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

by vol 25 no 09

  Faced with the failure of eighteenth- and nineteen-century opera to impress any alien mind, Dame Isabel is a good enough businesswoman as to abandon the tour and return everyone to Earth but not before taking the whole Phoebus Company to see an actual performance of the 9th Company, whose competency and power she has always doubted. Vance’s conception of the alien art form surprises the reader, just as much as Dame Isabel, by its splendor and power. But the art he describes is quite simply his own:

  Dame Isabel swung about and found the sky to be dancing with colored shapes. They mingled and separated, merged inward and outward and settled to the meadow which became a place of luminous magic, and the whole Phoebus Company came forth in awe to watch the magnificences now displayed to them. Cities like flower gardens appeared one after the other, as if in compendium: each different, each a development of the last, each with its own delights and prideful vistas, each receding and growing remote. A miscellany of new images appeared in the foreground: regattas of boats with enormous patterned sails, each of which might have been alive and sentient: a jeweled moth. Exalted figures marched in a stately pavane; there were tourneys of love and beauty, gusts and whispers of many musics. Now came a series of pageants, performances by troupes like the 9th Company, and Dame Isabel thought to recognize the 9th Company itself. Suddenly there was silence, so intense as to be an ecstatic sensation in itself. Down from the sky floated a battered spaceship....

  At this point ghostly symbols and characters suggest only their own inadequacy clearly.

  There followed other spectacles and vistas, and these seemed far away and long past, like memories half-forgotten. A parade of dead heroes came by, turning to search the faces of those who watched, as if asking for knowledge which had been denied them. All seemed to ask the same question and then they were gone from view. Cities were built and listlessly abandoned: all goals had been achieved, all excellences attained. Nothing remained but idleness, casual amusement....

  Previewing Lyonesse, prophesying a move toward what only the twenty-first century will begin to understand as the pointless wealth of The Dying Earth—there comes the climactic pièce de résistance:

  Finally in gigantic enlargement appeared the Tough Luck Jug Band, with its music of boldness and assertion, enthusiasm conquering surfeit. For a brief space the world was renewed and wonderful things seemed possible. Then the meadow was as before, the sky was blank; the Phoebus Company stood alone beside the ship.

  The last Beckettian image rather vehemently asserts the scope and limits of the minimalist writing-as-writing esthetics of the Jack Vance space opera.

  Back on Earth, his books were being read by a generation believing itself ready to transform the world. For Vance the question was scriptory. In the ’60s, despite the state of the market, despite immediate success in crime fiction, Jack Vance preferred to write science fiction, to do exactly no more and no less than what he outlined in Space Opera. It is telling that he reveals his ’60s work as an alien performance, for the joys on every page one finds in Vance are the results of the fisher/miner of languages and narrative forms, no more and no less. Vance’s world view is the rational world view of total empiricism, like David Hume; custom and superstition explain all that can be explained, and self-interest is the law of the human land, even out beyond the Gaean Reach itself.

  But within the confines of the musical moment—between the covers of the book—everything again is possible or seems that way. Indeed, on the silence left at the end of a Jack Vance performance, writers like Le Guin, George R. R. Martin, Gene Wolfe, and J.G. Ballard would help transform the possibilities of high literature from below. As if in inverse proportion to Vance’s self-removal not only from high literary culture but from science fiction as well, perhaps more interestingly than any other writer of the paperback revolution—a misguided sort of claim, no doubt, but supportable—Vance’s was breeding activist fans. His would-be disciple, Frank Herbert, was so stung by Jack’s disdain for his desert planet idea that he turned his full attention to the project that would be called Dune to prove him wrong (Vance “Interview” 2010).

  Vancians are the sorts of fans who will go so far as to remake the world so it contains the idol’s image.

  The Vance fan, confronted by a literary establishment that erases its hero, creates its own literary magazines to discuss Vance with other fans. Through Gary Gygax, Vance’s influence would transform the shape of gaming into the twenty-first century. In Gygax’s 2001 essay, “Jack Vance and the D&D Game,” the author seems almost at pains to stress there were parts of the game not under Vance’s direct influence:

  Need I say that I am not merely a Jack Vance fan, but that he is in my opinion the very best of all the authors of imaginative fiction? Well I am and he is! ... Just what portions of these works, the subsequent AD&D game, stemmed from inspiration related to the writing of Jack Vance? Several elements, the unquestioned foremost being the magic system used in these games. To my way of thinking, the concept of a spell itself being magical, that its written form carried energy, seemed a perfect way to balance the mage against other types of characters in the game. The memorization of the spell required time and concentration so as to impart not merely the written content but also its magical energies. When subsequently cast—by speaking or some other means—the words or gestures, or whatever triggered the magical force of the spell, leaving a blank place in the brain where the previously memorized spell had been held. Because I explained this often, attributing its inspiration to Jack Vance, the D&D magic system of memorized then forgotten spells was dubbed by gamers “the Vancian magic system....”

  Of the other portions of the A/D&D game stemming from the writing of Jack Vance, the next most important one is the thief-class character....

  D&D’s risky acceptance of evil in its character generation (the “alignment” system that helped fuel the 1970s and ’80s urban legends and extravagant claims about devil worship) and its insistent sense of humor are also easily traceable to that “realm of cynical wonders” The Dying Earth (1950) (cf. Rotella).

  But calling attention to the relation of magic to writing in Vance, Gygax can help us see behind the mask Vance so consistently dons of the unimpressed craftsperson, unconcerned with high art and its pretensions, to see that his life’s work does stand as an affirmation of writing as magic. In some ways it brought itself more and more to life, peculiarly and easily dovetailing with the cultural scene determined by the Internet despite Vance’s general uninterest in technology. In the ’90s fans used the ’Net, on a global scale to establish a complete, hardcover, 45-volume archival edition of the whole Vance corpus, re-proofed and edited according to authorial intention.

  With original intensity and vision, the Vancians have therefore secured the survival of their idol’s literary principle beyond the paperback revolution into the still unknown future books must brave. Its web site explains,

  The Vance Integral Edition project began in 1999. Over 300 volunteers, world-wide, worked via the Internet, for 6 years, to create a definitive and complete edition of Vance’s work in 44 volumes. A supplemental 45th volume, with the 3 Ellery Queen novels, was also published. Approximately 600 book sets were printed for VIE subscribers. Several dozen sets were donated to libraries... The V.I.E. project was unprecedented in the history of literature: never have readers paid comparable homage to a writer, and never has a writer received such a treatment over the Internet.

  The model of Shakespeare, whose own works were similarly preserved and celebrated by his friends and colleagues, certainly comes to mind. Like Shakespeare, Vance wrote for money. Like Shakespeare, his female characters outshine those of his contemporaries. Frederick Jameson in his acclaimed Archaeologies of the Future: The Desire Called Utopia and Other Science Fictions, makes Philip K. Dick his science fiction Shakespeare. With Dick the most literary sf allowed, criticism by writers in the self-promoting Hard SF, New Wave, or Cyberpunk eras for the most part leaves Vance unmentioned; Samuel R. Delany
and Thomas Disch do without; and Brian Aldiss is explicitly hostile. Yet Vance’s work, still insistently pulp, still appealing to the general reader of imaginative literature, has not dated like the work of these younger writers with literary pretension already so often has.

  Like any craft, writing is mastered by practice and patience, and if one has any “knack” for it at all, that very knack—paradoxically—can explicate everything under the sun but itself. (This Is Me 6)

  In This is Me!, Vance admits a “knack,” a built-in, unexplainable facility for writing. This is unable to describe itself? Is it really? What reads rhetorically like a confession of weakness can also be read as a bold claim of extraordinary powers that can explicate anything under any sun. In Vance this power seems, in fact, to depend upon its refusal to consider itself.

  When asked to prepare a General Preface and a series of brief introductions for each of the tales in 1976’s rather-late-in-coming Pocket Books Best of Jack Vance volume, he gave a general preface less than a page long, making clear only that this selection of his “best” work was not his own. The remaining notes are fascinating nuggets of critical kryptonite. Before “Ullward’s Retreat” we read:

  To extol one’s own work is sheer recklessness; on the other hand unabashed candor is refreshing and perhaps a virtue; therefore I will venture one or two comments in regards to “Ullward’s Retreat.”

  I consider the story well-constructed from a technical standpoint, and I feel that in spite of its overt frivolity, the story makes a number of profound statements upon the human condition. There are no villains in this piece, and no heroes; we are confronted only with human captiousness and human vanity. (Best of Jack Vance 29)

  Charles Platt said of this,

  The “captiousness” in the case of the Preface, is Vance’s own (the quietly extravagant word signifying the particular artificially created quality the OED calls “Apt to catch or take one in; fitted to ensnare or perplex in argument; designed to entrap or entangle by subtlety; fallacious, sophistical”). The reader who goes forward and reads this oddly conventional tale (by no means a best) for any particularly profound glimpses of the human condition will be left with something different altogether: “a history of the future human race” that depends on the shallowest of issues and behaviors. (161)

  “Now what about lunch? Genuine algae!” Ullward’s retreat is not a military maneuver in any great war but simply a Californian architecture built up to view the future. “A rustic lodge commanded the view, the door being the opening into Ullward’s living room.” Vance’s works are far more autobiographical and self-descriptive than we like to believe. The architecture becomes eerily familiar as it reappears in the many manses of fictions to come. In the opening of his 1966 masterpiece, The Eyes of the Overworld (aka Cugel the Clever), Vance seems to explicitly reference his own eccentric, self-built home in the Oakland Hills:

  On the heights above the river Xzan, at the site of certain ancient ruins, Ioucounu the Laughing Magician had built a manse to his private taste: an eccentric structure of steep gables, balconies, sky-walks, cupolas, together with three spiral green glass towers through which the red sunlight shone in twisted glints and peculiar colors. (3)

  And so quite clearly every reader of Jack Vance (who wrote by hand with multicolor pens) recognizes the homemade getaway is not for Rhialto the Marvelous, not for Shimrod or Murgen or the many other players-with-fire—it is the manse of the laughing wizard-author himself with its written spells collected and preserved all around, tricks of other mages stolen and jarred, curses still outstanding. As Vance identifies with the Magus, the fan identifies with Cugel, the not so clever everyman Ioucounu torments.

  “I felt myself seized by a writer’s style in a way I had never experienced before,” writes Carlo Rotella of his first experience with Cugel. Rotella, an academic and nonscience fiction specialist, wrote 2009’s New York Times portrait of a then still-living Jack Vance, “The Genre Artist.”

  By virtue of their hostility to and virtual destruction of what might be called the romantic author, Vance’s works confront the authentic reader with his own imagination-as-imagination: that lazy, workaholic faculty entirely dependent on nature, depths, chance, custom, and language. Brian Aldiss found Vance “a gaudily painted coelacanth, washed up on sf’s shore” (314). There is indeed something ancient in Vance, a literature that is only language, as full of marvels as the any animal of evolution, but as with today’s charming coelacanths (not at all the living fossils Aldiss believes them to be) it is caught and not found washed up. Though his stories will occupy the Bronze Age past in the Lyonesse trilogy of the 1980s, they will take place on the “the Elder Isles,” a repressed Atlantis between England and France, now indeed sunken beneath the sea:

  The Elder Isles had known the coming and coming of many peoples: Pharesmians, blue-eyed Evadnioi, Pelasgians with their maenad priestesses, Danaans, Lydians, Phoenicians, Etruscans, Greeks, Celts from Gaul, Ska from Norway by way of Ireland, Romans, Celts from Ireland and a few Sea Goths. The wash of so many peoples had left behind a complex detritus: ruined strongholds, graves and tombs; steles carved with cryptic glyphs; songs, dances, turns of speech, fragments of dialect, place-names; ceremonies of purport now forgotten, but with lingering flavor.... (Madouc 2)

  Imaginative literature of the Weird Fiction tradition distils the lingering flavors of these old worlds and peoples still present in a living language where the old magic can become cryptically new. In 1964’s The Houses of Iszm Vance can be found satirizing Jane Austen by what appears to be a nonsense game:

  It was assumed as a matter of course that visitors came to Iszm with a single purpose: to steal a female house. (5)

  Such wordplay opens the remarkable story of one peculiar Gaean world that moves through a cascade of science-fictional ideas, including a growable, gendered, and sentient posteconomic architecture, total surveillance via brain scan, multiculturism, and more. Unlike science fiction that focuses on one idea as its own brand, one central mood or concept, a Vance narrative moves relentlessly left-to-right, according to the play and change of a single line of music: illustrating nothing in the singular except that usual captiousness of language that will prove to be the tone of any human world with limited exploitable resources. Like the author, his all-too-human heroes and villains alike will prefer to show themselves only in extravagant and perfect disguise.

  By the mid-’60s, Jack and Norma Vance were working wonders with words-as-words. The quality of the Vance style became so extraordinary as to stand out not only in popular fiction (where only Chandler seems comparable) but in English language literature of the post-war period in general. Few writers have been able to craft such a comprehensive, recognizable, resilient, and far-ranging, esthetically pleasing style.

  It is regrettable that recent attempts at approaching twentieth century science fiction as a phenomenon serious enough to study prove themselves so provincial by leaving Jack Vance unconsidered. But one has to smile at recent defenders of the “mainstream novel” like the New Yorker’s Adam Gopnik when he protests the inclusion of Philip K. Dick in the canonical Library of America over issues of “bad writing”:

  The trouble is that, much as one would like to place Dick above or alongside Pynchon and Vonnegut—or, for that matter, Chesterton or Tolkien—as a poet of the fantastic parable he was a pretty bad writer. Though his imagination is at least the equal of theirs, he had, as he ruefully knew, a hack’s habits, too, and he never really got over them.... That’s probably why Dick’s reputation as a serious writer, like Poe’s, has always been higher in France, where the sentences aren’t read as they were written.

  “Pretty bad writer?” It’s doubtful Dick would have stooped to such a condescending “plebian” tone when addressing his own “fun-seeking” audience. Jack Vance forever proves the “bad sentences explain popularity in France” meme of reactionary canon making poseurs for the lie it really is. With less-than-zero publicity, Vance remains in print in
a rather large fashion overseas—despite his most famous feature being his sentences. Philip K. Dick’s supposed “bad writing” is a fiction; indeed against Vance’s Chandler-like mastery of style, Dick was a sort of Hammett, able to fashion a clear prose that could handle ideas other writers still do not know how to approach with grace, humor, novelty, and many other novelistic qualities missing from mainstream novels back when they were relevant at all. Dick’s current success is driven by his writing, not by publicity departments. (Though even sf writer friends like Poul Anderson and Frank Herbert suffered Vance’s scorn, in a radio interview on the show “Hour 25” on 12 November, 1976, Jack and Norma reveal more than a passing regard for Philip Dick—an extreme rarity.) I believe the proletarian and antiaristocratic ideology of the pulp midlist tradition as fully explored by Vance and others explains both Dick’s liquid clarity and his refusal of any high style at all. This success does not distinguish him from Vance, however, who, despite a vivid style, needs no current “relevance,” no movies to work his magic in, nor any light of promised illumination to shine his way. In fact, the style is disguise; Vance prefers the dark.

  Mark von Schlegell lives in Los Angeles and Cologne. This essay was adapted from the lecture “Beyond the Paperback Revolution: Jack Vance” first given in conjunction with the Frankfurt Book Fair at Staedelschule Frankfurt, 14 October, 2011.