Jack Vance

• 1. Introduction

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  Jack Vance published his first story in the summer of 1945 in Thrilling Wonder Stories. It ran sixteen pages. Over the next seven decades, he would go on to write more than sixty books, possibly close to ninety, across science fiction, fantasy, and mystery. He won the Hugo Award three separate times, the Nebula Award once, and in 1997 the Science Fiction and Fantasy Writers of America named him their fifteenth Grand Master. A profile in The New York Times Magazine in 2009 called him "one of American literature's most distinctive and undervalued voices." Writer Michael Chabon went further, describing the neglect as "the most painful case of all the writers I love who I feel don't get the credit they deserve." How did a man who grew up working gold dredges and canneries, who memorized an eye chart to join the Merchant Marine, who kept writing even after going legally blind, end up producing one of the most singular bodies of work in American genre fiction? The answer begins not with a typewriter, but with a ranch in the Sacramento River delta.

• 2. A California Upbringing

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  Vance grew up in a large house on Filbert Street in San Francisco, the grandson of L. M. Hoefler, a successful lawyer whose records are believed to have been destroyed in the fire that followed the 1906 earthquake. When his father left to live on a ranch in Mexico, the family lost the use of the San Francisco house, and his mother moved the children to their grandfather's ranch near Oakley, in the Sacramento River delta. That landscape shaped him. He spent his time outdoors and read voraciously from his mother's collection, which included Edgar Rice Burroughs's Tarzan of the Apes and Jules Verne's The Mysterious Island. He also discovered pulp fiction magazines at a local drugstore, which steered him toward the genre he would eventually make his own. His grandfather's death coincided with the worst years of the Great Depression, and the family's fortunes collapsed. Vance left junior college and worked as a bellhop, which he later described as "a miserable year," and also in a cannery and on a gold dredge. Of that period he wrote: "Over a span of four or five years, I developed from an impractical little intellectual into a rather reckless young man, competent at many skills and crafts, and determined to try every phase of life." He eventually made it to the University of California, Berkeley, where he studied mining engineering, physics, journalism, and English over six years. An English professor dismissed his early science fiction with a scornful aside: "We also have a piece of science fiction." It was Vance's first negative review, and apparently his last deterrent.

• 3. Life Before the Page

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  Vance worked as an electrician at Pearl Harbor, Hawaii, for fifty-six cents an hour, on a degaussing crew. He left roughly a month before the Japanese attack. Back in California, he graduated in 1942 but was kept out of military service by weak eyesight. He found work as a rigger at the Kaiser Shipyard in Richmond, enrolled in an Army Intelligence program to learn Japanese, and washed out. In 1943, he memorized an eye chart and enlisted as an able seaman in the Merchant Marine instead. It was during those voyages that he wrote some of his earliest fantasy stories; they would appear in 1950 under the title The Dying Earth. Beyond the sea, he worked as a surveyor, a ceramicist, and a carpenter. Full-time writing would not come until the 1970s. From his youth, Vance had been passionate about Dixieland and traditional jazz; he played the cornet, the ukulele, the harmonica, and accompanied himself on a kazoo. His very first published writing was not fiction at all but jazz reviews for The Daily Californian, his college newspaper. Music wove itself through many of his later works, most explicitly in the short story "The Moon Moth," in which an entire society communicates through musical instruments rather than unaccompanied speech. In 1946, he married Norma Genevieve Ingold, another University of California student. Together they traveled extensively, spending months at a time in Ireland, Tahiti, South Africa, and Positano in Italy, and once completed an around-the-world voyage. They also lived on a houseboat on Lake Nagin in Kashmir, an experience that surfaced in several of Vance's novels.

• 4. Friends, Houseboats, and Herbert

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  Frank Herbert was a reporter in the early 1950s when he interviewed Vance for an article. The two became close friends almost immediately. They moved their families together to Mexico, near Lake Chapala outside Guadalajara, to establish what they called a writer's colony. Poul Anderson was part of the same circle. In 1962, Vance, Herbert, and Anderson jointly built a houseboat and sailed it in the Sacramento Delta. Vance's attachment to boats went beyond leisure. He built a thirty-six-foot trimaran in the early 1980s. He owned a series of larger and larger vessels, ending with Hinano, a forty-five-foot boat, before deteriorating eyesight and costs forced him to sell it. Houseboats appear in "The Moon Moth" (1961), The Palace of Love (1967), and Wyst: Alastor 1716 (1978). His first lucrative sale, one of the early Magnus Ridolph stories, went to Twentieth Century Fox, who also hired him as a screenwriter for the Captain Video television series. The proceeds funded a year of travel in Europe for the Vances. Back in Oakland, in a house he built and extended himself, Vance installed a hand-carved wooden ceiling imported from Kashmir. In the 1950s, a ceramics hobby led him to buy a kiln; that interest fed directly into his 1950 story "The Potters of Firsk." The line between his life and his fiction was never cleanly drawn.

• 5. The Shape of the Work

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  "The World-Thinker," published in Thrilling Wonder Stories in the summer of 1945, was Vance's debut. His lifetime output, which spans more than sixty books and possibly approaches ninety, falls into three categories: science fiction, fantasy, and mystery. By the 1960s, his science fiction had converged on a single imagined setting he called the Gaean Reach, a loosely organized region of interstellar space colonized by humans. Old Earth, which he called Gaia, sat at the center. Planets in the inner Reach tended toward peaceable commerce; on the edges, in the lawless Beyond, conditions were far less secure. Critic Scott Bradfield noted that Vance "wrote about incomprehensibly far-off futures that weren't driven by the splashy intergalactic military conflicts of his Golden Age predecessors, such as E.E. Doc Smith or Robert A. Heinlein. Instead, Vance's futures are marked by rich, panoramic socioeconomic systems." Battles in his books are rarely the point. In The Last Castle, a slave revolt against the nobility is depicted in abbreviated length because Vance was more interested in the social machinery behind it. His early pulp stories had a tendency toward biological and mysterious themes: ESP, genetics, brain parasites, body switching, other dimensions. Robots are nearly absent. By contrast, language and culture receive extensive treatment. In The Languages of Pao, a planetary leader orders three entirely new languages developed to reshape his people's psychology. That level of anthropological invention distinguished Vance from most of his contemporaries and attracted a devoted international readership.

• 6. The Dying Earth and Its Legacy

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  The Dying Earth, published in 1950, set Vance's fantasy reputation on its foundation. The world it depicts is a far distant future in which the sun is slowly fading out and magic and technology coexist uneasily. Vance returned to that setting decades later to write about Cugel the Clever, a picaresque scoundrel who consistently fails to achieve his own goals, in books written in 1963, 1978, and 1981. He also wrote about the magician Rhialto the Marvellous. The influence of those books reached other writers directly. Michael Shea wrote a Cugel sequel called A Quest for Simbilis before Vance had written one himself. Vance gave permission, and Shea's book reached print first. Literary influence came from many directions. Vance cited Jeffery Farnol's "high" language as a stylistic model, pointing to the Farnol title Guyfford of Weare as a typical example. P. G. Wodehouse influenced his taste for overbearing aunts as comic figures. L. Frank Baum contributed fantasy elements that Vance borrowed directly. Fantasy historian Lin Carter traced several lasting influences from James Branch Cabell, whose style shaped Vance's earliest magazine submissions in the 1940s, and suggested those experiments bore fruit in The Dying Earth. Science fiction critic Don Herron also identified Clark Ashton Smith as a shaping presence, particularly in how Vance named his characters. Vance was an original member of the Swordsmen and Sorcerers' Guild of America, a loosely organized group of heroic fantasy authors founded in the 1960s and led by Lin Carter, whose work helped establish the sword and sorcery subgenre.

• 7. Mystery Writing and the Edgar Award

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  The Man in the Cage won the Edgar Award in 1961 for best first mystery novel. It is a thriller set in North Africa during the period of the French-Algerian war, drawn from a trip Vance made to Morocco. He wrote fifteen novels outside science fiction and fantasy in total, including three published under the Ellery Queen house pseudonym and others written under names including Alan Wade, Peter Held, John van See, and Jay Kavanse. Several of the mystery novels grew directly from his travels: Strange People, Queer Notions from his time in Positano; The Deadly Isles from a stay in Tahiti. Bad Ronald, a novel exploring solipsistic megalomania, was adapted into a television film on ABC in 1974 and also produced as a French film, Mechant garcon, in 1992. Those are the only two Vance works to have been adapted for film to date. His two rural California mysteries featuring Sheriff Joe Bain drew praise from The New York Times, which wrote of the second that it contained "the best job of satisfying these tastes with his wonderful tales of Sheriff Joe Bain." Dorothy B. Hughes, writing in The Los Angeles Times about The Fox Valley Murders, called it "fat with character and scene." Three books published under the Ellery Queen name were so heavily revised by the publisher that Vance long refused to acknowledge them; the original texts eventually appeared in Volume 45 of the Vance Integral Edition.

• 8. Blindness, the VIE, and the Final Years

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  Although Vance had been legally blind since the 1980s, he continued writing with the help of BigEd software created for him personally by Kim Kokkonen. His final novel was Lurulu. After stating it would be his last book, he completed an autobiography, published in July 2009. That memoir, This Is Me, Jack Vance!, won the Hugo Award in 2010. Between 1999 and 2006, some three hundred volunteers working over the internet produced the Vance Integral Edition, a limited run of forty-four hardback volumes covering his entire output, under the author's supervision. A forty-fifth volume contained the three Ellery Queen novels in their original unrevised texts. In 2010, Afton House Books used those same texts as the basis for The Complete Jack Vance in six large volumes. In 2012, Spatterlight Press began releasing DRM-free e-book editions based on the Integral Edition source texts, with the intention of eventually publishing the complete collection in both e-book and print-on-demand formats. Vance died on the morning of the 26th of May 2013, at the age of ninety-six, at his home in the Oakland Hills. His son John Holbrook Vance II said the cause was the complications of old age: "everything just finally caught up with him." Tributes came from George R. R. Martin, Michael Moorcock, Neil Gaiman, and Elizabeth Bear. Steven Gould, then president of the Science Fiction Writers of America, called Vance "one of the greatest science fiction and fantasy writers of the 20th century." A family memorial site received hundreds of messages within days of his death, a response that measured in popular affection what the awards had long since measured in peer recognition.