Posted by Robby Barkan on March 06, 1996 at 11:12:40:
Mr. Vance has had a great influence on my own work. There is simply no one like him who encompasses such a breadth of style and such rich depth IN each style. He has set the standard for fantasy settings, dialogue, interaction, archetypes, moods. I can feel the earth dying under my feet as the ebbing red sun beams sadly upon my face. Then he turns to science fiction in a heartbeat and blows us away with stories of parasite entities protecting us from OTHER parasite entities. All this from the hand and pen of one human being. I could go on and on, but my words of praise would fill the vast bandwidth of the Web. Without Vance and his literary pal Zelazny, the world of fantasy would run only topsoil deep.