Posted by Douglas Nicholas on January 04, 1997 at 14:51:33:
In Reply to: Re: Do Vance fans like Patrick O'Brian's sea books? posted by Douglas Nicholas on January 04, 1997 at 14:36:03:
: : On the basis of rather slender evidence, I have formed the hypothesis that people who like JV books would also like Patrick O'Brian's books about the Hornblower-era adventures of Jack Aubrey and Stephen Maturin.
: : Has anybody out there read enough of both to have formed an opinion?
: : Brian McCue
: I've read all of both writer's works (except the very latest of each, which I intend to read), and enjoyed them both enormously. JV is my favorite single author, reread constantly.
: What they have in common: each has a beautiful and distinctive prose style; both are now old men who have displayed a remarkable consistency of achievement over several decades.
: When I first encountered JV, in the mid-Sixties, with *The Dying Earth* I was struck by its mixture of amoral cruelty and dire peril described in exquisite prose. In the first Demon Princes novels, deadly adversaries would address each other in the most formal terms. These qualities have a kind of eighteenth-century flavor to them, and since O'Brian's chosen period is the late eighteenth century and that early part of the nineteenth that is still more the eighteenth, as "the Sixties" sort of spilled over into the first years of the Seventies, I think this might be another link between the two authors.
: Of course each is a highly individual artist. (I don't think O'Brian really can be considered a "successor" to Forester any more than Vance can be considered a "successor" to Aston Smith or Lord Dunsany, although the comparisons are tempting.)
: Best to all,
: Douglas Nicholas
Of course I meant to type "Ashton Smith." (What was my finger thinking of? Aston Martin? Asti Spumanti? (Spumante?))
D.