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Jack Vance

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Jack Vance at the helm of his boat on San Francisco Bay in the early 1980s
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Jack Vance at the helm of his boat on San Francisco Bay in the early 1980s

John Holbrook Vance (b. August 28, 1916 in San Francisco, California; inaccurate alternative birthdates, between 1916 and 1920, have also been cited) 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 Hugo) for the best first mystery novel in 1961 for The Man in the Cage; in 1990 he was named a SFWA Grand Master; and in 1992 he was Guest of Honor at the WorldCon in Orlando, Florida.

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

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 on a ranch in the area of the San Joaquin Valley around the delta of the Sacramento River and was an avid reader of the popular adventure-oriented pulp fiction of the 1920s. He left high school early and worked for some years as a construction worker and bell-hop, in a cannery and on a dredger before entering the University of California, Berkeley where over a six-year period he majored in mining engineering and also studied physics, journalism and English, but took time off to work 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 probably invented in the early days by an editor to enhance Vance's attraction in a blurb.[[Citing sources citation needed]] In later years blue water sailing remained one of his favorite recreations; and ships, boats and/or water voyages are frequently encountered in his novels and stories (either directly, as in Showboat World and Trullion, or indirectly, in the guise of starships and star voyages, as in Ports of Call). He worked as a carpenter for some years while establishing himself as a writer.

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

At university and afterwards Vance was active in jazz bands as a horn player, and his first published writings were reviews of jazz concerts, as a columnist for The Daily Californian. Music of various kinds is an element in many of his works, from grand opera (in Space Opera) to village dance bands (Kirth Gersen poses as a flute player in The Book of Dreams) to the world of Vance's classic short story 'The Moon Moth', whose inhabitants converse in elaborately prescribed modes of song, accompanying themselves on hand-held keyed percussion instruments. Vance is an able player of the jazz banjo and kazoo.

In 1946 Vance met and married Norma Ingold. During the 1950s they travelled extensively in Europe as well as once spending several months in a Tahitian beach house in the 1960s. He has lived most of his adult life in the hills above Oakland, California, not far from Robert Silverberg and Charlie Brown, the publisher of Locus. He began his full-time writing career in the late 1940s, the period in which the San Francisco Renaissance--a broad movement of experimentation in literature and the arts (ranging from poetry through architecture)--was in its early stages. Vance's own references to Bay Area bohemian life (directly in his early mysteries and in disguised form in his science-fiction novels) suggest affinities with this movement although not with its beat-generation wing. Certainly Vance's "Sailmaker Beach," the bohemian quarter of Avente on the planet Alphanor, is an overlay of San Francisco's North Beach, while the mad poet Navarth is said to be based on Kenneth Rexroth. Frank Herbert and Poul Anderson were among Vance's closest friends in the Bay Area science-fiction community and at one point the three jointly owned a houseboat in the Delta region of California.

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

Although Vance has become legally blind in his old age, he continues to write with the aid of special software, his most recent novel being the whimsical Lurulu. He lives high in the Oakland Hills in the same hand-crafted house that he and his wife bought in the 1950s on a steep hillside lot and have continuously up-graded with such amenities as a hand-carved wooden ceiling from Nepal in the tavern-like dining room.

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. Vance himself deplores these labels, and, indeed, his work fits them inexactly. Vance tried hard to become a mystery writer. He wrote fourteen, during about 20 years from the 1940s to the 1960s, which were published irregularly from the mid-1950s to the 1980s. Three were written for ‘Ellery Queen’. Three others are explicitly based on Vance’s frequent world travels (Strange People, Queen Notions based on his stay in Positano, Italy; The Man in the Cage, based on a trip to Morocco; The Dark Ocean, based on a stay in Hawaii). Many others 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 five volume science fiction Demon Prince cycle. Much more celebrated are the 'fantasy' stories. These include a set of stories, written while Vance served in the Merchant Marine during the war, under the title Mazirian the Magician (published as The Dying Earth). In a similar vein Vance wrote two sets of picaresque adventures of the ner-do-well Cugel the Clever (the first set from around 1960, the second from around 1980), as well as three stories about a haughty magician: Rhialto the Marvellous (1970-1980). All these stories are set in a distant future where the sun is going dark, despite which they are antic comedies. The Lyonesse series (Suldren’s Garden, The Green Pearl, Madouc) is not principally humorous. It recounts events on the 'Elder Isles', an Atlantis-like archipelago in the Armorican gulf, dynastic and magical doings are set in the early middle ages. Lyonesse, with Tolkien’s The Lord of the Rings, is considered by many to be the great fantasy work of the 20th century. Vance’s fantasy stories are a primary source of the ‘dungeons and dragons’ roll-playing games themselves an important source of much computer gaming. The ‘science fiction’ runs the gamut of stories written for pulps in the 1940s to multi-volume tales set in the space age. With a few exceptions most of Vance’s ‘science fiction’ is set in a near, far, or very far future, which sees man embark into space and colonize planets, to create a geographic and socio-cultural situation which, in the 1960s, he begins to call the ‘Gaean Reach’. In its early phases 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. In its later phases centripetal force causes Earth itself to become mythical, or even forgotten. Vance’s stories almost never concern wars. 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 featuring Miro Hetzel (a later version of Magnus Ridolph, a mystery solving elder man of fastidious tastes and gentile habits). Most of the science fiction stories, however, do not feature aliens, or even the humanoid E.G. Bourghes type ‘savages’ occurring in the early work who take the place of colonial exotics. Cultural, social or political conflict 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 book (Ports of Call-Lurulu) is a tranquil and picaresque voyage though a far sector of the aging Reach.

Characteristics:

One of the many charms of Vances work is the Shakespearean manner in which scoundrels and princes alike bargain and banter in elegant, ironic language, which Vance also uses in his rich evocations of complex societies. Unexspected vancian inventiveness is exemplified in the creation of such fictional sports as Hussade or Hadaul, which are not only attractive in themselves, but seem actually practicable. A hallmark of Vance's style is use of epigraphs which supply sometimes essential background information, sometimes sidelights which seem to have little to do with the main story. Likewize he often uses footnotes to expand an idea, or explain some untranslatable word which might sum up a social concept. Vance's sometimes presents a society based on a belief system that is absurd or repugnant; such interest in what might be called 'cultural relativesm' seems linked to his grandiose and artistic villans, who often sculp societies according to thier personal conceptions. A charactistic theme allong these same lines (exemplified in The Last Castle) is a society whose evolution has left it unable to cope with the challenges of reality. Vance has written several novels which are generally regarded as political, though many of his books seem to have messages of various sorts. The Domains of Koryphon (aka The Gray Prince ) treats the problem of ownership of land. Wyst contrasts egalitarianism with its opposite, the Hobbian state of nature. Cadwal treats the political problems inherent in ecologism and goverment by law. The Murth examines feminism. These, and other stories, have been denounced by some commentators as unduely conservative in outlook, though other commentators contest this judgement. Vance's work includes many lively and heroic female characters, including Glyneth and Madouc, in Lyonesse, or Wayness Tamm in Cadwal. Spunky female protagonists are rife even in the earliest work, such as Jane Parlier in Abercromby Station.

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'). He has, in fact, no clear 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. 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.

As Mystery Writer

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 version of what is perhaps Vance's greatest character--Howard Alan Treesong of The Book of Dreams. The Deadly Isles reveals, in its portrayal of Tahiti in the 1960s, some of the secret ingredients of master chef Vance's ability to cook up alien worlds with virtually no effort. The award-winning The Man in the Cage is a taut 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, embodies Vance's taste for farce.

In particular, the two Sheriff Joe Bain mysteries--and especially The Pleasant Grove Murders--can still be read with pleasure, although more for the delightful California characters (such as Bain's New Age girl friend Luna) than for the actual crime investigations.

Vance has produced more successful mysteries set within his science-fiction universe. Most notable among these mixed-genre efforts are the "Galactic Effectuator" novelettes featuring Miro Hetzel, a Sam Spade type character, and the recent Night Lamp, which borrows deftly from P.D. James' An Unsuitable Job for a Woman. An early 1950s short story series features Magnus Ridolph, an interstellar adventurer and amateur detective (similar to Leslie Charteris' Simon Templar - but elderly and not prone to knocking anyone down) whose exploits appear to have been inspired, in part, by those of Jack London's South Seas adventurer, Captain David Grief.

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.

The Vance Integral Edition

The Vance Integral Edition (VIE) was a five-year (1999-2004), nonprofit effort involving about 300 volunteers internationally to collect all of Vance's work into a uniform set of volumes with corrected text for each book.

The texts were restored, as far as possible, to Vance's original intentions. In the course of previous publication the texts had often become degraded. Editors had sometimes changed endings and simplified or changed the vocabulary. The VIE used the original manuscripts, when available, and also compared all previously published editions. Hundreds of restorations were usually made to the text of each book. [See http://www.integralarchive.org/essay-alun.htm on Foreverness, for a full discussion of VIE restortantions by Alun Hughes, head of VIE textual restoration.]

The 44 volumes of VIE present the totality of Vance's speculative work, as well as the three "Ellery Queen" novels in a special 45th volume. The VIE also includes unpublished texts, such as Wild Thyme and Violets, and STARK or Star Ark, a plan for a series of novels about a generational star ark.

Many of Vance's books are out of print, but the VIE volumes, containing some texts not being republished by commercial editors, are also being published in paperback format by subscription by a VIE volunteer in cooperation with the Vances.

The VIE uses the original titles, sometimes rejected by publishers. For instance, The Dying Earth is published by the VIE as Mazirian the Magician, the book's true title.

Trivia

The Demon Princes are five briefly-allied galactic criminal kingpins who joined to conduct an infamous slaver raid on a planet colony (the Mount Pleasant massacre). Kirth Gersen's relatives were all slain or enslaved except for his grandfather, who then raised him on Old Earth and Alphanor as an instrument of vengeance. The Demon Princes, in order of publication of the novels in which they are featured, are: Attel Malagate ("Malagate the Woe"), Kokor Hekkus (aka "Billy Windle"), Viole Falushe (born Vogel Filschner), Lens Larque and Howard Alan Treesong.

If one were to send a letter to Howard Alan Treesong when he was a teenager, one would address it to: Howard Hardoah, Home Farm, Gladbetook, Land of Maunish, Moudervelt, Van Kaathe's Star, The Oikumene.

The system of magic used in Vance's work, in which spells are memorised 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, Gygax named one of the deities of magic in the world of Greyhawk Vecna (an anagram of Vance).

Selected bibliography

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

  • [[Maske: Thaery]]
  • The Gray Prince (VIE title: The Domains of Koryphon)
  • Galactic Effectuator (collects the Miro Hetzel stories)
  • 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.

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.#redirect [[Template:Fact]]

Lurulu

Cadwal Chronicles

Alastor Cluster

Tschai Series (originally published as
  • City of the Chasch (VIE title: The Chasch)
  • Servants of the Wankh (VIE title: The Wannek)
  • The Dirdir
  • The Pnume

Lyonesse Trilogy (fantasy)

Non-series novels

Collections

Books About Vance

Books Emulating Vance

References

External links

 

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