Jack Vance 1917-2013
A 2009 article by Carlo Rotella tells you something of the grandmaster of our genre we lost this week.
Jack Vance, described by his peers as “a major genius” and “the greatest living writer of science fiction and fantasy,” has been hidden in plain sight for as long as he has been publishing — six decades and counting. Yes, he has won Hugo, Nebula and World Fantasy awards and has been named a Grand Master by the Science Fiction and Fantasy Writers of America, and he received an Edgar from the Mystery Writers of America, but such honors only help to camouflage him as just another accomplished genre writer. So do the covers of his books, which feature the usual spacecraft, monsters and euphonious place names: Lyonesse, Alastor, Durdane. If you had never read Vance and were browsing a bookstore’s shelf, you might have no particular reason to choose one of his books instead of one next to it by A. E. van Vogt, say, or John Varley. And if you chose one of these alternatives, you would go on your way to the usual thrills with no idea that you had just missed out on encountering one of American literature’s most distinctive and undervalued voices.
That’s how Vance’s fans see it, anyway. Among them are authors who have gained the big paydays and the fame that Vance never enjoyed. Dan Simmons, the best-selling writer of horror and fantasy, described discovering Vance as “a revelation for me, like coming to Proust or Henry James. Suddenly you’re in the deep end of the pool. He gives you glimpses of entire worlds with just perfectly turned language. If he’d been born south of the border, he’d be up for a Nobel Prize.” Michael Chabon, whose distinguished literary reputation allows him to employ popular formulas without being labeled a genre writer, told me: “Jack Vance is the most painful case of all the writers I love who I feel don’t get the credit they deserve. If ‘The Last Castle’ or ‘The Dragon Masters’ had the name Italo Calvino on it, or just a foreign name, it would be received as a profound meditation, but because he’s Jack Vance and published in Amazing Whatever, there’s this insurmountable barrier.”
The barrier has not proved insurmountable to other genre writers — like Ray Bradbury and Elmore Leonard, who have commanded critical respect while moving a lot of satisfyingly familiar product, or like H. P. Lovecraft and Raymond Chandler, pulp writers whose posthumous reputations rose over time until they passed the threshold of highbrow acceptance. But each of these writers, no matter how innovative or poetic, entered the literary mainstream by fully exploiting the attributes of his specialty. Vance, by contrast, has worked entirely within popular forms without paying much heed to their conventions or signature joys. His emphasis falls on the unexpected note, the odd beat. The rocket ships are just ways to get characters from one cogently imagined society to another; he prefers to tersely summarize battle scenes and other such potentially crowd-pleasing set pieces; and he takes greatest pleasure in word-music when exploring humankind’s rich capacity for nastiness. For example: “As he approached the outermost fields he moved cautiously, skulking from tussock to copse, and presently found that which he sought: a peasant turning the dank soil with a mattock. Cugel crept quietly forward, struck down the loon with a gnarled root.” While Vance may play by the rules of whatever genre he works in, his true genre is the Jack Vance story.
His loyal readers are fiercely passionate about him. An inspired crew of them got together in the late 1990s to assemble the Vance Integral Edition, a handsome 45-volume set of the great man’s complete works in definitive editions. Led by Paul Rhoads, an American painter living in France (whose recent critical appraisal of Vance, “Winged Being,” compares him to Oswald Spengler and Jane Austen, among others, and anoints him the anti-Paul Auster), the V.I.E. volunteers painstakingly compared editions and the author’s drafts to restore prose corrupted by publishers. Hard-core Vancians also created Totality (pharesm.org), a Web site where you can search the V.I.E. texts, which is how we know that he has used the word “punctilio” exactly 33 times in his published prose. It was an extraordinary display of true readerly love — a bunch of buffs giving a contemporary genre writer the Shakespearean variorum treatment on their own time.
Vance, who is 92, says that his new book — a memoir, “This Is Me, Jack Vance!” — will definitely be his last. Also arriving in bookstores this month is “Songs of the Dying Earth,” a collection of stories by other writers set in the far-future milieu that Vance introduced in some of his first published stories, which he wrote on a clipboard on the deck of a freighter in the South Pacific while serving in the merchant marine during World War II. The roster of contributors to the collection includes genre stars and best-selling brand names, among them Simmons, Neil Gaiman, Terry Dowling, Tanith Lee, George R. R. Martin and Dean Koontz. It’s a literary tribute album, in effect, on which reliable earners acknowledge the influence of a respectably semiobscure national treasure by covering his songs.
The balance of the piece is here: http://www.nytimes.com/2009/07/19/magazine/19Vance-t.html?_r=0&pagewanted=all. Read the whole thing.
My own favorite passage of Vancean dialog is from ‘Guyal of Sfere’ which appears as the last episode in THE DYING EARTH.
Mounting the north bank of the Scaum he saw ahead the Porphiron Scar, the dark poplars and white columns of Kaiin, the dull gleam of Sanreale Bay.
Wandering the crumbled streets, he put the languid inhabitants such a spate of questions that one in wry jocularity commended him to a professional augur.
This one dwelled in a booth painted with the Signs of the Aumoklopelastianic Cabal. He was a lank brownman with red-rimmed eyes and a stained white beard.
“What are your fees?” inquired Guyal cautiously.
“I respond to three questions,” stated the augur. “For twenty terces I phrase the answer in clear and actionable language; for ten I use the language of cant, which occasionally admits of ambiguity; for five, I speak a parable which you must interpret as you will; and for one terce, I babble in an unknown tongue.”
“First I must inquire, how profound is your knowledge?”
“I know all,” responded the augur. “The secrets of red and the secrets of black, the lost spells of Grand Motholam, the way of the fish and the voice of the bird.”
“And where have you learned all these things?”
“By pure induction,” explained the augur. “I retire into my booth, I closet myself with never a glint of light, and, so sequestered, I resolve the profundities of the world.”
“With all this precious knowledge at hand,” ventured Guyal, “why do you live so meagerly, with not an ounce of fat to your frame and these miserable rags to your back?”
The augur stood back in fury. “Go along, go along! Already I have wasted fifty terces of wisdom on you, who have never a copper to your pouch. If you desire free enlightenment,” and he cackled in mirth, “seek out the Curator.” And he sheltered himself in his booth.
It is my hope that the soul of Jack Vance resides in a supernal condition of illumed benevolence, such that all his questions have found more satisfactory answer, and he is reunited with his wife. RIP.
About John C Wright
John C. Wright is a practicing philosopher, a retired attorney, newspaperman, and newspaper editor, and a published author of science fiction. Once a Houyhnhnm, he was expelled from the august ranks of purely rational beings when he fell in love; but retains an honorary title.
