Jack Vance

Vance's great-grandfather is believed to have arrived in California from Michigan a decade before the Gold Rush and married a San Francisco woman.[9] Early family records were apparently destroyed in the fire following the 1906 San Francisco earthquake.[10] Vance's maternal grandfather, L. M. (Ludwig Mathias) Hoefler, was a successful lawyer in San Francisco.[9]

Vance grew up in the family's large house in San Francisco on Filbert Street. When Vance's father left the family to live on his ranch in Mexico, the family's house in San Francisco was rented out to the father's sister.[9] With the separation of his parents, and the loss of use of the San Francisco house, Vance's mother moved him and his siblings to their maternal grandfather's California ranch near Oakley in the delta of the Sacramento River. This setting formed Vance's love of the outdoors, and allowed him time to indulge his passion as an avid reader of his mother's large book collection, which included Edgar Rice Burroughs’ Tarzan of the Apes and his Barsoom novels and Jules Verne's The Mysterious Island.[9] When Vance explored the nearby town, he started reading pulp fiction magazines at the local drugstore.[9]

With the death of his grandfather, who supported the family, which coincided with the economic challenges of Great Depression, the Vance family’s fortune dwindled, and Vance was forced to leave junior college and work to support himself, assisting his mother when able. Vance plied many trades for short stretches: as a bellhop (a "miserable year"), in a cannery, and on a gold dredge.[11] Vance described this era as a time of personal change: “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.”[9]

He subsequently entered the University of California, Berkeley, and over the next six years studied mining engineering, physics, journalism, and English. Vance wrote one of his first science fiction stories for an English class assignment: his professor commented in a scornful tone, "We also have a piece of science fiction"—Vance's first negative review.[12]

He worked as an electrician in the naval shipyards at Pearl Harbor, Hawaii, being paid "56¢ an hour," and worked for a time as part of a degaussing crew. The attack on Pearl Harbor took place about a month after he resigned his employment there.[11]

Vance graduated in 1942.[13] 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.[12] In later years, boating remained his favorite recreation; boats and voyages are a frequent motif in his work. He worked as a seaman, a rigger, a surveyor, a ceramicist, and a carpenter before he established himself fully as a writer, which did not occur until the 1970s.

Jack Vance playing the jazz banjo and kazoo in 1979 in San Francisco

From his youth, Vance had been fascinated by Dixieland and traditional jazz. He was an amateur of the cornet and ukulele, often accompanying himself with a kazoo, and was a competent harmonica player. 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 Genevieve Ingold (died March 25, 2008), another Cal student. Vance continued to live in Oakland, in a house he built and extended with his family over the years, including a hand-carved wooden ceiling from Kashmir. The Vances had extensive travels,[14] including one around-the-world voyage, and often spent several months at a time living in places like Ireland, Tahiti, South Africa, Positano (in Italy) and on a houseboat on Lake Nagin in Kashmir.

Vance began trying to become a professional writer in the late 1940s, as part 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 for the Captain Video television series. The proceeds supported the Vances for a year's travel in Europe.[11] There are various references to the Bay Area Bohemian life in his work. In the 1950s, Vance started a pottery and ceramics hobby, buying a kiln; this interest was an influence on his story "The Potters of Firsk” (1950).

Science fiction authors Frank Herbert and Poul Anderson were among Vance's closest friends. In the early 1950s, when Frank Herbert was a reporter, he interviewed Vance, and the men became friends. They moved to Mexico with their families to establish a "writer’s colony" at Lake Chapala, near Guadalajara.[9] In 1962, Vance, Herbert, and Anderson jointly built a houseboat which they sailed in the Sacramento Delta. The Vances and the Herberts lived together near Lake Chapala, Mexico, for a while.[10][15] Vance's interest in houseboats led him to depict them in “The Moon Moth” (1961), The Palace of Love (1967), and in chapter 2 of Wyst: Alastor 1716 (1978).[9]

In the early 1980s, Vance became increasingly interested in sailing, and he started building a 36-foot trimaran. Later, he owned Venture (a 17-foot cutter-rigged boat), Columbia (a 35-foot ketch-rigged boat), and finally Hinano (a 45-foot boat).[9] While Vance derived pleasure from his sailing hobby, his increasingly poor eyesight and the high costs of outfitting, berthing, and maintaining the vessel led him to sell the Hinano.[9] Vance's failing eyesight also led him to cease his amateur jazz hobby.[9]

Although legally blind since the 1980s,[13] Vance continued to write with the aid of BigEd software, written especially for him by Kim Kokkonen. His final novel was Lurulu. Although Vance had stated Lurulu would be his final book,[16] he subsequently completed an autobiography, which was published in July 2009.[17]

French edition of The Many Worlds of Magnus Ridolph, illustrating "The Kokod Warriors".

Vance made his debut in print with "The World-Thinker", a 16-page story published by Sam Merwin in Thrilling Wonder Stories, Summer 1945.[1] His lifetime output totals more than 60 books—perhaps almost 90.[6] His work has been published in three categories: science fiction, fantasy and mystery. Among Vance's earliest published work was 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.[23]

Vance wrote many science fiction short stories in the late 1940s and through the 1950s, which were published in magazines. Of his novels written during this period, a few were science fiction, but most were mysteries. Few were published at the time, but Vance continued to write mysteries into the early 1970s. In total, he wrote 15 novels outside of science fiction and fantasy, including the extended outline, The Telephone was Ringing in the Dark, published only by the VIE (Vance Integral Edition), and three books published under the Ellery Queen pseudonym.[24] Some of these are not mysteries, such as Bird Isle, and many fit uneasily in the category. These stories are set in and around his native San Francisco, except for one set in Italy and another in Africa. Two begin in San Francisco but take to the sea.

Many themes important to his more famous science fiction novels appeared first in the mysteries. The most obvious is the "book of dreams", which appears in Bad Ronald and The View from Chickweed's Window, prior to being featured in The Book of Dreams. The revenge theme is also more prominent in certain mysteries than in the science fiction (The View from Chickweed's Window in particular). Bad Ronald was adapted to a TV film of the same name aired on ABC in 1974, as well as a French production (Méchant garçon) in 1992; this and Man in the Cage are the only works by Vance to be made into film to date.

Vance's Hugo Award-winning novella The Dragon Masters was the cover story on the August 1962 issue of Galaxy Science Fiction

Certain of the science fiction stories are also mysteries, penned using his full name John Holbrook Vance, three under the house pseudonym Ellery Queen, and one each using the pseudonyms Alan Wade, Peter Held, John van See, and Jay Kavanse.[1][25] Some editions of his published works give his year of birth as 1920. In addition to the comic Magnus Ridolph stories, two major stories feature the effectuator Miro Hetzel, a futuristic detective, and Araminta Station is largely concerned with solving various murders. Vance returned to the "dying Earth" setting (a far distant future in which the sun is slowly going out, and magic and technology coexist) to write the picaresque adventures of the ne'er-do-well scoundrel Cugel the Clever, and those of the magician Rhialto the Marvellous. These books were written in 1963, 1978 and 1981. His other major fantasy work, Lyonesse (a trilogy comprising Suldrun's Garden, The Green Pearl, and Madouc), was completed in 1989 and set on a mythological archipelago off the coast of France in the early Middle Ages.

Vance's stories written for pulps in the 1940s and 1950s covered many science fiction themes, with a tendency to emphasize mysterious and biological themes (ESP, genetics, brain parasites, body switching, other dimensions, cultures) rather than technical ones. Robots, for example, are almost entirely absent, though the short story "The Uninhibited Robot" features a computer gone awry. Many of the early stories are comic. By the 1960s, Vance had developed a futuristic setting that he came to call the Gaean Reach, a fictional region of space settled by humans. Thereafter, all his science fiction was, more or less explicitly, set therein.[1] The Gaean Reach per se is loose and expanding, old Earth (Gaia), being the center. Each planet has its own history, state of development and culture. Within the Reach conditions tend to be peaceable and commerce tends to dominate. At the edges of the Reach, out in the lawless Beyond, conditions are usually less secure.

Vance influenced many writers in the genre. Most notably, Michael Shea wrote a sequel to Eyes of the Overworld, featuring Cugel the Clever, before Vance did one himself (called Cugel's Saga). Vance gave permission, and the book by Shea went into print before Vance's. Shea's book, A Quest For Simbilis, is entirely in keeping with the vision of Vance. Cugel is a complete rogue, who is nevertheless worthy of sympathy in always failing to achieve his goals.[26]

Literary influences

Vance's novella "Gateway to Strangeness" was the cover story in the August 1962 issue of Amazing Stories, illustrated by Alex Schomburg. Under the title "Dust of Far Suns", it became the title piece in a Vance story collection in 1981

When asked about literary influences, Vance most often cited Jeffery Farnol, a writer of adventure books, whose style of "high" language he mentions (the Farnol title Guyfford of Weare being a typical instance); P. G. Wodehouse, an influence apparent in Vance's taste for overbearing aunts; and L. Frank Baum, whose fantasy elements were directly borrowed by Vance (see The Emerald City of Oz).[27] In the introduction to Dowling and Strahan's The Jack Vance Treasury, Vance mentions that his childhood reading including Edgar Rice Burroughs, Jules Verne, Robert W. Chambers, science fiction published by Edward Stratemeyer, the magazines Weird Tales and Amazing Stories, and Lord Dunsany.[11] According to pulp editor Sam Merwin, Vance's earliest magazine submissions in the 1940s were heavily influenced by the style of James Branch Cabell.[28] Fantasy historian Lin Carter notes several probable lasting influences of Cabell on Vance's work, and suggests that the early "pseudo-Cabell" experiments bore fruit in The Dying Earth (1950).[29] SF critic Don Herron[30] cites Clark Ashton Smith as an influence on Vance's style and characters' names.

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, in which stories sometimes were insensitively edited 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, Esperanto, French, Spanish, Russian, and Italian.[note 1] 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.

Vance was an original member of the Swordsmen and Sorcerers' Guild of America (SAGA), a loose-knit group of heroic fantasy authors founded in the 1960s and led by Lin Carter. Its purpose was to promote the sword and sorcery subgenre (such as Dying Earth stories by Vance), and some new works were published in Flashing Swords! anthologies edited by Carter, in both mass-market paperback and Doubleday Science Fiction Book Club editions.[1]

In 1976, the fantasy/sf small press Underwood-Miller released their first publication, the first hardcover edition of The Dying Earth in a 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. After these first publications and until the mid-1990s, Underwood-Miller published many of Vance's works, including his mystery fiction, often in limited editions featuring dustjacket artwork by leading fantasy artists. The entire Jack Vance output from 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", meaning that they have not been drastically edited. 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, often they could only be found in science fiction bookstores at the time of their release.

• A Quest for Simbilis by Michael Shea (DAW, NY, 1974) (authorised sequel of the Cugel novel Eyes of the Overworld although Vance later wrote his own sequel Cugel the Clever; Shea also wrote Nifft the Lean (DAW, NY, 1982), and The Mines of Behemoth (1997) about a Cugel-like character; and In Yana, the Touch of Undying (DAW, NY, 1985) which is also Vancian. A Quest for Simbilis was reprinted in 2020 by Spatterlight Press under the "Paladins of Vance" label.).
• The Archonate series by Matthew Hughes (beginning with Fools Errant (Aspect Books, 2001)) is set in a Vancean universe which at long intervals changes between running on science and rational cause-and-effect to magic and sympathetic association, with cataclysmic effects for its inhabitants. Stories set before this change, including the Henghis Hapthorn and Luff Imbry series, take place in a futuristic space opera setting reminiscent of Vance's Gaean Reach while those set after, including the Raffalon and Baldemar series, are in the Dying Earth subgenre. Hughes also published an authorised sequel to the Demon Princes series with Spatterlight Press under the "Paladins of Vance" label; titled Barbarians of the Beyond, the book was released in summer 2021.
• Phaedra: Alastor 824 by Tais Teng (Spatterlight Press, 2019) (authorised Alastor Cluster novel under the "Paladins of Vance" label.)
• Dinosaur Park by Hayford Peirce (Tor, NY, 1994).
• Fane by David M. Alexander (longtime Vance friend). (Pocket Books, NY, 1981).
• The Pharaoh Contract (Bantam, 1991), Emperor of Everything (Bantam, 1991), Orpheus Machine (Bantam, 1992) by Ray Aldridge.
• Gene Wolfe has acknowledged that The Dying Earth influenced his The Book of the New Sun.[35]
• Dan Simmons's Hyperion Cantos has many echoes of Vance, explicitly acknowledged in one of the later books.
• The Golden Age by John C. Wright has some similarities to Jack Vance's works, including an ornamented language, and a baroque and sterile culture toppled by a lone individualist.
• The Arbiter Tales (1995–1996), three novels by L. Warren Douglas, were strongly influenced by Vance's Alastor Cluster stories. (Douglas's first novel, A Plague of Change (1992), is dedicated to Jack Vance.[36])
• The Dog of the North (2008), a fantasy by Tim Stretton, is strongly influenced by Vance, as noted in the acknowledgements. He outlines his debt to Vance on his blog.[37]
• Songs of the Dying Earth (2009), a tribute anthology to Jack Vance's seminal Dying Earth series,[38] edited by George R. R. Martin and Gardner Dozois, both avid Vance fans.
• The Dungeons & Dragons role-playing game and associated literature used a magic system inspired in part by Jack Vance's Dying Earth series: notably, magic users in the game forget spells they have learned immediately upon casting them, and must re-study them in order to cast them again; indeed, this whole system of magic is commonly known as 'Vancian Magic'.[39][40] The Dying Earth and The Eyes of the Overworld are featured in the "Appendix N: Inspirational and Educational Reading" section of the 1st edition of the Dungeon Masters Guide[41] and in "Appendix E: Inspirational Reading" the 5th edition of the Player's Handbook.[42] One of the prominent villains in the game, Vecna, is named after Vance, his name being an anagram of the author's surname.[43]
• Other role-playing games include: Lyonesse, Dying Earth, Fallen London,[44] and Talislanta (originally designed by Stephen Michael Sechi).
• A Song of Ice and Fire by George R. R. Martin[45] has a minor character, "Lord Vance of Wayfarer's Rest", with daughters named Liane, Rhialta, and Emphyria for Liane the Wayfarer, Rhialto the Marvellous, and Emphyrio, respectively.
• Intergalactic Words: Articles for Consideration (2011), a series of articles by Joseph Wykel, is strongly influenced by Vance, particularly the article Solo Ball Future about the dying sun.[46]

Wikiquote has quotations related to Jack Vance.

• Official website
• "Jack Vance biography". Science Fiction and Fantasy Hall of Fame.

Bibliography and works by Vance

• Jack Vance at the Internet Speculative Fiction Database
• John Holbrook Vance at IMDb
• "Totality online". pharesm.org. — Vance vocabulary search tool
• "Foreverness". vanderveeke.net. — Bibliographic information, 11 first chapters from selected books, information about the Vance Integral Edition, archive of Cosmopolis and Extant, with interviews, accounts of encounters with Vance, and essays
• The Potters of Firsk. NBC Radio (audio). Dimension X. National Broadcasting Company (NBC). 1950.
• Jack Vance at the Internet Book List
• "Jack Vance". Fantasy Literature. Archived from the original on August 25, 2012. Retrieved January 2, 2011.
• Works by Jack Vance at Project Gutenberg
• Works by or about Jack Vance at Internet Archive
• Works by Jack Vance at LibriVox (public domain audiobooks) Works by Jack Vance at LibriVox (public domain audiobooks)
• n79021250 Jack Vance at Library of Congress, with 101 library catalog records