Information about Jack Vance

John Holbrook Vance

Jack Vance at the helm of his boat on San Francisco Bay in the early 1980s.
Born:	July 28 1916 (1916--) (age 91) San Francisco, California
Occupation:	Novelist, Short story writer
Nationality:	United States
Genres:	Fantasy, Science Fiction
Influenced:	Gene Wolfe, George R.R. Martin, Gardner Dozois

John Holbrook Vance (born August 28, 1916 in San Francisco, California) is generally described as an American fantasy and science fiction author. 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 Nebula) for the best first mystery novel in 1961 for The Man in the Cage; in 1992, he was Guest of Honor at the WorldCon in Orlando, Florida; and in 1996 he was named a SFWA Grand Master.

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 in San Francisco, and then on a farm near Oakley in the delta of the Sacramento River. He was an avid reader. He left high school early to work as a bell-hop (a "miserable year"), in a cannery, and on a gold dredge,^[1] before entering the University of California, Berkeley where, over a six-year period, he studied mining engineering, physics, journalism and English. Vance wrote one of his first science fiction stories for an English class assignment; his professor's reaction was “We also have a piece of science fiction” in a scornful tone, Vance’s first negative review.^[2] He worked for a while as an electrician in the naval shipyards at Pearl Harbor, Hawaii -- for "56 cents an hour". He quit about a month before the attack on Pearl Harbor.^[3]

Vance graduated in 1942. Weak eyesight prevented military service. He found a job as a rigger at the Kaiser Shipyard in Richmond, California, and enrolled in an Army Intelligence program to learn Japanese, but washed out. In 1943, he memorized an eye chart and became an able seaman in the Merchant Marine.^[4] Contrary to a tenacious legend, he was not torpedoed even once. This was possibly invented in the early days by an editor to enhance Vance's attraction in a blurb. In later years, boating remained his favorite recreation; boats and voyages are a frequent theme in his work. He worked as a seaman, a rigger, a surveyor, ceramicist, and carpenter before he established himself fully as a writer, which did not occur until the 1970s.

From his youth, Vance has been fascinated by jazz. He is an amateur of the horn and banjo. His first published writings were jazz reviews for The Daily Californian, his college paper, and music is an element in many of his works.

In 1946 Vance met and married Norma Ingold. They live, with their son, in Oakland, in a house built and extended by Vance himself over the years, which includes a hand-carved wooden ceiling from Nepal. The Vances have made several extensive around-the-world voyages, often spending several months in places like Tahiti, Positano (in Italy) and a boat house on a lake in Kashmir.

Vance began trying to become a professional writer in the late 1940s, in the period of the San Francisco Renaissance--a movement of experimentation in literature and the arts. His first lucrative sale was one of the early Magnus Ridolph stories to Twentieth Century Fox, who also hired him as a screenwriter. The proceeds supported the Vances for a year's travel in Europe.^[5] There are various references to the Bay Area Bohemian life in his work.

Science fiction authors Frank Herbert and Poul Anderson were among Vance's closest friends. The three jointly owned a houseboat which they sailed in the Sacramento Delta. The Vances and the Herberts lived in Mexico together for a period.

Although legally blind since the 1980s, Vance has continued to write with the aid of special software, his most recent novel being Lurulu. Vance has said this will be his final book.^[6]

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

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 (though Vance himself reportedly deplores these labels).

Among Vance's earliest published fiction is a set of fantasy stories written while he served in the merchant marine during the war. They appeared in 1950, several years after Vance had started publishing science fiction in the pulp magazines, under the title The Dying Earth. (Vance's original title, and the one used for the Vance Integral Edition version (see below), is Mazirian the Magician.) Vance used the same general setting (a far distant future where the sun is dying, and where magic and high technology coexist) for two sets of picaresque adventures of the ne'er-do-well Cugel the Clever (first published as The Eyes of the Overworld and Cugel's Saga), as well as three stories about a haughty magician (collected as Rhialto the Marvellous). His other major fantasy cycle, the Lyonesse Trilogy (Suldrun’s Garden, The Green Pearl, Madouc), recounts events on the Elder Isles, an Atlantis-like archipelago in the Armorican gulf, where dynastic politics and magical doings are set in the early Middle Ages.

Vance's science fiction runs the gamut from stories written for pulps in the 1940s to multi-volume tales set in the space age. While Vance's stories have a wide variety of temporal settings, a majority of them belong to a period long after humanity has colonized other stars, culminating in the development of the "Gaean Reach." In its early phases (the Oikumene of the Demon Princes series), 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.

Vance’s stories are seldom concerned directly with war. The conflicts are rarely direct. Sometimes at the edges of the Reach, or in the lawless "Beyond," a planet is menaced or craftily exploited, though more extensive battles are described in The Dragon Masters, "The Miracle Workers," and the Lyonesse trilogy, in which medieval-style combat abounds. His characters usually 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 in Galactic Effectuator, featuring Miro Hetzel. 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, , and, one way and another, most of the science fiction novels.

Literary influences

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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: Baum's use of stilted dialogue for comic effect in The Tin Woodman of Oz would later be echoed by Vance. Note the similarity of the title "Guyal of Sfere" to Guyfford of Weare, a 1928 novel by Jeffrey Farnol that Vance owns.^[7] Vance specifically mentions reading, as a child, Robert W. Chambers, Edgar Rice Burroughs, Jules Verne, L. Frank Baum, and hundreds of books from the Edward Stratemeyer fiction factory. As a teenager, he discovered Weird Tales and Amazing Stories.Vance cites Wodehouse, Farnol and Lord Dunsany as "important influences in my own development."^[8]

Whatever the relative weight of these and other influences, 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").

Vance has no single 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, while Vance's mordantly stylized dialogues are especially reminiscent of Ernest Bramah's Kai Lung tales. 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 probably influenced Vance's The Dying Earth.

Mystery fiction

Between the late 1940s and the 1960s, Vance wrote fourteen mystery novels that appeared irregularly from the mid-1950s through the 1980s. Some of them 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 "Demon Princes" cycle of science fiction novels. Bad Ronald was made into a TV-movie, which aired on ABC, in 1974.

Three books published under the Ellery Queen pseudonym were written (and rewritten by the publisher) to editorial requirements. Four others reflect Vance’s 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, set on a merchant marine vessel; and The Deadly Isles, based on a stay in Tahiti.

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 for Howard Alan Treesong of The Book of Dreams. The Edgar-Award-winning The Man in the Cage is a 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, reflects Vance's taste for farce.

Vance's two rural Northern California mysteries featuring Sheriff Joe Bain were well received by the critics. The New York Times said of The Fox Valley Murders: "Mr. Vance has created the county with the same detailed and loving care with which, in the science fiction he writes as Jack Vance, he can create a believable alien planet." And Dorothy B. Hughes, in The Los Angeles Times, wrote that it was "fat with character and scene." As for the second Bain novel, The New York Times said: "I like regionalism in American detective stories, and I enjoy reading about the problems of a rural county sheriff... and I bless John Holbrook Vance for the best job of satisfying these tastes with his wonderful tales of Sheriff Joe Bain..."

Vance has also written mysteries set in his science-fiction universes. An early 1950s short story series features Magnus Ridolph, an interstellar adventurer and amateur detective who is elderly and not prone to knocking anyone down, and whose exploits appear to have been inspired, in part, by those of Jack London's South Seas adventurer, Captain David Grief. The "Galactic Effectuator" novelettes feature Miro Hetzel, a figure who resembles Ridolph in his blending of detecting and troubleshooting (the "effectuating" indicated by the title). A number of the other science fiction novels include mystery, spy thriller, or crime-novel elements: The Houses of Iszm, Son of the Tree, the Alastor books Trullion and Marune, the Cadwal series, and large parts of the Demon Princes series.

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, including Dutch, French, Spanish, Russian and Italian. Beginning in the 1960s, Jack Vance's work has also been extensively translated into German. In the large German-language market, his books continue to be widely read.

In 1977, the fantasy/sf small press Underwood-Miller released their first publication, the first hardcover edition of The Dying Earth in a beautiful high-quality limited edition of just over 1000 copies. Other titles in the "Dying Earth" cycle also received hardcover treatment from Underwood-Miller shortly thereafter, such as The Eyes of the Overworld and Cugel's Saga. Since these first publications until the mid-1990s, Underwood-Miller published many of Vance's works, including his mystery fiction, often in beautiful limited editions featuring dustjacket artwork by leading fantasy artists. The entire Jack Vance output of Underwood-Miller comes close to a complete collection of Vance's previously published works, many of which had not seen hardcover publication. Also, many of these editions are described as "the author's preferred text" ensuring that they have not been drastically edited and/or cut. In the mid-1990s, Tim Underwood and Charles Miller parted company. However, they have continued to publish Vance titles individually, including such works as Emphyrio and To Live Forever by Miller, and a reprint edition of The Eyes of the Overworld by Underwood. Because of the low print-run on many of these titles, which often could only be found in science fiction bookstores at the time of their release, these books are highly sought after by ardent Vance readers and collectors, and some titles fetch premium prices.

The Vance Integral Edition

An Integral Edition of all Vance's works has been published in a limited edition of 44 hardback volumes. A special 45th volume contains the three novels Vance wrote as Ellery Queen. This edition was created from 1999 to 2006 by 300 volunteers working via the internet, under the aegis of the author. The texts and titles used are those preferred by the author. Further information can be found at Foreverness.

Influence on Dungeons & Dragons

The system of magic used in some of Vance's work, in which spells are memorized 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. It is often referred to as Vancian spellcasting. In homage, Dungeons & Dragons contributor Brian Blume named one of the deities of magic in the world of Greyhawk as 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)
• Cugel's Saga (novel, 1983)
• Rhialto the Marvellous (collection of linked stories, 1984)

Gaean Reach

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

• The Gray Prince (alternate title: The Domains of Koryphon) (1974)
• (1976)
• Galactic Effectuator (collects the Miro Hetzel stories "Freitzke's Turn" and "The Dogtown Tourist Agency")
• 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

• The 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 references to it. This makes the earlier novel by extension a Gaean Reach book as well, even though it was written before Vance began to use the astronomical terminology of his mature career.

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

Lurulu

• Ports of Call
• Lurulu

Cadwal Chronicles

• Araminta Station (1987)
• Ecce and Old Earth (1991)
• Throy (1992)

Alastor Cluster

Durdane series

• The Anome (alternate title: The Faceless Man)
• The Brave Free Men
• The Asutra

Tschai Series (originally published as Planet of Adventure)

• City of the Chasch (alternate title: The Chasch)
• Servants of the Wankh (alternate 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: "Planet of the Damned"; alternate title: Gold and Iron)
• Vandals of the Void (young adult novel)
• To Live Forever
• 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 Earth (alternate title: Nopalgarth)
• The Last Castle
• Emphyrio
• Five Gold Bands (alternate title: The Space Pirate)

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
• The Jack Vance Treasury

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 Zipangote, 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)
• An Encyclopedia of Jack Vance: 20th Century Science Fiction Writer (Studies in American Literature, 50), David G. Mead (Lewiston: Edwin Mellen Press, New York, 2002)

Books emulating Vance

• A Quest for Simbilis by Michael Shea (DAW Books, NY, 1974) a sequel to The Eyes of the Overworld, with Vance's permission (later regretted). Vance's own Cugel sequel was published as Cugel's Saga, and republished by the VIE with Vance's title: Cugel: The Skybreak Spatterlight.^[9]
• Dinosaur Park by Hayford Peirce (Tor, NY, 1994).
• Fane by David M. Alexander (longtime Vance friend.) (Pocket Books, NY, 1981).
• Fools Errant (Aspect Books, 2001), Fool Me Twice (Aspect Books, 2001), Black Brillion (Tor, 2004) by Matt Hughes
• Gene Wolfe has acknowledged that The Dying Earth influenced his The Book of the New Sun.^[10]
• The Sea Hag by David Drake has intentional similarities to The Dying Earth.^[11]
• Dan Simmons's Hyperion series (Hyperion, The Fall of Hyperion, Endymion, The Rise of Endymion) has many echoes of Vance, explicitly acknowledged in one of the later books.

Listen to

• Jack Vance's The Potters of Firsk, Dimension X, NBC radio, 1950

References

See also

• "The Moon Moth", a short story

External links

• Jack Vance home page and archive
• Jack Vance at the Internet Speculative Fiction Database
• Totality Online the Vance vocabulary search tool
• Foreverness Bibliographic information, 11 first chapters, information about the Vance Integral Edition.
• The Jack Vance Message Board ; includes a section where Vance answered questions from readers.
• The Gaean Reach Another message board, which also contains unique early writings by Vance
• A Jack Vance information page. A long-maintained site that has exhaustive Vance information.

Persondata
NAME	Vance, John Holbrook
ALTERNATIVE NAMES	Vance, Jack
SHORT DESCRIPTION	American Novelist, Short story writer
DATE OF BIRTH	August 28, 1916
PLACE OF BIRTH	San Francisco, California
DATE OF DEATH
PLACE OF DEATH