Jack Vance

Jack Vance at the helm of his boat on San Francisco Bay in the early 1980s

John Holbrook Vance (b. August 28, 1916 in San Francisco, California; other birthdates, between 1916 and 1920, have also been inaccurately cited) is generally described as an American fantasy and science fiction author, though Vance himself has reportedly objected to such labels. Most of his work has been published under the name Jack Vance. Vance has published 11 mysteries as John Holbrook Vance and 3 as Ellery Queen. Other pen names include Alan Wade, Peter Held, John van See, Jay Kavanse.

Among his awards are: Hugo Awards — in 1963 for The Dragon Masters and in 1967 for The Last Castle; a Nebula Award in 1966, also for The Last Castle; the Jupiter Award in 1975; the World Fantasy Award in 1984 for life achievement and in 1990 for Lyonesse: Madouc; an Edgar (the mystery equivalent of the Hugo) for the best first mystery novel in 1961 for The Man in the Cage; in 1990 he was named a SFWA Grand Master; and in 1992 he was Guest of Honor at the WorldCon in Orlando, Florida.

He is generally highly regarded by critics and colleagues, some of whom have suggested that he transcends genre labels and should be regarded as an important writer by mainstream standards. Poul Anderson, for instance, once called him the greatest living American writer "in" science fiction (not "of" science fiction).

Biography

Vance's grandfather supposedly arrived in California from Michigan a decade before the Gold Rush and married a San Francisco girl. (Early family records were apparently destroyed in the fire following the 1906 San Francisco Earthquake). Vance grew up on a ranch in the area of the San Joaquin Valley around the delta of the Sacramento River and was an avid reader of the popular adventure-oriented pulp fiction of the 1920s. He left high school early and worked for some years as a construction worker and bell-hop, in a cannery and on a dredger before entering the University of California, Berkeley where over a six-year period he majored in mining engineering and also studied physics, journalism and English, but took time off to work as an electrician in the naval shipyards at Pearl Harbor, Hawaii.

Vance graduated in 1942 and did war service as a seaman in the Merchant Marine. Contrary to a tenacious legend, he was not torpedoed twice nor even once. This was possibly invented in the early days by an editor to enhance Vance's attraction in a blurb. In later years blue water sailing remained one of his favorite recreations; and ships, boats and/or water voyages are frequently encountered in his novels and stories (either directly, as in Showboat World and Trullion, or indirectly, in the guise of starships and star voyages, as in Ports of Call). He worked as a carpenter for some years while establishing himself as a writer.

Jack Vance playing the jazz banjo and kazoo in 1979 in San Francisco

At university and afterwards Vance was active in jazz bands as a horn player, and his first published writings were reviews of jazz concerts, as a columnist for The Daily Californian. Music of various kinds is an element in many of his works, from grand opera (in Space Opera) to village dance bands (Kirth Gersen poses as a flute player in The Book of Dreams) to the world of Vance's classic short story "The Moon Moth", whose inhabitants converse in elaborately prescribed modes of song, accompanying themselves on hand-held keyed percussion instruments. Vance is an able player of the jazz banjo and kazoo.

In 1946 Vance met and married Norma Ingold. During the 1950s they travelled extensively in Europe as well as once spending several months in a Tahitian beach house in the 1960s but have lived most of their lives together in Oakland. Vance began his full-time writing career in the late 1940s, the period in which the San Francisco Renaissance--a broad movement of experimentation in literature and the arts (ranging from poetry through architecture)--was in its early stages. Vance's own references to Bay Area bohemian life (directly in his early mysteries and in disguised form in his science-fiction novels) suggest affinities with this movement although not with its beat-generation wing. Certainly Vance's "Sailmaker Beach," the bohemian quarter of Avente on the planet Alphanor, is an overlay of San Francisco's North Beach, while the mad poet Navarth is said to be based on Kenneth Rexroth. Frank Herbert and Poul Anderson were among Vance's closest friends in the Bay Area science-fiction community and at one point the three jointly owned a houseboat in the Delta region of California.

Vance was also a member of the Swordsmen and Sorcerers' Guild of America (SAGA), a loose-knit group Heroic Fantasy authors founded in the 1960s, some of whose works were anthologized in Lin Carter's Flashing Swords! anthologies.

Although Vance has become legally blind in his old age, he continues to write with the aid of special software, his most recent novel being the whimsical Lurulu. He lives high in the Oakland Hills in the same hand-crafted house that he and his wife bought in the 1950s on a steep hillside lot and have continuously up-graded with such amenities as a hand-carved wooden ceiling from Nepal in the tavern-like dining room. The house is not far from those of Robert Silverberg and Charlie Brown, the publisher of Locus.

Vance’s Work: An Overview

Since his first published story, "The World-Thinker", (Thrilling Wonder Stories) in 1945, Vance has written over sixty books. His work is regarded as falling into three categories: science fiction, fantasy and mystery. Vance himself reportedly deplores these labels, and, indeed, his work fits them inexactly.

Vance worked hard to become a mystery writer. He wrote fourteen during about 20 years from the 1940s to the 1960s that were published irregularly from the mid-1950s to the 1980s. Three were written for, and under the close editorial direction of, Ellery Queen. Three others are explicitly based on Vance’s frequent world travels ("Strange People, Queer Notions" based on his stay in Positano, Italy; "The Man in the Cage", based on a trip to Morocco; "The Dark Ocean", based on a stay in Hawaii). Many others are set in and around his native San Francisco. The "Joe Bain" stories ("The Fox Valley Murders", "The Pleasant Grove Murders", and an unfinished outline published by the VIE), are set in an imaginary northern California county; these are the nearest to the classical mystery form, with a rural policeman as protagonist. "Bird Island", by contrast, is not a mystery at all, but a Wodehousian idyll (also set near San Francisco), while "The Flesh Mask" or "Strange People…" emphasize psychological drama. The theme of both "The House on Lily Street" and "Bad Ronald" is solipsistic megalomania, taken up again in the five volume science fiction "Demon Prince" cycle.

Much more celebrated are the "fantasy" stories. These include a set of stories, written while Vance served in the Merchant Marine during the war, under the title "Mazirian the Magician", though published as "The Dying Earth". In a similar vein Vance wrote two sets of picaresque adventures of the ne'er-do-well "Cugel the Clever" (the first set from around 1960, the second from around 1980), as well as three stories about a haughty magician: "Rhialto the Marvellous" (1970-1980). All these stories are set in a distant future where the sun is going dark, despite which they are antic comedies. The "Lyonesse" series ("Suldren’s Garden", "The Green Pearl", "Madouc") is not primarily humorous. It recounts events on the Elder Isles, an Atlantis-like archipelago in the Armorican gulf, where dynastic and magical doings are set in the early middle ages. Some of Vance’s fantasies such as "The Dying Earth" are a primary source for the roleplaying game Dungeons & Dragons, at least according to one of the creators, Gary Gygax.

Vance's science fiction runs the gamut from stories written for pulps in the 1940s to multi-volume tales set in the space age. With a few exceptions most of Vance’s ‘science fiction’ is set in a near, far, or very far future, which sees man embark into space and colonize planets, to create a geographic and socio-cultural situation which, in the 1960s, he begins to call the ‘Gaean Reach’. In its early phases this expanding, loose and peaceable agglomerate has an aura of colonial adventure, commerce and exoticism. In its more established phases it becomes stolidly middle class. In its later phases centripetal force causes Earth itself to become mythical, or even forgotten. Vance’s stories almost never concern wars. Sometimes at the far ends of the Reach, or in the lawless ‘Beyond’, a planet is menaced or craftily exploited by an alien culture. The conflicts are rarely direct. Humans become inadvertently enmeshed in low-intensity conflicts between alien cultures; this is the case in ‘Emphyrio’, the ‘Tschai’ series, the ‘Durdane’ series, or the comic stories featuring Miro Hetzel (a later version of Magnus Ridolph, a mystery solving elder man of fastidious tastes and gentile habits). Most of the science fiction stories, however, do not feature aliens, or even the humanoid E.G. Bourghes type ‘savages’ occurring in the early work who take the place of colonial exotics. Cultural, social or political conflicts are the central concerns. This is most particularly the case in the ‘Cadwal’ series, though it is equally characteristic of the three Alastor books, Maske:Thaery, and, one way and another, most of the ‘science fiction’ novels. His last book (‘Ports of Call--Lurulu’) is a tranquil and picaresque voyage though a far sector of the aging Reach.

Characteristics:

An attractions of Vance's novels are his exquisite and bone-dry ironic language and his rich evocation — often in a few well-chosen words — of alien, complex, absurd, yet thoroughly human societies. An example of his inventiveness is his creation of several fictional games that feature in some of his novels, notably Hussade in the Alastor Cluster books and Hadaul, a martial arts sport, in The Face.

Another of Vance's hallmarks is his use of chapter epigraphs and explanatory footnotes, which supply not only essential background information, but sidelights that have little to do with the main story-line. In the Demon Princes books, one set of epigraphs trace the adventures of one Marmaduke, quoted from The Avatar's Apprentice, a tale from A Scroll from the Ninth Dimension.

A common function for a Vancean footnote is to illuminate some strange cultural practice or belief or to explain the meaning of a nearly-untranslatable word that sums up a concept central to the society described, but is likely to be quite alien to the reader. Indeed, Vance's ability to "explain" without diminishing the reader's mystification is part of the charm of his works, which are rich in the "Negative Capability" lauded by John Keats and essential to fantasy or science fiction. The fact that one never quite figures out what a "deodand" looks like or has never heard of the Flesh Cape of Miscus in no way impairs one's ability to follow the story.

Commonplace in Vance's works is a village (or planet) whose inhabitants practice with utmost sincerity a belief system that is absurd, repugnant, or both. Besides their picaresque potential, Vance uses these episodes to satirize dogmatism in general and religious dogmatism in particular. Indeed, there is a great deal of the 18th-century philosophe in Vance, who in his Lyonesse trilogy pokes particular fun at Christianity. Where so many peoples over the aeons have held so many disparate beliefs, Vance implies, who has the right to impose his dogma on others? But, in one of paradoxes so typical for Vance, nearly all his heroes are engaged in exactly that - they are constantly forcing their convictions on others, and tend to answer questions about their right to do so with a swordstroke or projac-blast. They are not interested, however, in promoting religious beliefs, but in basic honesty and ethical behaviour.

This skepticism is tied to Vance's individualism, which is both an ethical and an aesthetic imperative for him and his characters. Thoreau's desire that there be as many different sorts of person as possible seems to be applied in practice in Vance's fiction along with the idea of a world, or a region of space, big enough to encompass all human types (as in Big Planet or the Alastor Cluster novels). His Enlightenment values appear again in his assumption that everyone should be free to realize himself in his own manner, provided that this self-realization doesn't act to the detriment of others.

Often Vance's villains are grandiosely creative--and sadistic--personalities who destroy the lives or property of others in order to pursue their own obsessive visions. But after depicting their downfall, Vance leaves his readers with a lingering sense of regret. For instance, his darkly ambiguous hero, Kirth Gersen, after revenging himself on Lens Larque, proceeds to complete Larque's last grand jest (for similar motives).

Vance favors aristocratic characters for the scope that status or wealth can provide, and he enjoys creating freakishly indivdualistic aristocratic societies (such as in the second Alastor novel, or like the Ska in Lyonesse). A favorite theme of his (exemplified in The Last Castle) is the decadent society whose pursuit of aesthetic individualism has left it unable to cope with the challenges of reality, which may require cooperation and sacrifice. This tension recurs in Vance, though usually his protagonists find it possible to be both aesthetes and heroes.

But Vance never assumes that aristocracy automatically confers merit. He is ruthless in his satire of pompous notables who think that noble birth saves them the obligation to be gracious or interesting. Pretension is always a vice in Vance. But he always distinguishes between pretension and actual elevation. One of the many charms of his work is the Shakespearean manner in which scoundrels and princes alike bargain and banter in elegant language.

Vance wrote two novels that can be regarded as "political." The first, The Brains of Earth, is a gruesome Orwellian satire of all attempts to impose rigid ideologies on societies or individuals. The second, The Gray Prince, depicts the endless regress of grievances that can come into play in ethnic liberation movements. This book has been accused of political incorrectness, because its villain, who bears a certain resemblance to Vance's fellow Oakland resident, the late Huey Newton of the Black Panthers, is a non-white leader of a tribal people on a planet where white ranchers control the land. But the villain is a nuanced character, the "joke" turns out to be on both settlers and revolutionaries, and the villain lives to fight another day. The second volume of the Durdane trilogy also deals, to a lesser extent, with political issues; in portraying Durdane's revolution, Vance displays a good understanding of the French revolution and the dangers of fanaticism (his hero just barely keeps things under control).

Vance's emphasis on individualism prevents him from being a relativist. Indeed, his values sometimes assert themselves as socially conservative, as with his disdain for homosexual behavior: the few homosexuals in Vance's work are all villains, principally King Casmir of Lyonesse, Faude Carfilhiot and the wizard Tamurello, all from the Lyonesse trilogy. One Dying Earth story, "The Murthe," is especially explicit in insisting that women's and men's natures are different and that any deviations from one's gender norm are to be avoided. This ontological "sexual conservatism" also manifests itself in male-female relations.

Nevertheless, Vance has created lively and heroic female characters, such as Glyneth in the Lyonesse books; after Glyneth marries, she drops offstage for the last book in that trilogy, but is replaced by another assertive female character, Madouc. Further examples of female protagonists quite as capable as their male equivalents may be found in, among other titles, Monsters in Orbit, Ecce and Old Earth, A Room to Die In, The Dark Ocean, Night Lamp and the short story "Assault on a City", which also features one of Vance's nastier male villains.

Possible Influences

Vance has spoken of his fondness for the writings of P.G. Wodehouse and a certain influence of Wodehouse can be discerned in some of Vance's writings, especially in his portrayals of overbearing aunts and their easily intimidated nephews. The Wodehouse influence, however, may not be as pronounced as that of L. Frank Baum (see Baum's Vance-like use of stilted dialogue for comic effect in The Tin Woodman of Oz). Whatever the relative weight of these and other models, Vance has proven himself a master of episodic farce in such works as Showboat World, "The Kokod Warriors" (a short story), and the celebrated chapter in the The Book of Dreams in which Howard Alan Treesong returns to his Gladbetook High School reunion to get even.

In an interview published in 1986, Vance stated that 'the best way to teach someone to be a writer is to force them to read twenty books I would set out for them': he then names, in addition to Wodehouse and Baum, Cervantes's Don Quixote, Kenneth Grahame's The Wind in the Willows, Richard Adams's Watership Down and The London Times Historical Atlas ('my favourite book - I don't know of anything more clutching for the imagination'). He has, in fact, no clear ancestor in English-language fiction, but some intriguing parallels in tone, language, narrative structure and character could be drawn with the novels of Thomas Love Peacock and James Branch Cabell. Similarities can also be discerned in some of the writings of Washington Irving, who had a Vance-like fascination with rogue personalities and an ability to describe their competition and machinations in arch language and with a wry humor. Additionately, the Zothique cycle of short stories by Clark Ashton Smith clearly influenced to some degree The Dying Earth.

As Mystery Writer

The mystery novels of Vance reveal much about his evolution as a science-fiction and fantasy writer (he stopped working in the mystery genre in the early 1970s except for science-fiction mysteries--see below). Bad Ronald is especially noteworthy for its portrayal of a trial-run version of what is perhaps Vance's greatest character--Howard Alan Treesong of The Book of Dreams. The Deadly Isles reveals, in its portrayal of Tahiti in the 1960s, some of the secret ingredients of master chef Vance's ability to cook up alien worlds with virtually no effort. The award-winning The Man in the Cage is a taut thriller set in North Africa at around the period of the French-Algerian war. A Room to Die In is a classic 'locked-room' murder mystery featuring a strong-willed young woman as the amateur detective. Bird Isle, a mystery set at a hotel on an island off the California coast, embodies Vance's taste for farce.

In particular, the two Sheriff Joe Bain mysteries--and especially The Pleasant Grove Murders--can still be read with pleasure, although more for the delightful California characters (such as Bain's New Age girl friend Luna) than for the actual crime investigations.

Vance has produced more successful mysteries set within his science-fiction universe. Most notable among these mixed-genre efforts are the "Galactic Effectuator" novelettes featuring Miro Hetzel, a Sam Spade type character, and the recent Night Lamp, which borrows deftly from P.D. James' An Unsuitable Job for a Woman. An early 1950s short story series features Magnus Ridolph, an interstellar adventurer and amateur detective (similar to Leslie Charteris' Simon Templar - but elderly and not prone to knocking anyone down) whose exploits appear to have been inspired, in part, by those of Jack London's South Seas adventurer, Captain David Grief.

Publication

For most of his career Vance's work suffered the vicissitudes common to most writers in his chosen field: ephemeral publication of stories in magazine form, short-lived softcover editions, insensitive editing beyond his control. As he became more widely recognized conditions improved, and his works became internationally renowned among aficionados. Much of his work has been translated into several languages.

The Vance Integral Edition

A integral edition of all of Vance's speculative works has been published in a limited, standardized edition of 44 volumes of hardbacks. This edition, put together over several years by Vance enthusiasts, presents the original manuscripts as Vance first submitted them for publication. Errors and editorial changes that later showed up in their original publications have now, according to the editors of the Vance Integral Edition, been corrected. A 45th volume contains the three novels that Vance wrote as Ellery Queen. Paperback editions derived from the VIE hardbacks are apparently now being prepared for publication.

Trivia

The Demon Princes are five briefly-allied galactic criminal kingpins who joined to conduct an infamous slaver raid on a planet colony (the Mount Pleasant massacre). Kirth Gersen's relatives were all slain or enslaved except for his grandfather, who then raised him on Old Earth and Alphanor as an instrument of vengeance. The Demon Princes, in order of publication of the novels in which they are featured, are: Attel Malagate ("Malagate the Woe"), Kokor Hekkus (aka "Billy Windle"), Viole Falushe (born Vogel Filschner), Lens Larque and Howard Alan Treesong.

If one were to send a letter to Howard Alan Treesong when he was a teenager, one would address it to: Howard Hardoah, Home Farm, Gladbetook, Land of Maunish, Moudervelt, Van Kaathe's Star, The Oikumene.

The system of magic used in Vance's work, in which spells are memorised and then forgotten once cast, was borrowed by Gary Gygax for the Dungeons & Dragons role-playing game, in part because it is not similar to any real-world occult beliefs. In homage, Gygax named one of the deities of magic in the world of Greyhawk Vecna (an anagram of Vance).

Selected bibliography

Dying Earth series (fantasy)

• The Dying Earth (collection of linked stories, 1950)
• The Eyes of the Overworld (collection of linked stories, 1966) (original title: Cugel the Clever)
• Cugel's Saga (novel, 1983) (original title: Cugel: The Skybreak Spatterlight)
• Rhialto the Marvellous (collection of linked stories, 1984)

Gaean Reach

The following books consist of individual non-series novels in a common shared background.

• Maske: Thaery
• The Gray Prince (original title: The Domains of Koryphon)
• Galactic Effectuator (collects the Miro Hetzel stories)
• Night Lamp

The Demon Princes, Big Planet, Lurulu, Cadwal Chronicles, Alastor Cluster and Durdane books listed below apparently also take place within the Gaean Reach/Alastor Cluster universe.

Demon Princes series

• Star King
• The Killing Machine
• The Palace of Love
• The Face
• The Book of Dreams

Big Planet

The Big Planet duo is included within the Gaean Reach setting because Showboat World contains Gaean Reach references. This makes the earlier novel by extension a Gaean Reach book even though it was written before Vance began to use the astronomical terminology of his mature career.

• Big Planet
• Showboat World (original title: The Magnificent Showboats of the Lower Vissel River, Lune XXIII, Big Planet)

Lurulu

• Ports of Call
• Lurulu

Cadwal Chronicles

• Araminta Station
• Ecce and Old Earth
• Throy

Alastor Cluster

• Trullion: Alastor 2262
• Marune: Alastor 933
• Wyst: Alastor 1716

Durdane trilogy

• The Anome
• The Brave Free Men
• The Asutra

Tschai Series (originally published as Planet of Adventure)

• City of the Chasch (original title: The Chasch)
• Servants of the Wankh (original title: The Wannek)
• The Dirdir
• The Pnume

Lyonesse Trilogy (fantasy)

• Lyonesse (subtitled Book I: Suldrun's Garden on the title page)
• The Green Pearl
• Madouc

Non-series novels

• Slaves of the Klau (original title: 'Gold and Iron')
• Vandals of the Void (young adult novel)
• To Live Forever (original title: 'Clarges')
• The Languages of Pao
• The Dragon Masters
• The Houses of Iszm
• Son of the Tree
• Monsters in Orbit (two linked novellas)
• Space Opera
• The Blue World
• The Brains of the Earth
• The Last Castle
• Emphyrio

Collections

• Future Tense
• The World Between and Other Stories
• The Many Worlds of Magnus Ridolph
• Eight Fantasms and Magics
• Lost Moons
• The Narrow Land
• The Augmented Agent and Other Stories
• The Dark Side of the Moon
• Chateau D'If and Other Stories
• When the Five Moons Rise

Books About Vance

• Jack Vance, ed. Tim Underwood and Chuck Miller (Writers of the 21st Century Series) (NY, 1980)
• Demon Prince: The Dissonant Worlds of Jack Vance, Jack Rawlins (Milford Series Popular Writers of Today, Volume 40) (San Bernardino, CA, 1986)
• The Jack Vance Lexicon: From Ahulph to Zygote, ed. Dan Temianka (Novato, CA and Lancaster, PA, 1992)
• The Work of Jack Vance: An Annotated Bibliography & Guide, Jerry Hewett and Daryl F. Mallett (Borgo Press Bibliographies of Modern Authors No.29) (San Bernardino & Penn Valley, CA and Lancaster, PA, 1994)
• Jack Vance: Critical Appreciations and a Bibliography, ed. A.E. Cunningham (Boston Spa & London, 2000)
• Vance Space: A Rough Guide to the Planets of Alastor Cluster, the Gaean Reach, the Oikumene, & other exotic sectors from the Science Fiction of Jack Vance, Michael Andre-Driussi (Sirius Fiction, San Francisco, 1997)

Books Emulating Vance

• A Quest for Simbilis (DAW Books, NY, 1974) by Michael Shea is designed - with Vance's permission - as a sequel to The Eyes of the Overworld, but was later superseded by Vance's own sequel, Cugel's Saga.
• Dinosaur Park, by Hayford Peirce, (Tor, NY, 1994), first published as The Thirteenth Majestral, (Tor, NY, 1989) — A novel in the manner of Jack Vance, particularly in its style and theme: retribution by a youthful hero for injustices done to his family. A brief, but vital, appearance is made in the book by an overly zealous cultural anthropologist and ethnologist named Kalikari Stone, Baron Bodissey, working on a grant from the Historical Institute of Naval Research on the planet Riverain. He saves the book's protagonist from a dire end, although, to his dismayed surprise, at the cost of his own life.
• Fane by David M. Alexander, (Pocket Books, NY, 1981) — A fantasy novel in the Vancian manner. Alexander is a longtime friend of Vance.
• Fools Errant (Aspect Books, 2001), Fool Me Twice (Aspect Books, 2001), and Black Brillion (Tor ,2004) by Matthew Hughes are set in a far future and feature protagonists that are very much inspired by Vance's Dying Earth.

External links

• Jack Vance home page and archive
• Jack Vance at the Internet Speculative Fiction Database