Magazine - The New York Review of Science Fiction - 309 - 2014-05

by vol 25 no 09

  One of the important characters here is Unangan, not the generic movie Eskimo, and Denton does a great job of getting the anthropology right. Three of the characters in the story take the traditional Amanita muscaria and rotten fish soup, which can reveal the whole life-streams of the celebrants. The narrative for 95% of the piece is pure Hammett, and deft handling of the multiple timeline mosaic takes Hammett’s The Glass Key up a few notches.

  The story can be read on many levels—a good account of the Aleutian campaign in WWII (with its use of native Aleuts), a great mystery and revenge story (like the other novellas in this book), and finally a philosophical response of Western thought to shamanism that is neither Orientalist nor whitewashed. But the best part? You get to see the older Corporal Hammett scare the bejesus out of the lieutenant colonel. Like Jimmy Blackburn and Sergeant Chip, he is a badass who excels at taking bad guys with a cool mixture of word and deed.

  Denton learned his craft from James Gunn at the University of Kansas. He’s the real deal, trained in the sciences (BA in astronomy) and humanities (MA in English literature). Denton has been a permanent fixture of the Austin scene since 1988, a man of unfailingly good temper and a thoughtful friend to the writing and fan communities.

  This collection may be the best introduction so far to Denton’s moral themes, speculative fiction finesse, and lively plotting. It’s hard to believe that this book was not created as a whole; without his introductions, I would have believed this to be a single work of great artistic harmony.

  Don Webb lives in Austin, Texas.

  Mark von Schlegell

  The Great Jack Vance

  “Mrs. Jack Vance”—she is pure and related to divinity.... she is informing, correcting me, speaking words of wisdom.... Behind her have I seen the Godhead, which is the ultimate archetype (the Wise Old Man once more).... She instructs me with the Logos, the word, wisdom itself.…

  —Philip K. Dick, Exegesis (204)

  Though he seems to any rational glance to be without end, John Holbrook “Jack” Vance, like the ever expanding Universe that created him, does have a beginning; it occurs in Northern California in the summer of 1916.

  Ninety-three years later, the author of more than sixty genre novels and near countless shorter fictions chose to present 2009’s surprising nonfiction memoir, This Is Me, Jack Vance! (Or, More Properly, This Is “I”) as a work of regional California history. The book immediately locates Vance’s special feel for weird literature in his early experience of the Northern Californian post–Gold Rush boom economy. Abandoned by a deadbeat dad, raised by a spirited single mother (now daughter of a suddenly rich father), Vance saw the Sacramento River delta as a Utopian paradise—and worlds away from the violence slaughtering a generation of Europe raised on Edwardian romanticism. Gentility was very much a role in what was now an almost baroque American West, and though wealth came to his family when he was a baby, it did not outlast his youth. As the title of his autobiography neatly signals, Jack Vance would maintain the paradox of Edwardian elitism and Western populism until he died. High-low California and the vain splendor of the rich forever haunt his writings—many of which, interestingly enough, would be composed as far away from post-war USA as it would be possible to get. (The West of Ireland, Italy, Kashmir, Tahiti—much of the autobiography describes places the Vances lived as they wrote the books that paid for their travels and freedom.)

  Nature was bountiful and relatively gentle; he developed a life-long love of the sea and sailing. But it was clear from the first that the prize gems were books of a certain kind. They were like pieces of nature themselves, these new scientificfantasies by likes of L. Frank Baum, Edgar Rice Burroughs, Lord Dunsany, and Jeffrey Farnol, books written for clever boys (Vance This Is Me 213). His eyes soon suffered—they kept him out of the Navy during the Second World War.

  The literature that transformed Vance from reader into writer extended into the California still growing up around him from magazine racks, at this time nodes of the global, modern, popular culture. Vance saw nascent science fiction and fantasy as tied explicitly to the idea of the expanding present exploited by jazz:

  About three miles west of us was the town of Oakley. In the drugstore was a magazine rack, and there I came upon the Amazing Stories quarterly, edited by Hugo Gernsback, and also the Amazing Stories monthly. I subsequently discovered Weird Tales and subscribed to it. It was a banner day of the month when I ran down to the mailbox in front of Iron House School to find it there.... (This Is Me 17)

  Hugo Gernsback had developed Amazing out of the popular fictions he’d been placing in the back-pages of radio buff and engineering periodicals. Vance was an engineering student, primed to respond to stories celebrating the common sense of the scientific method. Gernsback himself would soon coin the term “science fiction,” branding that genre with which Jack Vance, “Genre-Artist” extraordinaire, would always be rather awkwardly associated (cf. Rotella, “The Genre Artist”).

  If 2004’s Lurulu, his last novel, still stands as perhaps the finest science fiction of the twenty-first century, it is via fantasy through Dungeons & Dragons into gaming and through his fan, George R. R. Martin, into TV that his writing can be seen as actively engaged with the present mainstream.

  Vance never was comfortable with what was known as science fiction. He tended to dismiss it rather rudely from his consideration. It is telling that in the autobiography he moves immediately from Amazing Stories to Weird Tales. Certainly Weird Tales was a more literary affair than the early Amazing. In its 1930s golden age, Weird Tales boasted writing of more extravagance and eccentricity than any other American periodical. With a mature H. P. Lovecraft directly involved in its creation and flavor, with Margaret Brundage’s famous and scandalously fashionable covers, the magazine laced the drugstore mainstream with surrealism (still being invented), sex, and science fiction. Vance was hardly an admirer of HPL himself, saying “Lovecraft couldn’t write himself out of a wet paper sack” (Platt 163). Weird Tales’s most provocative covers served the works of the young and brilliant C. L. Moore. Jack Vance spoke rarely about his favorite writers of science fiction and fantasy, but when he did, he always mentioned her.

  Catherine L. Moore (1911–1987) was only five years Vance’s senior. Well into her career, Moore married the science fiction regular Henry Kuttner, and together under a variety of names they wrote a great deal of sf and not so much fantasy. She got to an early, brilliant start in Weird Tales, authoring two series that would be of particular influence on writers to come. Moore’s “Jirel of Joiry” stories updated Robert E. Howard even as he was publishing the extraordinary Conan stories in the very same issues. Moore’s transformation of male tropes occurred on the page; esthetic disruption was a matter of form. Moore clearly is a source of the enlightened feminism whose POV-shock frequently interrupts Vance’s ostensibly male focus, distinguishing it immediately from most U.S. science fiction of the golden age. Moore’s recurring male hero, Northwest Smith, hitching about various settlements of the solar system under the most dubious circumstances, showed Vance that ordinary pulp stories of revenge, desire, crime, and punishment could be set offworld, set against the most fantastic and tantalizing circumstances:

  Who has been influential upon my development as a writer? Who indeed? I don’t know. To name some names, I admire C. L. Moore from the old Weird Tales magazine. As a boy I was quite affected by the prose of Clark Ashton Smith. (This Is Me 213)

  The Poe-like nineteenth-century flaneur imprinted itself on Weird Tales through figures like Clark Aston Smith. His type can be found in the countless avant-garde impresarios who do not quite replace villains in Jack Vance narratives. Drug addict, poet, surrealist sculptor, devoted fan of Baudelaire, Smith imagined bizarrely detailed landscapes in the most extravagant terms. Vance’s famous style is always both a quiet celebration and blatant satire of the lengths Smith was willing to go:

  It was noon of a vernal day when I came forth from that interminable cactus-forest
in which the Inquisitors of Ong had left me, and saw at my feet the gray beginnings of Yondo. I repeat, it was noon of a vernal day.... (Smith, “The Abominations of Yondo”)

  Vance would refine and clarify Smith’s excesses, discovering an always delightful style able to deliver sentences like “Titus Pompo, I will warn you once and once only. You are talking dangerous nonsense,” with the archest possible seriousness (Ariminta Station 276). Though a Clark Ashton Smith sentence can take over a page—

  but in that fantastic wood I had found no token or memory of a spring; and the swollen, fulvous, dying and half-rotten growths through which I had pushed my way were like no other cacti, but bore shapes of abomination scarcely to be described... (Smith, “The Abominations of Yondo”)

  —his Lovecraftian and overwrought prose can’t deliver the sort of fully conceived world C. L. Moore was able to detail, complete with fascinatingly developed fauna, flora, and cultural systems.

  Previously having published jazz reviews, Vance sold his first story, the novelette “The World-Thinker,” to Canada’s Thrilling Wonder Stories in 1945. (They published it under the title “The World-Builder.”) Written while he was serving out the end of the War on board a Merchant Marine vessel, the story features Kenna Parker, an “enigmatic,” elusive heroine (first arrested for assault with a deadly weapon and now on the run with a set of deadly equations) and still sparkles:

  It hardly seemed the face of an incorrigible criminal. A reckless glint in the blue eyes, a whimsical tilt to the eyebrows, a set to the lips—otherwise it was the face of a very pretty girl.... (“The World-Thinker” 36)

  The hero Lanarck will get those equations but not quite the girl—though he goes so far as to occupy her mind. In fact, the hard-to-get attractive/elusive female will occasion all sorts of journeys throughout Vance’s “Gaean Reach”—that galaxy explicitly honoring a goddess. It wouldn’t be until the 1980s, when Vance’s overseas success was now taking care of financial problems at home, that female protagonists and antagonists take the reins of Lyonesse with spectacular results.

  In crime, he tried earlier. Vance wrote the fascinating locked-room mystery, A Room To Die In (1965), as his second under the Ellery Queen moniker, starring charming young Ann Nelson, a schoolteacher-heiress who decides to turn detective instead of up dead. Two more crime novels of the ’80s, The View from Chickweed’s Window and The Dark Ocean, also featured strong female protagonists.

  Back in 1945, the not-quite-villainous “world-thinker” with his black “tremendous dome-like bulk” of a body specifically resembles the cover image for Moore’s first and most famous Jirel story, “Black God’s Kiss,” of 1934. His power is a totally augmented imagination. Its power is both imaginary and real by definition:

  In front of Lanarck’s eyes, space quivered and wrenched. A dark aperture appeared in midair. Lanarck, looking through, saw hanging apparently but a yard before his eyes a lambent sphere—a miniature world. As he watched, it expanded.... (“The World-Thinker” 40)

  Describing the experience of reading a science fiction story would become the story itself.

  Soon enough, the name Jack Vance was thought to be another Kuttner pseudonym (Clute 1266). In reality the name soon described a woman as well as a man. Fellow student Norma Genevieve Ingold (1927–2008) would take on the name Vance when they married in ’47; a lifelong partnership was begun:

  Norma was strongly supportive of my writing from the start, and we began to work together as a team. I cannot emphasize enough how hard Norma worked over the course of my career, certainly as hard as I have, if not more. (This Is Me 94–95)

  We know she was responsible for the manuscripts moving from pen to typewriter and from proofs to print. Was Norma one reason for the numerous fascinating women who wend their way through the many worlds of Jack Vance?

  The young Vance listed “hot jazz” and “feminine psychology” as central interests alongside “Oriental languages” and physical sciences in his author’s note to “The World-Builder” in Thrilling Wonder Stories. U.S. science fiction was a boy’s club at least through most of the ’60s. A long-time, perhaps perpetual, place on the science fiction midlist may be best explained by the fact Vance seems to have received his most definite fan letters from female readers:

  Dear Mr. Vance,

  This is a fan letter—an unmitigated fan letter. I have read all your books and stories with the greatest pleasure, and then after a while re-read them with greater pleasure. There are some lovely imaginations at work in S.F. now, but the work itself is so often botched or stretched or compromised; yours never; you are competent, an artist. Write more books, write more books.

  Yours gratefully,

  Ursula K. Le Guin 27 April 1967

  In the Jack Vance Collection at Gotlieb Library Collection in Boston, an assortment selected and sent by Vance himself in the late 1980s, Le Guin’s letter is indeed the only unmitigated fan letter the author seems to have received at all up to that date. In the Gotlieb Collection is a manila envelope with this handwritten note on it:

  Dear the Gottlieb

  Herewith a collection of ancient correspondence, rejection slips, etc. a compendium of a thousand little tragedies and small triumphs that made me feel rather sad going through them.

  Along with editors constantly bickering and projecting negativity, the other fan letters ask Vance not to write a certain way or to return to old characters. In their context we see what a glorious exception Le Guin provides. Quite simply a masterpiece of the fan letter genre, it is even written in that semicolonial “Vancian” style one takes one when determined to speak with a clarity that is not itself without a certain luxury or wryness. In two well-executed sentences, Le Guin offers a clear critical reading of Vance as the quintessential writer, no more no less—celebrating the victory of craft and practice over a romantic valorization of authorship and therefore the need for no further criticism.

  In the Gotlieb archives, as I’ve suggested, Ursula Le Guin is the only reader to suggest Vance’s work is “never ... botched or stretched or compromised.” Whatever the reason, in the ’50s, ’60s, and ’70s the writer-editor gate-keepers of U.S. science fiction (John W. Campbell and Frederik Pohl stand out as closer to enemies than editors) were forever accepting Vance while pushing him away at the same time. The re-titling, reediting, the forcing of rewrites is accompanied by steady disagreement in all matters. Vance’s immediate success in the mystery world, the quiet masterpiece The Fox Valley Murders (1966), came with absolutely no generic interference and feedback.

  It didn’t seem to help that Vance secured the services of Scott Meredith, a first-rate agent. “Our slick writers include P.G. Wodehouse, B. Traven,” Meredith told him. “And of course we do not ignore our pulp authors in favor of the slick writers. Ten percent of a bunch of eighty dollar checks soon adds up to just as much as ten percent of a several hundred dollar check…” (“Letter” 2 June 1950). In his first letter Meredith made it quite clear how many books Vance would be expected to write. Vance accepted, and though he experimented in genre, he never experimented in “class.” Apparently content to survive with the chance of sudden possible windfalls from TV and elsewhere on the horizon, as the quintessential mid-lister he never showed an inclination to reach across the aisle into so-called serious literature.

  As late as 1995, Clute and Nichols’s influential Encyclopedia of Science Fiction was scolding Vance for his reliance on “pulp conventions” (1264). But throughout his career, the pulps themselves found the author often perplexing and overly literary. At least until the 1970s, editors would be asking Vance to bring back Magnus Ridolph, the deliciously pulpy antihero of his early 1950s C. L. Moore imitations. Vance’s most original developments of the science fiction field celebrated today, the fantasy/sf hybrids of the “Dying Earth” genre (first written in the ’50s and returned to with stunning effect throughout his career) and the Planetary Romance style novel first clearly demonstrated in 1965’s Big Planet, and its sequel, Showb
oat World (1975), were only seen as problematic by his editors. (By this point, Vance was either provoking editorial interference or entirely unconcerned. Showboat World was originally entitled Magnificent Showboats of the Lower Vissel River, Lune XXIII, Big Planet.)

  “I am not paranoid, I hope;” Vance wrote to Scott Meredith on August 6, 1966, “no persecution complex or anything like that, but it’s almost as if [Campbell] were griped at me personally.” Even when the powerful Campbell published Vance in Astounding Science Fiction, he expressed long and wordy reservations about the work. Yet Vance’s writing was good enough to survive the hostility. Campbell issued Vance’s “The Potters of Firsk,” a tale of art turned to (literally) crackpot religion, alongside the first appearance of L. Ron Hubbard’s Dianetics in the May 1950 Astounding. In his 1951 novel, The Brains of Earth, Vance did indeed anger Campbell for satirizing the young religion of Scientology. (Scott Meredith said in a letter on May 4, 1951, that “It had been shown to Campbell, but he felt that Dianetics was not fiction, and shouldn’t be used in fiction.”) Accepting his situation, suffering the whims of whatever lowbrow organization he was working with at the time, in the ’60s Vance issued a number of increasingly impressive novels out of stories, returning to The Dying Earth for the first time with Cugel the Clever (1966; published as The Eyes of the Overworld). He also continued to experiment in exquisitely (if sometimes ridiculously) executed mysteries and crime novels of the English model, usually under the name John Holcomb Vance, “outraged at the entire range of the science-fiction market” (“Letter,” August 6, 1966).

  In 1964 when Pyramid Books offered him a contract for an original novel with the humiliating title they supplied, Space Opera, Vance responded with characteristic punctilio by actually addressing the future of high opera in galactic space. An homage to Wodehouse, the novel is a clearly intended send-up of high-art pretension. When society scion Dame Isabel (our young hero’s rich Aunt) hears a report of the supposedly exhilarating “9th Company,” perhaps the only alien music group in the galaxy, she decides to affirm Earth’s primacy by financing the best high opera company she can put together and bringing it on a tour of alien worlds. But none of her Phoebus Company productions, from Wagner to Verdi, makes the slightest impression on any of the perplexed races she encounters; in fact, each show on the tour bombs more dangerously than the last. Meanwhile, the kitchen staff’s jug band is a runaway success.