******************************* copyright 1993 Gregg Parmentier ******************************* Do not post "The Vance File" to any public access systems or bulletin boards. You can distribute copies freely in other manners, electronic or printed. *******************************
Welcome to the premiere issue of The Vance Phile. The Vance Phile is being produced on a 25 MHz 386 using Ami Pro for Windows 3.0. I print copies myself and send out uuencoded copies in various formats to other people via internet for their personal use and to be printed and distributed.
Right at the beginning I would like to extend thanks to some of the people who have made this publication possible, through suggestion and/or inspiration. First, to Bob Long, who started stocking SF at his game store back in 1977, where I worked and bought my very first Vance books: Servants of the Wankh and The Killing Machine. To Hans Verkuil, who's bibliography made it possible for me to complete my Vance collection, which let me add further information to his bibliography. To Bill Garrett, who's offhand reference to my old mailing list as a newsletter, made me decide to do this in the first place.
My hope for The Vance Phile is to make available old and new articles, reviews, commentaries, parodies, and bibliographic information. I hope my efforts are of help to others.
I know this venture will be starting very slowly, and I don't expect to impress anyone with the first issue or two, but I hope I can get input from out there and get the ball rolling on this.
I don't find myself to be a very good writer or analyser of writing, so I don't intend this to be just an echo of my opinions. For this reason I'd really like people to send me ideas or articles to keep these pages filled, or to point out articles or commentary which I could get permission to reprint here.
I'm working on setting up more connections in the SF world to make this job easier on myself, spending more time at more conventions, writing more people for input. If anyone can point me in more and/or better directions I'm all ears.
This fanzine is intended as much to give me more information and insight into the works of Jack Vance as it is to give you more information and insight.
Together we can figure out all of the things which Jack Vance didn't really intentionally put behind his writing and have lots of fun spending lots of hours doing lots of reading and rereading of all of that wonderful body of work he has given us so far.
For submissions and/or subscription information contact:
parmentier@iowasp.physics.uiowa.edu
Gregg Parmentier
2018 Waterfront Dr. #137
Iowa City, Ia 52240
Alastor Cluster
"Actually individual books taking place on different planets of the Alastor Cluster. Each puts a stranger into a vastly different culture to the one he knows and we watch him adapt and/or rebel. Vivid pictures of some very extreme cultures. Marune: Alastor 933 is one of my particular favorites by Vance and I now own 54 Vance books."
[I'm well beyond 54 Vance books now.]
Dying Earth
"When not involving Cugel the Clever ( a very good characterization of a really obnoxiously self-centered jerk ), I enjoy these stories tremendously. Even with Cugel, they tend to be rather light and off-the-wall while still giving the depth of description I love in Vance's work."
[I've reread them since
then, and have decided I very much like Eyes of the Overworld,
though not Cugel's Saga. As they say, "your mileage may vary."
]
Planet of Adventure
"An interesting look at four different spacefaring races with a well-developed motivational basis for each as well as many different human cultures. I've read these five times and counting."
Demon Princes
"Vance gives an interesting portrait of the five Demon Princes and a consistant main character throughout the books. His planets and societies are very colorful and varied. I've read these books five times, and know I'll read them again."
"I read both Throy and Brains of the Earth in the original version, and I think that the original versions contain more humor than the translations. Especially Throy was much better in English. I don't know if this is a general rule."
"In general I think that Annemarie van Ewijck is doing a great job with her translations (especially the Lyonesse series). I think it is pretty difficult to translate Throy (and get all the subtile humor in) since IMHO I think that Vance's style has lately become less descriptive than it used to be. This has certainly everything to do with the way he has to write nowadays."
"Jack Vance wrote the introduction to the Easton Press edition of Dune."
"One of the U-M novels has a textual difference from its paperback counterpart. A portion of a sentence is missing. I discovered this while reading my U-M copy (I'll bet most people just put them on the shelf). In the U-M edition of Tschai #4, on Page 72, after line 9, the missing phrase is: 'They teach us what we most want to learn, which is decorum' This precedes the partial sentence: 'and good conduct.' "
"One of the Kinnell editions (Madman Theory or A Room to Die In) has first and second state covers. I have both, but can't for the life of me tell what the difference is."
"Someone told me that in a book about the publishing industry (I wish I had this book) that the old Ballantine pbs were supposed to be published simultaneous with the hbs. Production problems sometimes prevented this from occurring. So the pb To Live Forever may actually be the true first."
"The Five Gold Bands will be out [from Underwood-Miller] in April; it has been sent to the printer."
"The bibliography [which had tentatively been to be published by Borgo Press] will be out in July [also Underwood-Miller]."
If anyone wishes to send me more ratings I will add them in to these results and print the current poll results whenever the it seems appropriate.
ave. num. novel/collection 4.71 7 Marune: Alastor 933 4.33 9 Lyonesse I: Suldrun's Garden 4.25 12 Araminta Station 4.20 10 Emphyrio 4.11 9 The Killing Machine 4.00 8 The Dirdir 3.90 10 The Dying Earth 3.89 9 Lyonesse II: The Green Pearl 3.75 8 Servants of the Wankh 3.75 8 City of the Chasch 3.73 11 The Eyes of the Overworld 3.63 8 The Book of Dreams 3.50 8 The Pnume 3.40 5 Ecce and Old Earth 3.33 6 Trullion: Alastor 2262 3.25 8 Star King 3.13 8 The Face 3.00 9 Cugel's Saga 3.00 9 Rhialto the Marvelous 3.00 6 Wyst: Alastor 1716 3.00 5 The Complete Magnus Ridolph 2.88 8 The Palace of Love 2.75 8 The Last Castle 2.60 10 Lyonesse III: Madouc 2.60 5 To Live Forever 2.60 5 Green Magic 2.50 10 The Anome 2.50 8 Maske: Thaery 2.40 5 The Blue World 2.09 11 The Languages of Pao 2.00 10 The Brave Free Men 2.00 5 The Galactic Effectuator 2.00 4 The Augmented Agent 1.90 10 The Asutra 1.71 7 The Dragon Masters 1.60 5 Gold and Iron 1.25 8 Showboat World 1.22 9 Big Planet 1.00 6 The Grey Prince 0.75 4 The Houses of Iszm 0.50 4 The Five Gold Bands 0.20 5 Space Opera
Permission to reprint from Russell Letson, January, 1992.
For the first ten years of his career, Jack scrabbled along in the manner of any pulp writer. His first two books The Dying Earth and The Space Pirate (later retitled The Five Gold Bands), were poorly produced and distributed by marginal publishers, while his third, Vandals of the Void, a Winston juvenile, vanished into libraries. (All three editions are now rather expensive collector's items.) He was not unrecognized, however. The Hillman edition of The Dying Earth became what we would now call a cult classic (see Robert Silverberg's reminiscence in his introduction to the Gregg Press edition of The Eyes of the Overworld), while Jack's regular appearances in Startling and Thrilling Wonder received equally regular praise in the letter columns. By 1955 he was established as a writer of magazine SF, generally of the adventurous sort represented by Big Planet. The second fifteen years saw the appearance of To Live Forever, The Languages of Pao, and his first murder mysteries, and then, in a remarkable decade-long run, twenty-one novels, including the Edgar-winning mystery The Man in the Cage, the first three Demon Princes novels, the prize-winning The Dragon Masters and The Last Castle, The Blue World, The Eyes of the Overworld, the Tschai tetralogy, and Emphyrio. Since then Jack has settled down to explore his worlds in detail in several series and cycles - Durdane, the Dying Earth, the Oikumene, the Alastor Cluster and Gaean Reach, and most recently the lost world of Lyonesse.
II
It is, thank goodness, difficult to assemble a collection of
Jack's work that has not already been snatched up for some
mass-market or small-press edition. That was not always the
case. I recall scrounging through second-hand stores for copies
of Ace Doubles and issues of Startling and Thrilling Wonder so I
could read such items as Planet of the Black Dust or The
Overlords of Maxus or the complete text of Big Planet. Jack
may cringe to hear of a fan pursuing these tales from his puppy
days - he is one of the most mercilessly self-critical writers I
know - but I found even in his minor stories evidence of the wit
and style that make his major efforts so remarkable. Others
apparently felt the same way, since Underwood-Miller, DAW,
Pocket, Berkley, and Tor have carried on a brisk trade in
Vanceana of all periods, with the result that most of his early
work has been recovered - I now have hardcover editions of the
original magazine texts of Big Planet and Planet of the Damned
(aka Slaves of the Klau aka Gold and Iron) as well as several
collections of short fiction that allow me to trace Jack's
career back to its beginnings in The World Thinker without
getting pulpdust up my nose. (Unless I want to see some of the
early tales as they first appeared. The author has exercised
his right to second-guess in the cases of at least The World
Thinker and I'll Build Your Dream Castle, thus forcing me
back to the magazines if I want to be properly scholarly.) Jack
does not seem entirely comfortable with having his early work
thus available: in the Forward and Cold Facts to Lost Moons he
writes that several previously inaccessible items even lack the
distinction of being the worst stories I have ever written.
The material gathered for the volume you now hold is neither so
obscure nor quite so scorned by its creator, though much of it
is currently not in print and some of it does go back to Jack's
apprenticeship period. But for readers interested not only in
Jack's development as an individual talent but in the process,
wonderfully frequent in SF, by which a writer creates an
identity and a voice from the conventions and limitations of
newsstand fiction, any decent-sized and chronologically varied
sample of work will reward study.
III
Hard Luck Diggings is one of Jack's least favorite stories of
Magnus Ridolph, the character he invented for his first series.
Ridolph is a rather unusual hero for the pulps in which he
appeared (Startling Stories for eight of the ten): he is a
detective and problem-solver of more than middle age, a bit of a
rogue, constantly in financial difficulties. In The Kokod
Warriors, he deals with a client's disappointment in
unmistakably Vancean language:
"[You expected] a younger man, perhaps? With conspicuous biceps, a gun on his hip, a space helmet on his head? Or perhaps my beard alarms you?"This decidedly soft-boiled detective, the antithesis of Kirth Gersen, anticipates Miro Hetzel of Galactic Effectuator and, even more strongly, the cagey Milton Hack of The Man From Zodiac (a series that unfortunately never got beyond its first story). The plots Ridolph inhabits are science-fictional whodunits and puzzles, a form that Vance exploited extensively in his pulp days and which perhaps led him to the out-and-out mystery novel - compare the complicated murder and ironic ending of First Star I See Tonight with the reasoning behind Ridolph's solution to the problem of Diggings or his treatment of the gamblers and tourists in The Kokod Warriors."If your business requires feats of physical prowess, I beg you to hire elsewhere. My janitor might satisfy your needs: an excellent chap who engages his spare time moving bar-bells from one elevation to another."
Between 1948 and 1958 he wrote ten Ridolph tales, six of which comprise his entire published output in 1948 and 1949, when he had ambitions to become a million-word-a-year writer along the lines of Erle Stanley Gardner. The results in the case of Diggings and Sanatoris Short-Cut he calls less than remarkable, though anyone who has tried to write a story (let alone two) in a single weekend may disagree. While the plot Diggings is a rather drawn-out one-liner, it still shows that even early and hasty Vance prose is a cut above average. Also of interest is the idea of intelligent trees, a motif that has appeared in Vance 's work with some regularity from Son Of the Tree and The Houses of Iszm to Maske: Thaery.
1950 saw the publication of work more sophisticated in verbal surface, narrative structure, and characterization than the early Ridolph stories. Vance's second sale to Astounding, The Potters of Firsk, contains some effective pictorial writing-for example, the extended opening description of the pottery bowl. What makes the story work, though, is the sense of place with which Vance invests the world of Firsk. It is one of his many metal-poor, low-technology, traditional-culture worlds, a qiet, attractive backwater reminiscent of an Orient that never was. Such semi-pastoral settings, often juxtaposed to areas of harshness and lawlessness, appear later in Big Planet, The Blue World, the Durdane and Tschai series, The Moon Moth, and elsewhere. The other Vance hallmark is the treatment of alien psychology as simply different rather than evil. The Potters' values are sufficient for their own needs and consistent with their view of the world; that they result in the death of Thomm's boss is unfortunate for the boss but a gain for those who are privileged to see the bowl made from his bones.
Noise (1952 ), which also concerns the alienness of the alien, more psychological fantasy than SF - a descendant of the tales E. T. A. Hoffmann and Poe rather than, say, Jules Verne - in questioning of the reality of our normal world and its categories. The astronomical irregularity of the solar system in which spaceman Evans is marooned should probably be seen not as the cause of the visions he experiences but as a sign that this neighborhood of the universe is not suited to human understanding. In a line that has echoes throughout Vance's work, Evans reflects that the word intelligence may not even enter the picture; is not our brain a peculiarly anthropoid characteristic, and is not intelligence a fuction of our peculiarly anthropoid brain! Reality is not something out there which we can know directly, but only an interpretation, a model constructed and limited by our specific (in the sense of species as well as particular) sensibilities - or, in some cases, by individual needs, desire, and will.
This puzzle of the relationship between internal and external reality haunts much of Vance's work, whether he is exploring the differing perceptions and value systems of humans and aliens or the control of external reality by the individual will or the influence of environment and evolution on cultures. In the Dying Earth tale of Guyal of Sfere, Kerlin the Caretaker forgets that time is passing and so does not age - until he is brought back to reality, whereupon he dies. The magicians of The Miracle Workers (1958) control demons and other entities that exist only because others believe they do, while the psionic supermen of Telek (1952) manipulate the physical world because they believe they can do so. The primal example of this theme in Vance 's work is, of course The World-Thinker, in which the alien Laoome creates and controls multiple real universes by force of mind alone. This projection of the will and imagination on the fabric of reality is, among other things, an image of the artist, as a glance at the final episode of The New Prime (1951) will confirm.
But the environment can control thought and behavior as well,
thus the ability of the Organisms to survive Earth's psssage
through the pocket of non-causality in The Men Return (1957)
and their demotion back to mere insanity when causality is
restored. Vance explored this idea in an earlier story, The
Devil on Salvation Bluff (1955), in which the colonists of a
planet similar to that in Noise have adapted by abandoning all
regularity in their lives, while a group of missionaries clings
desperately to the order supplied by their clock. When the
clock is destroyed, the missionaries are forced to accept the
unpredictability of their environment on its own terms, to
become as crazy as the colonists.
IV
It is impossible to discuss Jack Vance without mentioning his
gift of language. He is a remarkable and unmistakable stylist
whose manner cannot be separated from the matter of his fiction.
It may be interesting to look for a moment at how his way with
words extends the sense of style beyond the decorative to the
thematic. Where much SF attempts to furnish a future milieu
with scientific and pseudoscientific neologisms (hyperdrive,
subspace, positronic brain) or to create a future colloquial
pattern in the manner of Anthony Burgess in A Clockwork Orange
or Russell Hoban in Riddley Walker, Vance pursues the same goals
- the creation of atmosphere and milieu through control of
verbal surface - with language that looks backward in time
rather than forward. This is not surprising in his fantasies,
since archaic language is one of the conventions of modern
fantasy. In the SF, however, it creates an interesting tension,
a distance between reader and milieu, a sense of the foreign
made real to which the adjective exotic does not quite do
justice.
Perhaps the best example of this is to be seen in The Dragon Masters, where most of the words appropriate to the neofeudalism of Aerlith are obsolete or archaic (fugleman, armamentarium), while names for the technological devices are plain, dcscriptive English (vision-pane, heat-gun) rather than scientific Greco-Latin. Aerlith is another low-technology backwater rather than a futuristic gadgeteer's heaven; moreover, this is an ancient future, one with a long history of its own, and the vocabulary emphasizes this mixture of yesterday and tomorrow by invoking our own past.
Another stylistic quirk with a scholarly feel is Vance's
fondness for fictional versions of the impedimenta of the
scholarly text - the epigraph, the footnote, the glossary, the
appendix. These devices supply details about setting and
background that might otherwise impede the movement of the
narrative; generally they are crucial to an understanding of the
story, but sometimes they seem excursions, decorations, or
detours. This is not to say that they are irrelevant, however.
A footnote in To Live Forever enumerates the variety of Stimmo
pills available to the citizens of Clarges, describes their
effects, and points out their limitations and the results of
overuse. This not only prepares for a scene in which a new
widow adjusts her mood with Non-Sobs, it also emphasizes the
artifiality of common life in the city. Similarly, the
epigraphs often carry thematic rather than purely informational
messages, as in the selections from Life by Unspiek, Baron
Bodissey and The Avatar's Apprentice that introduce many
chapters in the Demon Princes novels. The Baron and the
anonymous author of the scroll from the Ninth dimension sound
like Jack Vance in two of his more familiar roles: the
philosophic-scientific observer and the playful and ironic
artist-sage, both of whom caution us not to expect the universe
to meet human specifications.
V
Those middle sections - where it's Vance rather than Jack -
are the scholarly-critical parts of this introduction, and
they're appropriate in this volume of celebration and
appreciation not just because I'm an academic, but because
Jack's work deserves and rewards that kind of attention. The
reviewers' cliches about Jack (to which I've contributed my
share) - that he's colorful, exotic, a stylist, an ironist, a
painter of alien landscapes, and so on - rarely mention the
consistency with which he has returned to his major themes or
the rather stern views that inform such heroic-romantic tales as
The Dragon Masters and the Durdane trilogy or the ongoing
critique of modern urban life that goes back at least to
Chateau d'If (aka New Bodies for Old). When he reads this,
Jack will probably snort and reach for his banjo and kazoo, but
he is not just an inventor of entertainments; he is as skilled
and serious an investigator of our place among the infinities
as this field has produced. Happy fortieth, Jack.
Russell Letson