Posted by David Luckhardt on February 12, 1997 at 22:22:19:
In Reply to: Source for Yipton? posted by Parsifal Pankarow on February 04, 1997 at 22:52:59:
The Yips are probably his most negative "natives", with few redeeming cultural elements, and I suspect they came from his years in the Pacific in the Merchant Marine.
Vance has always been facinated by "scutwork", and his most definitive work on this topic has to be the wonderful Dodkin's Job from 1959. If you have't read it yet, READ IT NOW! This short story was written by a man very familiar with manual labor and office politics....fantastic!!
- David Luckhardt
: In Vance's best recent work, "Araminta Station." we have his ongoing exploration of a question that seems to have intrigued him lately: who is to do Society's scut work?
: In "Night Lamp," he sidesteps the question by having the servant class be nonhumans, genetically engineered. In "Wyst," it was dealt with from a Marxist perspective (Vance's satire of Marxism, that is).
: But Yipton ios more disturbing. The origins of the Yips are deliberately left vague, byt they are definitely human and, as we see, they have a claim on the larger society, in return for their menial labor. Yipton, in its origins, seems an amalgam of Bangkok, Jakarta, Tijuana, and the West Bank.
: Who knows which of these places Mr. Vance has been to? And how and when did this question (Who does the scut work?) start to intrigue him?