Jack Vance dead at 96

[morriss003]

Loved Big Planet

[vugtitan]

Originally Posted by Dr. Drib

Jack Vance died in his sleep Sunday, although I only learned about this from MobileRead member Fbone, which he mentioned in another post.

I remember how captivated I was of "The Dying Earth," and how it affected me as one of the most important and entertaining tales of fantasy that I have ever read.

His novels were hugely influential in the realms of fantasy and science fiction.



Don

That is bad.i am one of his biggest fans.i remember reading his books and being addicted to the his writing style,his characters and his amazing worlds.


R.I.P JACK VANCE.

you'll be sorely missed.

[frahse]

This is a sad day.

He did live to be 96. Deservedly so.

[Prestidigitweeze]

The main things I loved about Vance were the perversity of his wit and the unadulterated corruption of his protagonists.

A writer friend once told me Vance appeared at a science fiction convention in the '80s playing a banjo, which my friend was convinced he did to scare fans away. At a certain point, someone walked up to Vance and tried to sing along. Vance simply paused, glared at him, waited until he went away, and continued picking and flailing.

I was partial to Eyes of the Overworld myself.

[crich70]

I believe I have read some of his short fiction in paper. Don't know him as well as I do Clarke or Asimov though. The old masters of Sci Fi do seem to be dwindling in number.

[Istvan diVega]

Lyonesse was my first meeting with Jack Vance, mainly because it was just out as I moved away from home to a place with book stores that carried books in English. I pretty much swallowed it raw, hardly stopping to chew, and then I went on to The Dying Earth, Demon Princes, Alastor and many, many, many more through the years.

Thank you very much Mr. Vance, for all the adventures you have given me.

[vugtitan]

Originally Posted by Istvan diVega

Lyonesse was my first meeting with Jack Vance, mainly because it was just out as I moved away from home to a place with book stores that carried books in English. I pretty much swallowed it raw, hardly stopping to chew, and then I went on to The Dying Earth, Demon Princes, Alastor and many, many, many more through the years.

Thank you very much Mr. Vance, for all the adventures you have given me.

Loved this review of his recent works by Alex & Maria Feht and in my opinion could be a noble sort of epitaph of Jack Vance and his works:-

"Intentionally or not, "Ports of Call" and "Lurulu" are Vance's "Candide" in form as well as in spirit, and the very discernible morale of his story is surprisingly Voltairian: neither idealistic self-abnegation nor accidental wealth bring peace and fulfillment to human mind. A man is best off doing something pertaining to his inborn nature, cultivating his chosen garden and spending his free time taking a dram or two of "ardent liquor" while conversing with his good old friends.

"Lurulu" is a wise and somewhat tired ending to the less tired "Ports of Call." It brings the scant plot threads of "Ports" to their disparate conclusions -- sort of. One of the main ideas of both "Ports" and "Lurulu," however, is not the plot in itself, it is a farewell kaleidoscope of Jack's favorite planet-vistas, which become noticeably bleaker and sketchier to the end. The other major idea of these two half-books is a search for the nature of human happiness, fulfillment and destiny, which is shown to be quite futile. The best thing in life is, Vance concludes, a relative isolation of a small group of the detached observers of life, preferably well-heeled, in the constant state of mental, emotional, and physical escape. Dismal thoughts it evokes, indeed. Life is not unlike an onion of delusions: the more you peel them, the more you cry, and in the end there's nothing.

Many Vance's readers would feel that these last two books are anticlimactic, overly schematic, too founderous, even unconvincing time to time, and -- let us not mince the words -- lacking in novelty, in engrossing situations and in well-shaped, likable characters. All true. Even Vance's fortissimo, his descriptions of alien landscapes and weird customs, are devoid of their former vividness and conviction.

Reconsider, however. Maybe "Lurulu" is not such an anticlimax after all. Jack Vance always had a penchant for the cold, somewhat frustrating touch of reality in the last paragraphs of his books. Perhaps, "Lurulu" serves well as one large, cold, somewhat frustrating conclusion to all of his life's work.

Jack makes several strong statements: not surprisingly, against the ugliness and immorality of religion, against the ugliness and immorality of modernist ("avant-garde") art. To the end he remains a humanist, a preacher of doubt and moderation, of reasonable kindness without mandatory compassion, of self-restraint without self-punishment, of minimizing the inevitable sufferings we all cause each other in order to survive. Taking into account Jack's age, his blindness, and the substandard milieu he must lean upon and endure, Jack Vance remains a miracle giant of mind and spirit, an enviable example of graceful, endlessly forgiving genius who illuminated the dusk of the Western civilization with his (last?) Voltairian smile of reason".


What do you folks think?

[Istvan diVega]

I've not read the books in question, so cannot comment on the review. However, I think the piece is nicely written and captures Vance's output and philosophy very well indeed. This pretty much says who he was and what he was about, I think, as much any single sentence can:

"a humanist, a preacher of doubt and moderation, of reasonable kindness without mandatory compassion, of self-restraint without self-punishment, of minimizing the inevitable sufferings we all cause each other in order to survive"

Yes, that's certainly Vance as I "knew" him.

Thank you for posting it.

[vugtitan]

Originally Posted by Istvan diVega

I've not read the books in question, so cannot comment on the review. However, I think the piece is nicely written and captures Vance's output and philosophy very well indeed. This pretty much says who he was and what he was about, I think, as much any single sentence can:

"a humanist, a preacher of doubt and moderation, of reasonable kindness without mandatory compassion, of self-restraint without self-punishment, of minimizing the inevitable sufferings we all cause each other in order to survive"

Yes, that's certainly Vance as I "knew" him.

Thank you for posting it.

"a humanist, a preacher of doubt and moderation, of reasonable kindness without mandatory compassion, of self-restraint without self-punishment, of minimizing the inevitable sufferings we all cause each other in order to survive"

That is my favorite part too.First time I read it has stuck in my head since.

Fantastic way of describing him.

[Prestidigitweeze]

While all of that sounds quite impassioned and respectful, it doesn't convey the Vance I remember at all. That fellow was an unrepentant satirist and certainly no cheerleader for the human species (to the extent his characters were entirely human).

Vance was especially fun when he celebrated the pettiness and hypocrisy of his protagonists and that's why (in my incredibly humble opinion) he deserves the respect he rarely afforded his characters.

[Istvan diVega]

There's no dichotomy there that I can see?

[Prestidigitweeze]

Originally Posted by Istvan diVega

There's no dichotomy there that I can see?

It's this wee bit which caused me to pause, Roz:

a humanist, a preacher of . . . reasonable kindness . . . of self-restraint without self-punishment . . . minimizing the inevitable sufferings. . . .

I've never felt that Vance was preaching, either through the selfish actions of his characters or the consequences which befell them. He seemed to me to be a harshly hilarious critic of human folly, perhaps even in a way that suggested human beings were far too selfish and self-destructive to guide to redemption.

However, I don't intend to belittle your own sense of the man. I qualify and clarify only to be true to my own memory of Vance's writing, not to delegitimate anyone else's. At any affecting funeral or wake, we wish only to honor the person we remember. If I can't find that person represented as I knew them, then I wish to delineate the person I knew, if only to testify to time that they mattered (or also mattered) in that specific way.

[Istvan diVega]

I just didn't read "preacher" the way you did, I think. I never thought he was preaching either, but rather advocating all that quoted good stuff exactly by holding up the mirror to show us all the crap we get up to.

Of course the authors of the review may have meant "preacher" in a more literal way, but I rather think they agreed more with your view than you think. I know I do.