesh Mask or Strange People… emphasize psychological drama. The theme of both The House on Lily Street and Bad Ronald is solipsistic megalomania, taken up again in the "Demon Princes" cycle of science fiction novels. Bad Ronald was made into a TV-movie, which aired on ABC, in 1974.

Three books published under the Ellery Queen pseudonym were written (and rewritten by the publisher) to editorial requirements. Four others reflect Vance’s world travels: Strange People, Queer Notions based on his stay in Positano, Italy; The Man in the Cage, based on a trip to Morocco; The Dark Ocean, set on a merchant marine vessel; and The Deadly Isles, based on a stay in Tahiti.

The mystery novels of Vance reveal much about his evolution as a science-fiction and fantasy writer. (He stopped working in the mystery genre in the early 1970s, except for science-fiction mysteries; see below). Bad Ronald is especially noteworthy for its portrayal of a trial-run for Howard Alan Treesong of The Book of Dreams. The Edgar-Award-winning The Man in the Cage is a thriller set in North Africa at around the period of the French-Algerian war. A Room to Die In is a classic 'locked-room' murder mystery featuring a strong-willed young woman as the amateur detective. Bird Isle, a mystery set at a hotel on an island off the California coast, reflects Vance's taste for farce.

Vance's two rural Northern California mysteries featuring Sheriff Joe Bain were well received by the critics. The New York Times said of The Fox Valley Murders: "Mr. Vance has created the county with the same detailed and loving care with which, in the science fiction he writes as Jack Vance, he can create a believable alien planet." And Dorothy B. Hughes, in The Los Angeles Times, wrote that it was "fat with character and scene." As for the second Bain novel, The New York Times said: "I like regionalism in American detective stories, and I enjoy reading about the problems of a rural county sheriff... and I bless John Holbrook Vance for the best job of satisfying these tastes with his wonderful tales of Sheriff Joe Bain..."

Vance has also written mysteries set in his science-fiction universes. An early 1950s short story series features Magnus Ridolph, an interstellar adventurer and amateur detective who is elderly and not prone to knocking anyone down, and whose exploits appear to have been inspired, in part, by those of Jack London's South Seas adventurer, Captain David Grief. The "Galactic Effectuator" novelettes feature Miro Hetzel, a figure who resembles Ridolph in his blending of detecting and troubleshooting (the "effectuating" indicated by the title). A number of the other science fiction novels include mystery, spy thriller, or crime-novel elements: The Houses of Iszm, Son of the Tree, the Alastor books Trullion and Marune, the Cadwal series, and large parts of the Demon Princes series.

[edit] Publication

For most of his career Vance's work suffered the vicissitudes common to most writers in his chosen field: ephemeral publication of stories in magazine form, short-lived softcover editions, insensitive editing beyond his control. As he became more widely recognized, conditions improved, and his works became internationally renowned among aficionados. Much of his work has been translated into several languages, including Dutch, French, Spanish, Russian and Italian. Beginning in the 1960s, Jack Vance's work has also been extensively translated into German. In the large German-language market, his books continue to be widely read.

[edit] The Vance Integral Edition

An Integral Edition of all Vance's works has been published in a limited edition of 44 hardback volumes. A special 45th volume contains the three novels Vance wrote as Ellery Queen. This edition, created from 1999 to 2006, under the aegis of the author, was made possible by 300 volunteers working via the internet. The texts and titles used are those preferred by the author. Further information about the VIE can be found at Foreverness.

[edit] Trivia

The system of magic used in some of Vance's work, in which spells are memorized and then forgotten once cast, was borrowed by Gary Gygax for the Dungeons & Dragons role-playing game, in part because it is not similar to any real-world occult beliefs. In homage, Dungeons & Dragons creator Brian Blume named one of the deities of magic in the world of Greyhawk, Vecna (an anagram of Vance).

[edit] Selected bibliography

[edit] Dying Earth series (fantasy)

[edit] Gaean Reach

The following books consist of individual non-series novels in a common shared background.

  • The Gray Prince (alternate title: The Domains of Koryphon) (1974)
  • Maske: Thaery (1976)
  • Galactic Effectuator (collects the Miro Hetzel stories "Freitzke's Turn" and "The Dogtown Tourist Agency")
  • Night Lamp

The Demon Princes, Big Planet, Lurulu, Cadwal Chronicles, Alastor Cluster, and Durdane books listed below apparently also take place within the Gaean Reach/Alastor Cluster universe.

[edit] Demon Princes series

[edit] Big Planet

The Big Planet duo is included within the Gaean Reach setting because Showboat World contains Gaean Reach references. This makes the earlier novel by extension a Gaean Reach book even though it was written before Vance began to use the astronomical terminology of his mature career.[citation needed]

  • Big Planet
  • Showboat World (alternate title: The Magnificent Showboats of the Lower Vissel River, Lune XXIII, Big Planet)

[edit] Lurulu

  • Ports of Call
  • Lurulu

[edit] Cadwal Chronicles

  • Araminta Station (1987)
  • Ecce and Old Earth (1991)
  • Throy (1992)

[edit] Alastor Cluster

  • Trullion: Alastor 2262
  • Marune: Alastor 933
  • Wyst: Alastor 1716

[edit] Durdane trilogy

[edit] Tschai Series (originally published as Planet of Adventure)

[edit] Lyonesse Trilogy (fantasy)

[edit] Non-series novels

  • Slaves of the Klau (original title: "Planet of the Damned"; alternate title: Gold and Iron)
  • Vandals of the Void (young adult novel)
  • To Live Forever
  • The Languages of Pao
  • The Dragon Masters
  • The Houses of Iszm
  • Son of the Tree
  • Monsters in Orbit (two linked novellas)
  • Space Opera
  • The Blue World
  • The Brains of Earth (alternate title: Nopalgarth)
  • The Last Castle
  • Emphyrio
  • Five Gold Bands

[edit] Collections

  • Future Tense
  • The World Between and Other Stories
  • The Many Worlds of Magnus Ridolph
  • Eight Fantasms and Magics
  • Lost Moons
  • The Narrow Land
  • The Augmented Agent and Other Stories
  • The Dark Side of the Moon
  • Chateau D'If and Other Stories
  • When the Five Moons Rise
  • The Jack Vance Treasury

[edit] Books about Vance

  • Jack Vance, ed. Tim Underwood and Chuck Miller (Writers of the 21st Century Series) (NY, 1980)
  • Demon Prince: The Dissonant Worlds of Jack Vance, Jack Rawlins (Milford Series Popular Writers of Today, Volume 40) (San Bernardino, CA, 1986)
  • The Jack Vance Lexicon: From Ahulph to Zygote, ed. Dan Temianka (Novato, CA and Lancaster, PA, 1992)
  • The Work of Jack Vance: An Annotated Bibliography & Guide, Jerry Hewett and Daryl F. Mallett (Borgo Press Bibliographies of Modern Authors No.29) (San Bernardino & Penn Valley, CA and Lancaster, PA, 1994)
  • Jack Vance: Critical Appreciations and a Bibliography, ed. A.E. Cunningham (Boston Spa & London, 2000)
  • Vance Space: A Rough Guide to the Planets of Alastor Cluster, the Gaean Reach, the Oikumene, & other exotic sectors from the Science Fiction of Jack Vance, Michael Andre-Driussi (Sirius Fiction, San Francisco, 1997)
  • An Encyclopedia of Jack Vance: 20th Century Science Fiction Writer (Studies in American Literature, 50), David G. Mead (Lewiston: Edwin Mellen Press, New York, 2002)

[edit] Books emulating Vance

[edit] References

  1. ^ Deserted By My Enemies: Vengeance as a Theme in the Writings of Jack Vance by Martin LaBar
  2. ^ see: All Title Index in Bibliography section
  3. ^ Suns New, Long, and Short: An Interview with Gene Wolfe by Lawrence Person, Nova Express Online, 1998
  4. ^ David Drake's comments on The Sea Hag

[edit] External links

Wikiquote has a collection of quotations related to:


Persondata
NAME Vance, John Holbrook
ALTERNATIVE NAMES Vance, Jack
SHORT DESCRIPTION American Novelist, Short story writer
DATE OF BIRTH August 28, 1916
PLACE OF BIRTH San Francisco, California
DATE OF DEATH
PLACE OF DEATH
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