Posted by Terry on March 23, 1999 at 16:23:53:
In Reply to: Other Writers a la Vance posted by Rodger Whitlock on March 22, 1999 at 11:20:42:
> It's the peoples, the cultures, the cuisines, the religions, that are important, not the details of how space ships fly or rayguns work.
Just so. Vance goes out of his way to detail civilizations, but not the underlying mechnanisms. Plow through Kim Stanley Robinsons Mars trilogy and you see a writer a pains to tell you how "things" work. Vance's writing is much more how "society" works and what changes mean to humans.
> I see in Vance a forecast of post-technologial society.
Just reading _The Persian Boy_ by Mary Renault '72 about the travels of Alexander the Great through Persia and was struck by the same other-worldliness of the Persian civilization. I commend its reading to anyone, SF fans included. To me that detailing is much more important than if the action takes place on a space ship or a galaxy far, far away.