Inimitable Vance (well almost, there's Shea)
Written: Jul 13 '00 (Updated Jul 13 '00)
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Product Rating:
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Pros: Lush imagery, thoughtful stories
Cons: A touch of space opera some times, languid scenes some others.
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| expono's Full Review: Vance, Jack |
John Holbrook Vance is one of my literary lions. It is on the anniversary event of Markham Shaw Pyle's advent that I write this quick review to honor an inimitable author in honor of the inimitable mshawpyle. (You'll forgive my prolix style, for I must verge upon verbiage that shows I can go, toe-to-toe, with the rest of the rotters who are going so far as to say HAPPY BIRTHDAY MARKHAM!!! and even so much farther to say YOU WRITE SO MUCH AND SO WELL AND SO, WELL, MUCH THAT YOU MUST BE OLDER THAN DIRT, TOO! and fete him in the style to which we have been accustomed from him.)
But no, I shan't ruminate too long upon the many returns of Markham, past, present, and future, lest I spark a round robin rodomontade from the honoree of this occasion from which I will suffer, for he indeed has depth and breadth to make me appear shallow and callow. Allow me to merely note that an early epinions profile of Markham, and confirmation via private communication, have indicated that he obtained his majority at the apogee of disco. Now while naysayers maintain that perhaps his teeth are longer than intimated, I say let that suffice: Such as he to cosmically align himself with such as that is surely an irony that should be entertained without much scrutiny: So please, make no invidious comparisons between the age of the Esquire and dirt, take him at his word; humus him.
And fellow well-wishers are:
andy, arazim, buffoonery, caconti, conradd, cornelia, emlin, endora60, erik_kosberg, forkids, grouch, happy2000usa, jrk, kcfoxy, kimmiko, kurt_messick, lambira, leah, lovdbygod7, mshawpyle (natch), stonehousellc, sweetpaulie, veneto
You can check out their tributes/reviews at
http://www.epinions.com/book-Member_Write_Offs-Favorite_Author
But in my mind, who better to review on this occasion than John Holbrook Vance (a.k.a. Jack Vance)? Markham can't steal a march on him for sheer gadzookery:
The apartments of Joaz Banbeck, carved deep from the heart of the limestone craig, consisted of five principal chambers, on five different levels. At the top were the relinquarium and a formal council chamber: the first a room of somber magnificence housing the various archives, trophies and mementos of the Banbecks; the second a long narrow hall, with dark wainscoting chest-high and a white plaster vault above, extending the entire width of the drag, so that balconies overlooked Banbeck Vale at one end and Kergan's Way at another.
Below were Joaz Banbeck's private quarters: a parlor and bedchamber, then next his study and finally, at the bottom, a workroom where Joaz permitted none but himself.
Thus begins Vance's 1963 Hugo Award winning novel The Dragon Masters and thus begins your acquaintance with a master of literary style who writes intelligent science fiction and fantasy. There is, of course, the chance that you don't like big words and that you need to have a plot driven made-for-mass-market-to-be-made-into-a-movie tale, but then if you were that type of reader, you wouldn't have made it through my introduction, now would you?
I am not going to do an exhaustive analysis of Vance, mainly because I have come across excellent links (given below) that superbly summarize his career and do an even better job of conveying his literary appeal than I can. I am left with nothing but to convey to you what Jack Vance meant and means to me.
[[Plus it is past my bedtime and I have just been informed that I WILL be up with Li'l Ohno! tomorrow morning and I WILL be in a good mood and I WILL play with him until HE drops down exhausted. (Lord, is that possible? Just one miracle to outlast the vim in a tyke's zest for adventure--please?) And so it shall be, for Mrs. expono will not be brooked while she arranges life to deal with sleep deprivation and a teething baby.]]
In a nutshell, Jack Vance saved me from science fiction ennui. I had bought every interesting science fiction paperback from the (at that time) smallest Waldenbooks store in existence, and I had sucked the science fiction section of the local library dry. Robert Heinlein was cranking out his ridiculous later material, and there wasn't much in the world after Piers Anthony, whom I was finding to be just a tad derivative--of himself. (There was no internet back then, folks. I had no clue that the Hugo awards existed, even. I was just reading books that appeared on shelves without context, and I was too dumb to realize that I could pick up a non-fiction (gasp!) critique on science fiction to get some ideas of what else was out there.)
And so I happened upon Jack Vance. I had made a trip to the big city to visit my Mecca: a complete store devoted to science fiction and fantasy! There, by serendipity (and probably due to the fact the V's were shelved near the entrance) I saw the "Demon Prince" series. Cool! A revenge saga: rotund glasses wearing geeks with internalized bloodthirsty lives of adventure love nothing better.
But it was better. Oh, the first book, Star King didn't go that much beyond standard Isaac Asimov, golden age type of fare, but there was something different. The imagery was richer yet at the same time there was something "missing". It wasn't a bad sort of missing, but an absence that was ... ohmigosh--an absence of empathy. Not sympathy, but empathy. The main character was someone you followed, not someone you became. There is a distance to Vance's characters; and sometimes you actually have to read to find out what the characters will do!
Now this is not to say that Jack Vance doesn't pen likable characters, but that he does not truckle to an audience of adolescent boys via internal musings tinged with pathetic self deprecation and hurt over unrecognized potential. ("That's me! that's me!") Hey, in the 50's this was entrenched. Today anything goes in sci-fi, but remember, I got a lot of my books from the public library and the small mainstream bookstore: my universes were circumscribed by Asimov, Clarke, and Heinlein.
Hello Vance.
I soon read The Dying Earth, and Eyes of the Overlord and my appreciation knew no bounds. In a field where today you are considered a piker for writing anything less than 500 pages long, Vance wrote two wonderful, yet short, masterpieces. Sure, Vance has written thicker books, but those two really set the standard for me as far as modern fantasy goes. How inventive! How entertaining! How good are they? Here is the proof: My idiot brother liked them--and he detests fantasy and science fiction (oh but he LOOOOOVES horror, go figure, like science fiction is so contrived and horror isn't, puh-lease).
And so I read and read and read, Vance, Vance, Vance.
Don't get me wrong, I learned how to look for new science fiction and did branch out. Want to know of a pleasant surprise I happened across while looking for new authors? An excellent fantasy author, Michael Shea, actually wrote a sequel to Eyes of the Overlord. I didn't know this until I started reading it: Shea's book is A Quest for Simbilis. How many authors do you know who like some other author so much that they will continue their series for them? (And no snide Hardy Boys jokes here, please. This is a series, not a franchise.) Funny thing is, Vance subsequently wrote a sequel to EoO, called Cudgel's Saga, (and then Rhialto the Marvelous.)
Around 1988 I lost steam. I haven't read Vance's new stuff. For some reason, science fiction didn't hold me any more. Oh I'd read it, but there was so much else in the world and frankly, I'd rather reread Vance and Tolkein than read some 500 page soap opera hot off the presses which has robots and/or magic smeared throughout the syrupy plot.
Vance has had great influence on a few writers. Every now and then I will be reading about some other author and Vance's name will pop up.
Do his stories suffer from, shall we say, disadVANCEtages? Yes. That distance I was talking about? It's always there. The writing? Always is the same voice and sometimes you'll say, "Enough with the adjectives already". The story? Some seem a little old hat. But his work is far, far better as a whole than almost any other writer of similar scope.
Oh yeah, he also writes mysteries. I haven't read any of those. (Read the "Demon Prince" series, they are essentially science fiction detective stories.)
So there you are: Jack Vance, my most influential author? Perhaps. I had to get my penchant for sesquipedalian words somewhere, and I haven't known Markham for that long....
--Mr. expono
Links -n- such
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This is an excellent Vance article. It says everything I would say, but better:
http://www.infinityplus.co.uk/nonfiction/jvprofile.htm
This is a more personal bio of Vance.
http://www.massmedia.com/~mikeb/vie/About_Vance.htm
And don't you know, the Michael Shea site belongs to the Jack Vance appreciation ring. Go figure.
http://users.ap.net/~shea/
An in-your-face review that sets Vance and Shea up as then-saviors of fantasy. Right about the time that was written, I don't think I could have agreed more:
http://www.strangewords.com/archive/cheap1.html
P.S. Markham, forgive me for being late, please! You know that I am crisis driven--and writing this review wasn't a crisis until I lost my dictionary this evening!
Seriously, I apologize for being late. Belated happy birthday friend.
Recommended:
Yes
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Epinions.com ID:
expono
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Location: Houston, Texas
Reviews written: 51
Trusted by: 56 members
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