VANCE, Jack

   Working name of US writer John Holbrook Vance (1916-), who was educated at the University of California first as a mining engineer, then as a physics major and finally in journalism, though without taking a degree. During WWII he served in the Merchant Navy, being twice torpedoed andwriting his first story, "The World Thinker", published in 1945 in TWS. In the late 1940s and early 1950s JV contributed a variety of short stories (one time using the pseudonym John Holbrook) and novels to the PULPMAGAZINES, primarily STARTLING STORIES and THRILLING WONDER STORIES. These included the Magnus Ridolph series, chronicling the adventures of a roguish interstellar troubleshooter, assembled as The Many Worlds of Magnus Ridolph (coll 1966 dos; exp 1980; further exp vt The CompleteMagnus Ridolph 1984). But nothing of this early work, dependent as it was on pulp conventions, prefigured the mature JV.The change began with his first published book, THE DYING EARTH (coll of linked stories 1950), comprising 6 previously unpublished tales set on Earth in the FAR FUTURE, at a time, long after the wasting away of science, when MAGIC has become the operating principle. This Dying Earth venue derived its languid colours and its florid architecture from the romances of Clark Ashton SMITH, and the tales are the first mature examples of that form asadumbrated by Smith; but, unlike his mentor, JV told his stories in an ironical tone, uniquely distanced and serene, that itself became an integral part of any definition of a Dying-Earth tale. Cruelties and nostalgias, picaresque flashes of plotting, adjurations of melancholy: all were enveloped in the musing voice. JV's only real failure in THE DYING EARTH - it would dog him throughout his career - lay in his inability toconceive narrative structures capable of sustaining his vision for more than novelette length. His later full-length Dying Earth volumes were all made up from shorter units; they included The Eyes of the Overworld (fixup 1966), Morreion: A Tale of the Dying Earth (1973 Flashing Swords \#1, anthed Lin CARTER; 1979 chap), A Bagful of Dreams (1979 chap), The Seventeen Virgins (1974 FSF; 1979 chap), Cugel's Saga (coll of linked stories 1983)and Rhialto the Marvelous (1984). (This last is not to be confused with Rhialto the Marvelous * [anth 1985], a SHARED-WORLD book containing also"Basileus" by C.J. CHERRYH and Janet E. MORRIS. Before that, in A Quest for Simbilis * [1974], Michael SHEA wrote a direct sequel to The Eyes of the Overworld, territory later covered in conflicting terms by Cugel's Saga.) The influence of JV's articulation of the tone and venue of theDying Earth was widespread, affecting both fantasy and sf writers, and helping authors such as Michael MOORCOCK to define the characteristic ambience of SCIENCE FANTASY. It would not be until The Book of the New Sun (1980-82) by Gene WOLFE - who amply acknowledged JV's central influence -that a new paradigm for the Dying-Earth tale would appear, one more tightly tied to narrative revelation but no more entrancing than its model.JV's second original contribution to the sf/fantasy field was his sophistication of the PLANETARY ROMANCE in Big Planet (1952 Startling Stories; cut 1957; further cut 1958; full text restored 1978), to whichShowboat World (1975; vt The Magnificent Showboats of the Lower Vissel River Lune XXIII South, Big Planet 1983) forms a retroactively conceived sequel. Before 1950 and THE DYING EARTH, the planetary romance had been generally restricted either to tales which replicated, palely, the work of Edgar Rice BURROUGHS or to pulp-sf adventures set on worlds which might becolourful but which were at the same time conceived with a fatal thinness. What was lacking was any form of enabling premise. In Big Planet JVprovided an sf model for the planetary romance which has been of significant use for 40 years. The planet of this novel is a huge though Earthlike world, with enough landmass to provide realistic venues in whicha wide range of social systems can operate, and, significantly, is low in heavy-metal resources (a fact that both explains its relatively low gravity and requires the wide range of societies that flourish to be low-tech ones). As is usual with JV, these societies are all of distant human origin, though they have become exceedingly variegated in ways open to description in the ethnographical style he developed to tell this tale, and upon which he depended for his best and truest effects over the next decades (ANTHROPOLOGY; SOCIOLOGY). The world of the JV planetary romance might occasionally be linked notionally to Earth by conventional sf trappings (generally of little actual relevance), but basically it is a venue, placed far into the future though without foregrounding any common dating or other device that might tie it too tightly to any Future History.His other titles from this period were less ambitious butcontained some interesting incidental invention; they include Son of the Tree (1951 TWS; 1964 dos), Slaves of the Klau (1952 Space Stories as"Planet of the Damned"; cut 1958 dos; text restored, vt Gold and Iron 1982) and The Houses of Iszm (1954 Startling Stories; 1964 dos). None of these were particularly well organized books - nor for that matter are THE DYING EARTH and Big Planet - but the development of IMMORTALITY themes inthe far-future DYSTOPIA depicted in To Live Forever (1956) is more impressive, and The Languages of Pao (1958) interestingly espouses the Whorfian hypothesis (LINGUISTICS) that language creates PERCEPTION,rather than the reverse. The main thrust of JV's work, however, as in such stories as "The Miracle Workers" (1958), continued to lie in increasingly ambitious explorations of the planetary-romance theme of LIFE ON OTHER WORLDS. THE DRAGON MASTERS (1963 dos), a short novel which won JV hisfirst HUGO, clearly illustrates this tendency. Set on a distant world in the far future, it is a story grounded in GENETIC ENGINEERING, but the science is so far advanced that it could equally be considered magic.As JV's created worlds became richer and more complex, so too did his style.Always tending towards the baroque, it had developed by the time of THE DRAGON MASTERS into an effective high-mannered diction, somewhat pedantic, and almost always saturated with a rich but distanced irony. JV's talent for naming the people and places in his stories (a mixture of exotic invented terms and commonplace words with the right resonance) contributed to the sense that dream ethnographies were being carved, almost as a gardener would create topiary. Three novels, similar in structure, show these talents at their fullest stretch: The Blue World (1964 Fantastic as "King Kragen"; exp 1966), EMPHYRIO (1969) and The Anome (1971 FSF as "TheFaceless Man"; 1973; vt The Faceless Man 1978) each follow the life of a boy born into and growing up in a static, stratified society, with which he comes into conflict, being driven eventually into rebellion. The invented world in each is particularly carefully thought-out. Both EMPHYRIO and The Anome additionally feature some piercing SATIRE ofRELIGION.As his professional career developed, JV began to initiate various sequences - with mixed results, for he often gave the impression that, once the setting had been fully established, his interest began inexorably to wane. Later books in his series are often inferior to their predecessors, and far more likely to depend for their effects upon plotting routines extracted - none too competently - from the dawn of pulp. This is the case with the earlier vols of the Demon Princes series, an interstellar saga of vengeance comprising The Star King (1964), The Killing Machine (1964), The Palace of Love (1967), The Face (1979) and TheBook of Dreams (1981), though the last two titles are of more interest; with the Planet of Adventure series, comprising City of the Chasch (1968; vt Chasch 1986), Servants of the Wankh (1969; vt Wankh 1986), The Dirdir (1969) and The Pnume (1970), all assembled as The Planet of AdventureOmnibus (omni 1985 UK); and with the Durdane trilogy, comprising The Anome, The Brave Free Men (1973) and The Asutra (1974), all assembled as Durdane (omni 1989 UK). In contrast, the Alastor Cluster sequence - Trullion: Alastor 2262 (1973), Marune: Alastor 933 (1975) and Wyst: Alastor 1716 (1978) - arguably improves from beginning to end. Most of these novels are planetary romances, and can be read in isolation from their fellows; at the same time, most embody mild hints - for example, the Demon Princes series is set in the far past of the Cadwal Chronicles (seebelow) - that they belong to the same tenuously knit future Gaean Reach Universe, most clearly described in the Demon Princes series. But thisbackground never governs the reader's perception of individual tales.JV has written comparatively little short fiction. Apart from those stories already mentioned, the best include "Telek" (1952), "The Moon Moth" (1961) and the novella THE LAST CASTLE (1967 dos), which won JV a NEBULA and his 2nd Hugo. "The Moon Moth", one of JV's most elaborate stories, featuresthe use of MUSIC as a secondary form of COMMUNICATION. Music and other ARTS feature in several other JV stories, including Space Opera (1965),EMPHYRIO, The Anome and Showboat World. Many of JV's best short stories are in Eight Fantasms and Magics (coll 1969; with 2 stories cut, vt Fantasms and Magics 1978 UK) and The Best of Jack Vance (coll 1976). Thelatter is also notable for containing informative commentaries on the stories included, as JV is renowned for his reticence concerning himself and his stories, maintaining such a low profile that a rumour that began in 1950 that he was another Henry KUTTNER pseudonym was still being perpetrated in some quarters 20 years later, notwithstanding Kuttner's death in 1958.The 1980s saw some slackening in JV's production, though this might not have been evident to the casual observer, as it was now that much of his earlier short fiction was finally brought out in book form. Beyond continuations of earlier series, his most interesting work in this decade was restricted to 2 new series. One was the Lyonesse sequence of fantasies about Tristan's birthplace off the coast of France, now sunk into the wide funnel of the English Channel: Suldren's Garden (1983; rev 1983; vt Lyonesse 1984 UK), Lyonesse: The Green Pearl (1985; rev vt TheGreen Pearl 1986) and Lyonesse: Madouc (1989; vt Madouc 1990). Of greater sf interest are the Cadwal Chronicles - to date Araminta Station (1987), Ecce and Olde Earth (1991) and Throy (1992) - expanding theplanetary-romance idiom into very long books with a sophisticated, newly plot-wise leisureliness which almost fully warrants their length. Interestingly, the planet Cadwal - the main character of the sequence, ina fashion typical of JV - is a nature reserve.JV also wrote mystery novels, mostly during the 1960s - one of the best of them, The Man in the Cage (1960), won an Edgar - and scripts for the tv series CAPTAIN VIDEO.None of this work lacks competence, but none has the haunting retentiveness in the mind's eye of his planetary romances or his Dying Earths. As a landscape artist, a gardener of worlds, JV has been for halfa century central to both sf and FANTASY. He has a genius of place.

   MJE/JC

   Other works: The Space Pirate (1950 Startling Stories; 1953; cut vt The Five Gold Bands 1962 dos; text restored 1980); Vandals of the Void (1953); Future Tense (coll 1964; vt Dust of Far Suns 1981); The WorldBetween (coll 1965 dos; vt The Moon Moth dated 1975 but 1976 UK); Monsters in Orbit (1952 TWS as "Abercrombie Station" and "Cholwell's Chickens"; cut 1965 dos); The Brains of Earth (1966 dos), assembled vt Nopalgarth withThe Houses of Iszm and Son of the Tree in Nopalgarth (omni 1980); The Worlds of Jack Vance (coll 1973); Green Magic (coll 1979), not to be confused with Green Magic (1963 FSF; 1979 chap), which contains only the collection's title story; Galactic Effectuator (coll of linked stories 1980); Lost Moons (coll 1982); The Narrow Land (coll 1982); Light from aLone Star (coll 1985); The Dark Side of the Moon: Stories of the Future (coll 1986); The Augmented Agent (coll 1986); Chateau d'If and Other Stories (coll 1990); When the Five Moons Rise (coll 1992).Non-sf, some as John Holbrook Vance: Take My Face (1957) as by Peter Held and Isle of Peril (1959) as by Alan Wade, both assembled (the latter vt Bird Isle) as Bird Isle/Take My Face (omni 1988); A Room to Die In (1965) as by Ellery Queen; The Four Johns (1964; vt Four Men Called John 1976 UK) as by Ellery Queen; The Madman Theory (1966) as by Ellery Queen; The Fox Valley Murders (1966); The Pleasant Grove Murders (1967); The Deadly Isles (1969); Bad Ronald (1973); The House on Lilly Street (1979); Strange Notions (1985); The Dark Ocean (1985).

   About the author: Jack Vance, a Fantasmic Imagination: A Working Bibliography (last rev 1990 chap) by Gordon BENSON Jr and Phil STEPHENSEN-PAYNE; The Jack Vance Lexicon: From Aluph to Zipangote (1992) ed Dan Ternianka; The Work of Jack Vance: An Annotated Bibliography \& Guide (1994) by Jerry Hewett and Daryl F. MALLETT.

   See also: ALIENS; ASTEROIDS; COLONIZATION OF OTHER WORLDS; CRIME AND PUNISHMENT; CYBORGS; ECOLOGY; FANTASTIC VOYAGES; GALACTIC EMPIRES; GALAXY SCIENCE FICTION; GAMES AND SPORTS; GOTHIC SF; LEISURE; LIFE ON OTHER WORLDS; LONGEVITY (IN WRITERS AND PUBLICATIONS); MATTER TRANSMISSION; MONEY; SPACE HABITATS; SPACE OPERA; SUPERMAN; SWORD AND SORCERY; TABOOS; TERRAFORMING; THRILLING WONDER STORIES; TRANSPORTATION; UNDER THE SEA; VILLAINS.