Jack Vance (nonfiction): Difference between revisions
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== Karl Jones on Vance == | |||
From a [https://bbs.boingboing.net/t/excellent-review-of-jack-vances-tales-of-the-dying-earth/159207/24 Boing Boing comment]: | |||
<blockquote> | |||
The master craftsman of word-smiths … the voice of angels in a world-wise throat … Jack Vance. | |||
He was good from the outset: the style and the substance alike. | |||
Vance is hailed as a stylist, and with good reason. | |||
But the substance is there too, in rich measure: Vance was a natural born story teller who had things to say and reasons to say them, a modern-day Jack London sailing the space-lanes. | |||
Like many, I discovered Vance in my teens (the mid-1970s) via The Dying Earth. | |||
Forty-some years, and many Vance novels and short stories later, the work I like to call out for special attention is his early (1956) novel To Live Forever. It shows great maturity for so early a work, and presages the central concerns that Vance will elaborate in his subsequent work. | |||
I think of it sometimes when I read someone extolling their interpretation of Ayn Rand. (It’s the extolling that I find problematic, not Rand as such.) Neo-Randians need to lighten up and have some fun. Try To Live Forever – it’s got all the extolling of self-reliance that you are hoping for, and the cold pitiless individual-atomizing universe that will be the death of us all in due course which you celebrate in fear and delight … and yet recognizes (the part I like) that No Man Is An Island and that Bad Things Happen when we forget it or try to pretend otherwise. | |||
</blockquote> | |||
== Why I Love Jack Vance So Much == | == Why I Love Jack Vance So Much == | ||
Revision as of 14:02, 22 January 2020
...
Karl Jones on Vance
From a Boing Boing comment:
The master craftsman of word-smiths … the voice of angels in a world-wise throat … Jack Vance.
He was good from the outset: the style and the substance alike.
Vance is hailed as a stylist, and with good reason.
But the substance is there too, in rich measure: Vance was a natural born story teller who had things to say and reasons to say them, a modern-day Jack London sailing the space-lanes.
Like many, I discovered Vance in my teens (the mid-1970s) via The Dying Earth.
Forty-some years, and many Vance novels and short stories later, the work I like to call out for special attention is his early (1956) novel To Live Forever. It shows great maturity for so early a work, and presages the central concerns that Vance will elaborate in his subsequent work.
I think of it sometimes when I read someone extolling their interpretation of Ayn Rand. (It’s the extolling that I find problematic, not Rand as such.) Neo-Randians need to lighten up and have some fun. Try To Live Forever – it’s got all the extolling of self-reliance that you are hoping for, and the cold pitiless individual-atomizing universe that will be the death of us all in due course which you celebrate in fear and delight … and yet recognizes (the part I like) that No Man Is An Island and that Bad Things Happen when we forget it or try to pretend otherwise.
Why I Love Jack Vance So Much
"Why I Love Jack Vance So Much" ...
A fantasist for certain, he occasionally dabbled in mysteries, but his main concern was the way people behave and the social, political and personal forces that motivate them. He thought of himself as “a speculative anthropologist,” his son said, interested in human beings and their foibles and their ability — or inability — to adapt to strained and bizarre situations.
— “Jack Vance, Novelist of the Fantastical, Is Dead at 96” by Bruce Weber @ New York Times
- Comment @ Boing Boing