Jack Vance
Dan Clore
[This is a great article about one of the greatest writers.--DC]
The New York Times
July 19, 2009
The Genre Artist
By CARLO ROTELLA
Jack Vance, described by his peers as �a major genius� and �the greatest
living writer of science fiction and fantasy,� has been hidden in plain
sight for as long as he has been publishing � six decades and counting.
Yes, he has won Hugo, Nebula and World Fantasy awards and has been named
a Grand Master by the Science Fiction and Fantasy Writers of America,
and he received an Edgar from the Mystery Writers of America, but such
honors only help to camouflage him as just another accomplished genre
writer. So do the covers of his books, which feature the usual
spacecraft, monsters and euphonious place names: Lyonesse, Alastor,
Durdane. If you had never read Vance and were browsing a bookstore�s
shelf, you might have no particular reason to choose one of his books
instead of one next to it by A. E. van Vogt, say, or John Varley. And if
you chose one of these alternatives, you would go on your way to the
usual thrills with no idea that you had just missed out on encountering
one of American literature�s most distinctive and undervalued voices.
That�s how Vance�s fans see it, anyway. Among them are authors who have
gained the big paydays and the fame that Vance never enjoyed. Dan
Simmons, the best-selling writer of horror and fantasy, described
discovering Vance as �a revelation for me, like coming to Proust or
Henry James. Suddenly you�re in the deep end of the pool. He gives you
glimpses of entire worlds with just perfectly turned language. If he�d
been born south of the border, he�d be up for a Nobel Prize.� Michael
Chabon, whose distinguished literary reputation allows him to employ
popular formulas without being labeled a genre writer, told me: �Jack
Vance is the most painful case of all the writers I love who I feel
don�t get the credit they deserve. If �The Last Castle� or �The Dragon
Masters� had the name Italo Calvino on it, or just a foreign name, it
would be received as a profound meditation, but because he�s Jack Vance
and published in Amazing Whatever, there�s this insurmountable barrier.�
The barrier has not proved insurmountable to other genre writers � like
Ray Bradbury and Elmore Leonard, who have commanded critical respect
while moving a lot of satisfyingly familiar product, or like H. P.
Lovecraft and Raymond Chandler, pulp writers whose posthumous
reputations rose over time until they passed the threshold of highbrow
acceptance. But each of these writers, no matter how innovative or
poetic, entered the literary mainstream by fully exploiting the
attributes of his specialty. Vance, by contrast, has worked entirely
within popular forms without paying much heed to their conventions or
signature joys. His emphasis falls on the unexpected note, the odd beat.
The rocket ships are just ways to get characters from one cogently
imagined society to another; he prefers to tersely summarize battle
scenes and other such potentially crowd-pleasing set pieces; and he
takes greatest pleasure in word-music when exploring humankind�s rich
capacity for nastiness. For example: �As he approached the outermost
fields he moved cautiously, skulking from tussock to copse, and
presently found that which he sought: a peasant turning the dank soil
with a mattock. Cugel crept quietly forward, struck down the loon with a
gnarled root.� While Vance may play by the rules of whatever genre he
works in, his true genre is the Jack Vance story.
His loyal readers are fiercely passionate about him. An inspired crew of
them got together in the late 1990s to assemble the Vance Integral
Edition, a handsome 45-volume set of the great man�s complete works in
definitive editions. Led by Paul Rhoads, an American painter living in
France (whose recent critical appraisal of Vance, �Winged Being,�
compares him to Oswald Spengler and Jane Austen, among others, and
anoints him the anti-Paul Auster), the V.I.E. volunteers painstakingly
compared editions and the author�s drafts to restore prose corrupted by
publishers. Hard-core Vancians also created Totality (pharesm.org), a
Web site where you can search the V.I.E. texts, which is how we know
that he has used the word �punctilio� exactly 33 times in his published
prose. It was an extraordinary display of true readerly love � a bunch
of buffs giving a contemporary genre writer the Shakespearean variorum
treatment on their own time.
Vance, who is 92, says that his new book � a memoir, �This Is Me, Jack
Vance!� � will definitely be his last. Also arriving in bookstores this
month is �Songs of the Dying Earth,� a collection of stories by other
writers set in the far-future milieu that Vance introduced in some of
his first published stories, which he wrote on a clipboard on the deck
of a freighter in the South Pacific while serving in the merchant marine
during World War II. The roster of contributors to the collection
includes genre stars and best-selling brand names, among them Simmons,
Neil Gaiman, Terry Dowling, Tanith Lee, George R. R. Martin and Dean
Koontz. It�s a literary tribute album, in effect, on which reliable
earners acknowledge the influence of a respectably semiobscure national
treasure by covering his songs.
Right about now you might be thinking, Well, if Vance is as good as
Simmons and Chabon and Rhoads say he is, and if he refused to give in to
the demands of the genres in which he worked, then maybe he would have
done better to try other forms that better rewarded his strengths �
isn�t it a shame that he confined himself to adolescent genres in which
his grown-up talents could not truly shine? But I think that question
would be wrong in its assumptions: wrong about Vance, about genre and
about what �adolescent� and �grown-up� mean when we talk about literary
sensibility.
WHEN I WAS 14 or so, in the late �70s, I knew an Advanced Boy, a
connoisseur of all that was cooler than whatever his classmates were
listening to, smoking or reading. I was impressed with myself for having
graduated from Tolkien to E. R. Eddison and Michael Moorcock. �Kid
stuff,� said the Advanced Boy. �Try this.� He handed me a paperback copy
of Vance�s �Eyes of the Overworld.� On the cover a giant lizardlike
creature was tipping over a rowboat containing a man in regulation
swords-and-sorcery attire and a buxom woman in regulation dishabille.
I can remember the exact lines on the second page that sank the hook in
me for keeps, a passing exchange of dialogue between two hawkers of
sorcerous curios at a bazaar:
� �I can resolve your perplexity,� said Fianosther. �Your booth occupies
the site of the old gibbet, and has absorbed unlucky essences. But I
thought to notice you examining the manner in which the timbers of my
booth are joined. You will obtain a better view from within, but first I
must shorten the chain of the captive erb which roams the premises
during the night.�
�No need,� said Cugel. �My interest was cursory.� �
The feral, angling politesse, the marriage of high-flown language to low
motives, the way Cugel�s clipped phrases rounded off Fianosther�s ornate
ones � I felt myself seized by a writer�s style in a way I had never
experienced before. Vance didn�t even have to describe the �captive
erb.� The phrase itself conjured up rows of teeth and the awful strength
of a long, sinewy body surging up your leg.
Cugel soon finds himself in Smolod, a village whose inhabitants wear
magical eye cusps that transform their fetid surroundings into apparent
splendor. The cusps are relics of the demon Unda-Hrada�s incursion from
the subworld La-Er during the Cutz Wars of the 18th Aeon. �I dimly
recall that I inhabit a sty and devour the coarsest of food,� one elder
admits, �but the subjective reality is that I inhabit a glorious palace
and dine on splendid viands among the princes and princesses who are my
peers.� It�s a typical Vancian setup: a few bold conceptual strokes,
ripe descriptions and evocative names combine to fully realize a weird
place that feels real � because the meatiness of his language endows it
with presence, but also because every reader lives in a place sort of
like it.
Cugel manages to steal a single cusp before fleeing Smolod ahead of an
angry mob. It�s merely the first stop on his journey across the Dying
Earth, a realm of cynical wonders in which the last exemplars of human
civilization go about the age-old business of lying, cheating and
stealing to satisfy base desires as the enfeebled sun falters toward
final darkness.
I read the book in a kind of rapt delirium and went looking for more. In
addition to picaresque fantasy, Vance has written science fantasy,
planetary romance, extraterrestrial mystery, revenge sagas and
less-classifiable speculative adventure tales on scales ranging from the
short story to the multivolume chronicle. For good measure, he wrote 11
mysteries under his given name, John Holbrook Vance, and three more
under the floating pseudonym Ellery Queen. He had a brief stint early in
his career as a writer for the Captain Video television series, and over
the years several of his stories have been optioned, but Hollywood has
not snapped up his work as it snapped up, say, Philip K. Dick�s. Part of
Hollywood�s lack of interest in Vance can be traced, I think, to an
oversimple reading of him as a baroque stylist whose writing depends
mostly on language to achieve its effect, rather than on plot, character
or high-concept premise.
Vance believes that the musical flow of language is all-important to
storytelling � �The prose should swing,� he told me more than once � but
some social or cultural problem always moves beneath the action,
inviting the intellect to pause and consider. �The Languages of Pao,�
for instance, develops the proposition that language can be manipulated
to make a people more warlike; �The Dragon Masters� pursues an analogy
between genetic manipulation and aesthetic sophistication. He will also
mute or undercut the action with a well-struck psychological grace note.
After hunting down one by one the evil geniuses who slaughtered his
family, the hero of the Demon Princes cycle becomes so subdued that his
companion asks if he�s all right. �Quite well,� he answers in the
closing lines of the fifth and final novel. �Deflated, perhaps. I have
been deserted by my enemies. Treesong is dead. The affair is over. I am
done.� Deflated, perhaps. Rarely has a science-fiction hero reached the
finish line with so little fanfare.
Intricate plotting is not Vance�s forte, but he artfully recombines
recurring elements: the rhythms of travel; the pleasures of music,
strong drink and vengeance; touchy encounters with pedants, mountebanks,
violently opinionated aesthetes and zealots, louts, bigots of all
stripes and boyishly slim young women with an enigmatic habit of looking
back over their shoulders. His stories sustain an anecdotal forward
drive that balances his digressive pleasure in imagining a world and the
hypnotic effect of his distinctive tone, which has been variously
described as barbed, velvety, arch and mandarin.
Reading Vance leaves you with a sense of formality, of having been
present at an occasion when, for all the jokiness and the fun of made-up
words, the serious business of literary entertainment was transacted.
And it teaches a lasting lesson about the writer�s craft: Whatever�s on
the cover, you can always aim high.
IT TURNS OUT that mine was a common reaction to a first encounter with
Vance�s prose at an impressionable age. Some of the celebrated
fantasists who contributed to �Songs of the Dying Earth� told me similar
stories.
Dan Simmons was 12 when his older brother let him read �The Dragon
Masters� and he suddenly found himself in the deep end of the pool. Neil
Gaiman was 12 or 13 when he stumbled across a Dying Earth tale. �I fell
in love with the prose style,� Gaiman said. �It was elegant,
intelligent; each word felt like it knew what it was doing. It�s funny
but never, ever once nudges you in the ribs.�
Tanith Lee told me that in her early 20s she was �a great misfit,
unhappy in my heart, and I knew I wanted to write.� Her mother bought
her the first Dying Earth book, which invested Lee�s then-mopey
existence with writerly possibility. �I loved the black humor, the
elegance, and I loved the sheer viciousness. And when I got to Cugel, I
loved him. He was a lifeline.� After we talked, she e-mailed me one of
her favorite lines from Vance: �I would offer congratulations were it
not for this tentacle gripping my leg.�
Michael Chabon, who did not contribute to the tribute volume, was 12 or
13 when he read �The Dragon Masters.� He places Vance �in an authentic
American tradition that�s important and powerful but less recognized.
It�s not Twain-Hemingway; it�s more Poe�s tradition, a blend of European
refinement with brawling, two-fisted frontier spirit. I picture this
sailor in his blue chambray work shirt, his jeans and a watch cap
sitting on the deck of a ship in the South Pacific, imagining a million
years in the future, this elaborate world going through its death
throes. The prose isn�t just rarefied and overripe. Vance has the
narrative force, the willingness to look very coldly at violence and
cruelty, to not shy away.�
Chabon contrasted Vance with Tolkien and C. S. Lewis, British dons who
shared a grandiose �impulse to synthesize a mythology for a culture.
There�s none of that in Vance. The engineer in him is always on view.
They�re always adventure stories, too, but they�re also problem-solving
puzzles. He sets up these what-ifs, like a syllogism. He has that
logic-love like Poe, the Yankee engineering spirit, married to erudite
love of pomp and pageantry. And he has an amazing ear and writes a
beautiful sentence.�
Most of these writers were adolescents when they first read Vance, who
awoke in them an appreciation for the artistic possibilities of
language. When applied to literature, �adolescent� does not only have to
mean pedestrian prose that evokes the strong feelings of emotionally
inexperienced people. �Adolescent� can also mean writing that inspires
the first conscious stirrings of literary sensibility. So, yes, Vance
worked exclusively in adolescent genres � if under that heading we
include the transformative experience of falling in love for the first
time with a beautiful sentence.
VANCE LIVES IN the Oakland hills, in a house he tore down and rebuilt
over the years in idiosyncratic form. He has a reputation for reclusive
crabbiness, and encounters between strangers in his stories are often
instinctively truculent. (A specimen exchange between a customer and a
clerk: � �Your methods are incorrect. Since I entered the chamber first,
you should have dealt first with my affairs.� The clerk blinked. �The
idea, I must say, has an innocent simplicity in its favor.� �) As I
climbed the steep driveway on a gray afternoon last winter, a large dog
barking at my approach, I tried to banish the irrational expectation
that Vance and I would exchange Vancian dialogue. Me: �Why did you
persist in writing hurlothrumbo romances of the footling sort favored by
mooncalfs?� Him: �The question is nuncupatory. I grow weary of your
importunities. Begone.�
But he was gracious and regaled me with stories about his adventures in
the South Seas. He sat in a rocking chair at his desk, bundled up
against the chill in windbreaker and watch cap, with a blanket around
his shoulders and a heater by his slippered feet. Old age has stooped
and diminished him, but his deep voice still carries a rasp of
authority. He spends his days at his desk, listening to mysteries on
tape (he has been blind since the 1980s), talking on the phone when
somebody calls, listening to or playing the traditional jazz he adores.
At one point during my visit he pulled down a baritone ukulele from the
rack of stringed instruments behind him and strummed it with abandon as
he sang a forceful little ditty about pitching woo. He also plays � or
played � harmonica, washboard, kazoo and cornet.
Unlike many of his characters, who are forever puffing themselves up (�I
am studied in four infinities and I sit as a member of the Collegium�),
Vance presents himself as a down-to-earth, practical fellow. He
deflected my questions about the fan letters in his file cabinets from
the likes of the young Ursula K. Le Guin, the software zillionaire Paul
Allen and the game designer Gary Gygax, whose Dungeons & Dragons
borrowed heavily from Vance, but he was happy to explain how he once
raised a sunken houseboat using an air compressor and eight 50-gallon drums.
Vance never got rich, but he made enough to support his wife, Norma, who
died last year after 61 years of marriage, and their son, John, now an
engineer. They traveled often to exotic locales � Madeira, Tahiti, Cape
Town, Kashmir � where they settled in cheap lodgings long enough for
Vance to write another book. �We�d hole up for anywhere from a couple of
weeks to a few months,� John told me. �He had his clipboard; she had the
portable typewriter. He�d write in longhand, and she�d type it up. First
draft, second draft, third draft.�
That he could make a good living as a genre writer was supremely
important to Vance, who was born into a San Francisco family that fell
on hard times during his early childhood. Growing up during the Great
Depression on his grandparents� farm on Little Dutch Slough in the
waterway country east of the city, he came early to his love of sailing,
self-reliant handiness and genre fiction. He admired Edgar Rice
Burroughs�s tales of John Carter of Mars and, he said, �I waited at the
mailbox every month with my tongue hanging out for the latest issue of
Weird Tales,� the pulp magazine that featured seminal fantasy writers
like Lovecraft, Robert E. Howard, C. L. Moore and Clark Ashton Smith.
Vance attended the University of California, Berkeley, but his practical
education as a writer came from reading the pulps and other
entertainments: L. Frank Baum�s Oz books, the mannered yarns of Jeffery
Farnol, the light comedy of P. G. Wodehouse, his literary hero.
Other than mastery of tonal effects and a penchant for creating
formidable matrons of advanced middle years, Vance would seem to have
little in common with Wodehouse, least of all in his view of human
nature. Vance�s characters tend to share a dark, grasping quality, and
cruelty comes easily to them. In �Araminta Station,� the first novel in
his eco-political Cadwal trilogy, Vance mock-cites �The Worlds of Man,�
a study by the galaxy-spanning Fellows of the Fidelius Institute: �In
our journeys from one end of the Gaean Reach to the other and, on
occasion, Beyond, we discover nothing to indicate that the human race is
everywhere and inevitably becoming more generous, tolerant, kindly and
enlightened. Nothing whatever.� Vance told me that he and his family
always found good treatment and good company in their travels, eating
and drinking well and filling up their eyes with the beauty of the
world. So what, then, inspired the pandemic interpersonal nastiness in
his writing? He declined to speculate, but his son told me: �I think
that came from when his family lost its money, dealing with the people
he had to deal with. Times were tough, people were rugged. My guess is
that pattern comes from his experiences in his early days, in California
and in the merchant marine.�
Vance takes pride in his craft but does not care to talk about it in any
detail, going so far in his memoir as to consign almost all discussion
of writing to a brief chapter at the end. Jeremy Cavaterra, a composer
who lives in an apartment attached to Vance�s house and helps look after
him (and who was recruited as a lifelong fan when he read �The Eyes of
the Overworld� at age 14), said of this reticence, �Part of it is that
he feels like it�s the magician telling you how the trick works, and
part of it is that he writes by feel and doesn�t interrogate it.�
Vance�s lingering distaste for talking about himself as a fantasist may
also go back to his own adolescence, when he arrived in high school very
young after skipping grades. The character of the awkward youth with a
made-up world in his head recurs in his writing, as does the scene of
popular kids tormenting a loner. The most prolifically homicidal of his
strange dreamers is probably the Demon Prince Howard Alan Treesong, who
speaks in the voices of imaginary avatars and terrorizes a school
reunion. Norma used to say that her husband was Treesong. John told me
that his father prefers to think of himself as a less dastardly Cugel.
Put them together, Treesong the dreamer with streetwise Cugel, and you
get Vance, whose long labor at his trade grew from a youthful discovery:
you can turn idle dreaminess into purposeful art, and you can turn art
into a paying gig.
Now Vance has begun to lose words. When he made a little show of waving
me toward his bar and said, �Go get yourself a drink of single-malt
scotch,� he laughed and added: �There�s a word I can�t remember to
describe that. It has a sense of aesthetic mastery, of command, but also
a sense of thinking highly of yourself.� His old favorite �punctilio�
came to mind, as did �hauteur� (16 listings on Totality), but neither
seemed quite right, so I didn�t say anything. During our conversation he
had already summarily dismissed several people, including two celebrated
science-fiction writers I grew up reading, as a jackass or a show-off.
Volunteering the wrong word might qualify me as both. I went to get my
drink, leaving him to consider the exact shape of the hole the lost word
had left behind in his mind. It might not be lost forever, though. It
could well turn up in Michael Chabon�s prose or that of the contributors
to �Songs of the Dying Earth� or in Ursula K. Le Guin�s. Maybe even in mine.
Carlo Rotella is the director of American Studies at Boston College.
--
Dan Clore
My collected fiction, _The Unspeakable and Others_:
(Wait for the new edition: http://hplmythos.com/ )
Lord We�rdgliffe & Necronomicon Page:
http://tinyurl.com/292yz9
News & Views for Anarchists & Activists:
http://groups.yahoo.com/group/smygo
"Tho-ag in Zhi-gyu slept seven Khorlo. Zodmanas
zhiba. All Nyug bosom. Konch-hog not; Thyan-Kam
not; Lha-Chohan not; Tenbrel Chugnyi not;
Dharmakaya ceased; Tgenchang not become; Barnang
and Ssa in Ngovonyidj; alone Tho-og Yinsin in
night of Sun-chan and Yong-grub (Parinishpanna),
&c., &c.,"
-- The Book of Dzyan.
mimus
> [This is a great article about one of the greatest writers.--DC]
>
> The New York Times
> July 19, 2009
> The Genre Artist
> By CARLO ROTELLA
This review is getting some serious play here on rasfw, which is fair
enough.
I do think a slight emendation of a phrase of Rotella's might well best
describe one of Vance's most addictive of his several talents, "feral
politesse".
It's a talent of Congreve's; Sheridan's, at least in _The Way of the
World_; Melville's, at least in _The Confidence-Man_; and Compton-Burnett,
all over the place, as well.
And forms the very core of what is called "the comedy of manners".
--
Decorum, after all, was a more subtle and ultimately more
satisfactory weapon than high feelings and improper conduct.
< Vance
Al Smith
"The Dying Earth" stories and the "Blue World" novel both made
profound impressions on me as a teenager. I must have re-read "The
Blue World" six or eight times.
-Al-
Al Smith
>
Just read the article. Now I want to know which well known SF
authors Jack Vance thinks are a "jackass or a show-off." I can't
think he'd say that about Heinlein or Clarke, but I bet he had
Asimov in mind.
-Al-
Schrodingers Hat
wrote:
<snipped some groups coz my server only crossposts to 4>
>On 7/20/2009 1:43 PM, Dan Clore wrote:
>>
>> [This is a great article about one of the greatest writers.--DC]
>>
>> The New York Times
>> July 19, 2009
>> The Genre Artist
>> By CARLO ROTELLA
>>
>> Jack Vance, described by his peers as �a major genius� and �the greatest
>> living writer of science fiction and fantasy,� has been hidden in plain
>> sight for as long as he has been publishing � six decades and counting.
>> Yes, he has won Hugo, Nebula and World Fantasy awards and has been named
>> a Grand Master by the Science Fiction and Fantasy Writers of America,
>> and he received an Edgar from the Mystery Writers of America, but such
>> honors only help to camouflage him as just another accomplished genre
>> writer. So do the covers of his books, which feature the usual
>> spacecraft, monsters and euphonious place names: Lyonesse, Alastor,
>> Durdane. If you had never read Vance and were browsing a bookstore�s
>> shelf, you might have no particular reason to choose one of his books
>> instead of one next to it by A. E. van Vogt, say, or John Varley. And if
>> you chose one of these alternatives, you would go on your way to the
>> usual thrills with no idea that you had just missed out on encountering
>> one of American literature�s most distinctive and undervalued voices.
>>
>> That�s how Vance�s fans see it, anyway. Among them are authors who have
>> gained the big paydays and the fame that Vance never enjoyed. Dan
>> Simmons, the best-selling writer of horror and fantasy, described
>> discovering Vance as �a revelation for me, like coming to Proust or
>> Henry James. Suddenly you�re in the deep end of the pool. He gives you
>> glimpses of entire worlds with just perfectly turned language. If he�d
>> been born south of the border, he�d be up for a Nobel Prize.� Michael
>> Chabon, whose distinguished literary reputation allows him to employ
>> popular formulas without being labeled a genre writer, told me: �Jack
>> Vance is the most painful case of all the writers I love who I feel
>> don�t get the credit they deserve. If �The Last Castle� or �The Dragon
>> Masters� had the name Italo Calvino on it, or just a foreign name, it
>> would be received as a profound meditation, but because he�s Jack Vance
>> and published in Amazing Whatever, there�s this insurmountable barrier.�
>>
>> The barrier has not proved insurmountable to other genre writers � like
>> Ray Bradbury and Elmore Leonard, who have commanded critical respect
>> while moving a lot of satisfyingly familiar product, or like H. P.
>> Lovecraft and Raymond Chandler, pulp writers whose posthumous
>> reputations rose over time until they passed the threshold of highbrow
>> acceptance. But each of these writers, no matter how innovative or
>> poetic, entered the literary mainstream by fully exploiting the
>> attributes of his specialty. Vance, by contrast, has worked entirely
>> within popular forms without paying much heed to their conventions or
>> signature joys. His emphasis falls on the unexpected note, the odd beat.
>> The rocket ships are just ways to get characters from one cogently
>> imagined society to another; he prefers to tersely summarize battle
>> scenes and other such potentially crowd-pleasing set pieces; and he
>> takes greatest pleasure in word-music when exploring humankind�s rich
>> capacity for nastiness. For example: �As he approached the outermost
>> fields he moved cautiously, skulking from tussock to copse, and
>> presently found that which he sought: a peasant turning the dank soil
>> with a mattock. Cugel crept quietly forward, struck down the loon with a
>> gnarled root.� While Vance may play by the rules of whatever genre he
>> works in, his true genre is the Jack Vance story.
>>
>> His loyal readers are fiercely passionate about him. An inspired crew of
>> them got together in the late 1990s to assemble the Vance Integral
>> Edition, a handsome 45-volume set of the great man�s complete works in
>> definitive editions. Led by Paul Rhoads, an American painter living in
>> France (whose recent critical appraisal of Vance, �Winged Being,�
>> compares him to Oswald Spengler and Jane Austen, among others, and
>> anoints him the anti-Paul Auster), the V.I.E. volunteers painstakingly
>> compared editions and the author�s drafts to restore prose corrupted by
>> publishers. Hard-core Vancians also created Totality (pharesm.org), a
>> Web site where you can search the V.I.E. texts, which is how we know
>> that he has used the word �punctilio� exactly 33 times in his published
>> prose. It was an extraordinary display of true readerly love � a bunch
>> of buffs giving a contemporary genre writer the Shakespearean variorum
>> treatment on their own time.
>>
>> Vance, who is 92, says that his new book � a memoir, �This Is Me, Jack
>> Vance!� � will definitely be his last. Also arriving in bookstores this
>> month is �Songs of the Dying Earth,� a collection of stories by other
>> writers set in the far-future milieu that Vance introduced in some of
>> his first published stories, which he wrote on a clipboard on the deck
>> of a freighter in the South Pacific while serving in the merchant marine
>> during World War II. The roster of contributors to the collection
>> includes genre stars and best-selling brand names, among them Simmons,
>> Neil Gaiman, Terry Dowling, Tanith Lee, George R. R. Martin and Dean
>> Koontz. It�s a literary tribute album, in effect, on which reliable
>> earners acknowledge the influence of a respectably semiobscure national
>> treasure by covering his songs.
>>
>> Right about now you might be thinking, Well, if Vance is as good as
>> Simmons and Chabon and Rhoads say he is, and if he refused to give in to
>> the demands of the genres in which he worked, then maybe he would have
>> done better to try other forms that better rewarded his strengths �
>> isn�t it a shame that he confined himself to adolescent genres in which
>> his grown-up talents could not truly shine? But I think that question
>> would be wrong in its assumptions: wrong about Vance, about genre and
>> about what �adolescent� and �grown-up� mean when we talk about literary
>> sensibility.
>>
>> WHEN I WAS 14 or so, in the late �70s, I knew an Advanced Boy, a
>> connoisseur of all that was cooler than whatever his classmates were
>> listening to, smoking or reading. I was impressed with myself for having
>> graduated from Tolkien to E. R. Eddison and Michael Moorcock. �Kid
>> stuff,� said the Advanced Boy. �Try this.� He handed me a paperback copy
>> of Vance�s �Eyes of the Overworld.� On the cover a giant lizardlike
>> creature was tipping over a rowboat containing a man in regulation
>> swords-and-sorcery attire and a buxom woman in regulation dishabille.
>>
>> I can remember the exact lines on the second page that sank the hook in
>> me for keeps, a passing exchange of dialogue between two hawkers of
>> sorcerous curios at a bazaar:
>>
>> � �I can resolve your perplexity,� said Fianosther. �Your booth occupies
>> the site of the old gibbet, and has absorbed unlucky essences. But I
>> thought to notice you examining the manner in which the timbers of my
>> booth are joined. You will obtain a better view from within, but first I
>> must shorten the chain of the captive erb which roams the premises
>> during the night.�
>>
>> �No need,� said Cugel. �My interest was cursory.� �
>>
>> The feral, angling politesse, the marriage of high-flown language to low
>> motives, the way Cugel�s clipped phrases rounded off Fianosther�s ornate
>> ones � I felt myself seized by a writer�s style in a way I had never
>> experienced before. Vance didn�t even have to describe the �captive
>> erb.� The phrase itself conjured up rows of teeth and the awful strength
>> of a long, sinewy body surging up your leg.
>>
>> Cugel soon finds himself in Smolod, a village whose inhabitants wear
>> magical eye cusps that transform their fetid surroundings into apparent
>> splendor. The cusps are relics of the demon Unda-Hrada�s incursion from
>> the subworld La-Er during the Cutz Wars of the 18th Aeon. �I dimly
>> recall that I inhabit a sty and devour the coarsest of food,� one elder
>> admits, �but the subjective reality is that I inhabit a glorious palace
>> and dine on splendid viands among the princes and princesses who are my
>> peers.� It�s a typical Vancian setup: a few bold conceptual strokes,
>> ripe descriptions and evocative names combine to fully realize a weird
>> place that feels real � because the meatiness of his language endows it
>> with presence, but also because every reader lives in a place sort of
>> like it.
>>
>> Cugel manages to steal a single cusp before fleeing Smolod ahead of an
>> angry mob. It�s merely the first stop on his journey across the Dying
>> Earth, a realm of cynical wonders in which the last exemplars of human
>> civilization go about the age-old business of lying, cheating and
>> stealing to satisfy base desires as the enfeebled sun falters toward
>> final darkness.
>>
>> I read the book in a kind of rapt delirium and went looking for more. In
>> addition to picaresque fantasy, Vance has written science fantasy,
>> planetary romance, extraterrestrial mystery, revenge sagas and
>> less-classifiable speculative adventure tales on scales ranging from the
>> short story to the multivolume chronicle. For good measure, he wrote 11
>> mysteries under his given name, John Holbrook Vance, and three more
>> under the floating pseudonym Ellery Queen. He had a brief stint early in
>> his career as a writer for the Captain Video television series, and over
>> the years several of his stories have been optioned, but Hollywood has
>> not snapped up his work as it snapped up, say, Philip K. Dick�s. Part of
>> Hollywood�s lack of interest in Vance can be traced, I think, to an
>> oversimple reading of him as a baroque stylist whose writing depends
>> mostly on language to achieve its effect, rather than on plot, character
>> or high-concept premise.
>>
>> Vance believes that the musical flow of language is all-important to
>> storytelling � �The prose should swing,� he told me more than once � but
>> some social or cultural problem always moves beneath the action,
>> inviting the intellect to pause and consider. �The Languages of Pao,�
>> for instance, develops the proposition that language can be manipulated
>> to make a people more warlike; �The Dragon Masters� pursues an analogy
>> between genetic manipulation and aesthetic sophistication. He will also
>> mute or undercut the action with a well-struck psychological grace note.
>> After hunting down one by one the evil geniuses who slaughtered his
>> family, the hero of the Demon Princes cycle becomes so subdued that his
>> companion asks if he�s all right. �Quite well,� he answers in the
>> closing lines of the fifth and final novel. �Deflated, perhaps. I have
>> been deserted by my enemies. Treesong is dead. The affair is over. I am
>> done.� Deflated, perhaps. Rarely has a science-fiction hero reached the
>> finish line with so little fanfare.
>>
>> Intricate plotting is not Vance�s forte, but he artfully recombines
>> recurring elements: the rhythms of travel; the pleasures of music,
>> strong drink and vengeance; touchy encounters with pedants, mountebanks,
>> violently opinionated aesthetes and zealots, louts, bigots of all
>> stripes and boyishly slim young women with an enigmatic habit of looking
>> back over their shoulders. His stories sustain an anecdotal forward
>> drive that balances his digressive pleasure in imagining a world and the
>> hypnotic effect of his distinctive tone, which has been variously
>> described as barbed, velvety, arch and mandarin.
>>
>> Reading Vance leaves you with a sense of formality, of having been
>> present at an occasion when, for all the jokiness and the fun of made-up
>> words, the serious business of literary entertainment was transacted.
>> And it teaches a lasting lesson about the writer�s craft: Whatever�s on
>> the cover, you can always aim high.
>>
>> IT TURNS OUT that mine was a common reaction to a first encounter with
>> Vance�s prose at an impressionable age. Some of the celebrated
>> fantasists who contributed to �Songs of the Dying Earth� told me similar
>> stories.
>>
>> Dan Simmons was 12 when his older brother let him read �The Dragon
>> Masters� and he suddenly found himself in the deep end of the pool. Neil
>> Gaiman was 12 or 13 when he stumbled across a Dying Earth tale. �I fell
>> in love with the prose style,� Gaiman said. �It was elegant,
>> intelligent; each word felt like it knew what it was doing. It�s funny
>> but never, ever once nudges you in the ribs.�
>>
>> Tanith Lee told me that in her early 20s she was �a great misfit,
>> unhappy in my heart, and I knew I wanted to write.� Her mother bought
>> her the first Dying Earth book, which invested Lee�s then-mopey
>> existence with writerly possibility. �I loved the black humor, the
>> elegance, and I loved the sheer viciousness. And when I got to Cugel, I
>> loved him. He was a lifeline.� After we talked, she e-mailed me one of
>> her favorite lines from Vance: �I would offer congratulations were it
>> not for this tentacle gripping my leg.�
>>
>> Michael Chabon, who did not contribute to the tribute volume, was 12 or
>> 13 when he read �The Dragon Masters.� He places Vance �in an authentic
>> American tradition that�s important and powerful but less recognized.
>> It�s not Twain-Hemingway; it�s more Poe�s tradition, a blend of European
>> refinement with brawling, two-fisted frontier spirit. I picture this
>> sailor in his blue chambray work shirt, his jeans and a watch cap
>> sitting on the deck of a ship in the South Pacific, imagining a million
>> years in the future, this elaborate world going through its death
>> throes. The prose isn�t just rarefied and overripe. Vance has the
>> narrative force, the willingness to look very coldly at violence and
>> cruelty, to not shy away.�
>>
>> Chabon contrasted Vance with Tolkien and C. S. Lewis, British dons who
>> shared a grandiose �impulse to synthesize a mythology for a culture.
>> There�s none of that in Vance. The engineer in him is always on view.
>> They�re always adventure stories, too, but they�re also problem-solving
>> puzzles. He sets up these what-ifs, like a syllogism. He has that
>> logic-love like Poe, the Yankee engineering spirit, married to erudite
>> love of pomp and pageantry. And he has an amazing ear and writes a
>> beautiful sentence.�
>>
>> Most of these writers were adolescents when they first read Vance, who
>> awoke in them an appreciation for the artistic possibilities of
>> language. When applied to literature, �adolescent� does not only have to
>> mean pedestrian prose that evokes the strong feelings of emotionally
>> inexperienced people. �Adolescent� can also mean writing that inspires
>> the first conscious stirrings of literary sensibility. So, yes, Vance
>> worked exclusively in adolescent genres � if under that heading we
>> include the transformative experience of falling in love for the first
>> time with a beautiful sentence.
>>
>> VANCE LIVES IN the Oakland hills, in a house he tore down and rebuilt
>> over the years in idiosyncratic form. He has a reputation for reclusive
>> crabbiness, and encounters between strangers in his stories are often
>> instinctively truculent. (A specimen exchange between a customer and a
>> clerk: � �Your methods are incorrect. Since I entered the chamber first,
>> you should have dealt first with my affairs.� The clerk blinked. �The
>> idea, I must say, has an innocent simplicity in its favor.� �) As I
>> climbed the steep driveway on a gray afternoon last winter, a large dog
>> barking at my approach, I tried to banish the irrational expectation
>> that Vance and I would exchange Vancian dialogue. Me: �Why did you
>> persist in writing hurlothrumbo romances of the footling sort favored by
>> mooncalfs?� Him: �The question is nuncupatory. I grow weary of your
>> importunities. Begone.�
>>
>> But he was gracious and regaled me with stories about his adventures in
>> the South Seas. He sat in a rocking chair at his desk, bundled up
>> against the chill in windbreaker and watch cap, with a blanket around
>> his shoulders and a heater by his slippered feet. Old age has stooped
>> and diminished him, but his deep voice still carries a rasp of
>> authority. He spends his days at his desk, listening to mysteries on
>> tape (he has been blind since the 1980s), talking on the phone when
>> somebody calls, listening to or playing the traditional jazz he adores.
>> At one point during my visit he pulled down a baritone ukulele from the
>> rack of stringed instruments behind him and strummed it with abandon as
>> he sang a forceful little ditty about pitching woo. He also plays � or
>> played � harmonica, washboard, kazoo and cornet.
>>
>> Unlike many of his characters, who are forever puffing themselves up (�I
>> am studied in four infinities and I sit as a member of the Collegium�),
>> Vance presents himself as a down-to-earth, practical fellow. He
>> deflected my questions about the fan letters in his file cabinets from
>> the likes of the young Ursula K. Le Guin, the software zillionaire Paul
>> Allen and the game designer Gary Gygax, whose Dungeons & Dragons
>> borrowed heavily from Vance, but he was happy to explain how he once
>> raised a sunken houseboat using an air compressor and eight 50-gallon
>> drums.
>>
>> Vance never got rich, but he made enough to support his wife, Norma, who
>> died last year after 61 years of marriage, and their son, John, now an
>> engineer. They traveled often to exotic locales � Madeira, Tahiti, Cape
>> Town, Kashmir � where they settled in cheap lodgings long enough for
>> Vance to write another book. �We�d hole up for anywhere from a couple of
>> weeks to a few months,� John told me. �He had his clipboard; she had the
>> portable typewriter. He�d write in longhand, and she�d type it up. First
>> draft, second draft, third draft.�
>>
>> That he could make a good living as a genre writer was supremely
>> important to Vance, who was born into a San Francisco family that fell
>> on hard times during his early childhood. Growing up during the Great
>> Depression on his grandparents� farm on Little Dutch Slough in the
>> waterway country east of the city, he came early to his love of sailing,
>> self-reliant handiness and genre fiction. He admired Edgar Rice
>> Burroughs�s tales of John Carter of Mars and, he said, �I waited at the
>> mailbox every month with my tongue hanging out for the latest issue of
>> Weird Tales,� the pulp magazine that featured seminal fantasy writers
>> like Lovecraft, Robert E. Howard, C. L. Moore and Clark Ashton Smith.
>> Vance attended the University of California, Berkeley, but his practical
>> education as a writer came from reading the pulps and other
>> entertainments: L. Frank Baum�s Oz books, the mannered yarns of Jeffery
>> Farnol, the light comedy of P. G. Wodehouse, his literary hero.
>>
>> Other than mastery of tonal effects and a penchant for creating
>> formidable matrons of advanced middle years, Vance would seem to have
>> little in common with Wodehouse, least of all in his view of human
>> nature. Vance�s characters tend to share a dark, grasping quality, and
>> cruelty comes easily to them. In �Araminta Station,� the first novel in
>> his eco-political Cadwal trilogy, Vance mock-cites �The Worlds of Man,�
>> a study by the galaxy-spanning Fellows of the Fidelius Institute: �In
>> our journeys from one end of the Gaean Reach to the other and, on
>> occasion, Beyond, we discover nothing to indicate that the human race is
>> everywhere and inevitably becoming more generous, tolerant, kindly and
>> enlightened. Nothing whatever.� Vance told me that he and his family
>> always found good treatment and good company in their travels, eating
>> and drinking well and filling up their eyes with the beauty of the
>> world. So what, then, inspired the pandemic interpersonal nastiness in
>> his writing? He declined to speculate, but his son told me: �I think
>> that came from when his family lost its money, dealing with the people
>> he had to deal with. Times were tough, people were rugged. My guess is
>> that pattern comes from his experiences in his early days, in California
>> and in the merchant marine.�
>>
>> Vance takes pride in his craft but does not care to talk about it in any
>> detail, going so far in his memoir as to consign almost all discussion
>> of writing to a brief chapter at the end. Jeremy Cavaterra, a composer
>> who lives in an apartment attached to Vance�s house and helps look after
>> him (and who was recruited as a lifelong fan when he read �The Eyes of
>> the Overworld� at age 14), said of this reticence, �Part of it is that
>> he feels like it�s the magician telling you how the trick works, and
>> part of it is that he writes by feel and doesn�t interrogate it.�
>>
>> Vance�s lingering distaste for talking about himself as a fantasist may
>> also go back to his own adolescence, when he arrived in high school very
>> young after skipping grades. The character of the awkward youth with a
>> made-up world in his head recurs in his writing, as does the scene of
>> popular kids tormenting a loner. The most prolifically homicidal of his
>> strange dreamers is probably the Demon Prince Howard Alan Treesong, who
>> speaks in the voices of imaginary avatars and terrorizes a school
>> reunion. Norma used to say that her husband was Treesong. John told me
>> that his father prefers to think of himself as a less dastardly Cugel.
>> Put them together, Treesong the dreamer with streetwise Cugel, and you
>> get Vance, whose long labor at his trade grew from a youthful discovery:
>> you can turn idle dreaminess into purposeful art, and you can turn art
>> into a paying gig.
>>
>> Now Vance has begun to lose words. When he made a little show of waving
>> me toward his bar and said, �Go get yourself a drink of single-malt
>> scotch,� he laughed and added: �There�s a word I can�t remember to
>> describe that. It has a sense of aesthetic mastery, of command, but also
>> a sense of thinking highly of yourself.� His old favorite �punctilio�
>> came to mind, as did �hauteur� (16 listings on Totality), but neither
>> seemed quite right, so I didn�t say anything. During our conversation he
>> had already summarily dismissed several people, including two celebrated
>> science-fiction writers I grew up reading, as a jackass or a show-off.
>> Volunteering the wrong word might qualify me as both. I went to get my
>> drink, leaving him to consider the exact shape of the hole the lost word
>> had left behind in his mind. It might not be lost forever, though. It
>> could well turn up in Michael Chabon�s prose or that of the contributors
>> to �Songs of the Dying Earth� or in Ursula K. Le Guin�s. Maybe even in
>> mine.
>>
>> Carlo Rotella is the director of American Studies at Boston College.
>>
>
>
>Just read the article. Now I want to know which well known SF
>authors Jack Vance thinks are a "jackass or a show-off." I can't
>think he'd say that about Heinlein or Clarke, but I bet he had
>Asimov in mind.
>
>-Al-
Theres Harlan Ellison; he could be both at the same time. He isnt as
famous as Clarke or Asimov, except maybe in his own mind.
Mike Schilling
>
> Just read the article. Now I want to know which well known SF
> authors Jack Vance thinks are a "jackass or a show-off." I can't
> think he'd say that about Heinlein or Clarke, but I bet he had
> Asimov in mind.
I think you're right. He thought Asimov's behavior at cons was marketing,
rather than the natural reaction of someone who'd always envied the cool
kids to finally finding a place where he was one of them.
Al Smith
> On Mon, 20 Jul 2009 16:57:53 -0400, Al Smith <inv...@address.com>
> wrote:
>
> <snipped some groups coz my server only crossposts to 4>
>
>> On 7/20/2009 1:43 PM, Dan Clore wrote:
>>> [This is a great article about one of the greatest writers.--DC]
>>>
>>> The New York Times
>>> July 19, 2009
>>> The Genre Artist
>>> By CARLO ROTELLA
>>>
>>> living writer of science fiction and fantasy,� has been hidden in plain
>>> sight for as long as he has been publishing � six decades and counting.
>>> a Grand Master by the Science Fiction and Fantasy Writers of America,
>>> and he received an Edgar from the Mystery Writers of America, but such
>>> honors only help to camouflage him as just another accomplished genre
>>> writer. So do the covers of his books, which feature the usual
>>> spacecraft, monsters and euphonious place names: Lyonesse, Alastor,
>>> instead of one next to it by A. E. van Vogt, say, or John Varley. And if
>>> you chose one of these alternatives, you would go on your way to the
>>> usual thrills with no idea that you had just missed out on encountering
>>>
>>> That�s how Vance�s fans see it, anyway. Among them are authors who have
>>> Simmons, the best-selling writer of horror and fantasy, described
>>> Henry James. Suddenly you�re in the deep end of the pool. He gives you
>>> glimpses of entire worlds with just perfectly turned language. If he�d
>>> been born south of the border, he�d be up for a Nobel Prize.� Michael
>>> Masters� had the name Italo Calvino on it, or just a foreign name, it
>>> would be received as a profound meditation, but because he�s Jack Vance
>>> and published in Amazing Whatever, there�s this insurmountable barrier.�
>>>
>>> while moving a lot of satisfyingly familiar product, or like H. P.
>>> Lovecraft and Raymond Chandler, pulp writers whose posthumous
>>> reputations rose over time until they passed the threshold of highbrow
>>> acceptance. But each of these writers, no matter how innovative or
>>> poetic, entered the literary mainstream by fully exploiting the
>>> attributes of his specialty. Vance, by contrast, has worked entirely
>>> within popular forms without paying much heed to their conventions or
>>> signature joys. His emphasis falls on the unexpected note, the odd beat.
>>> The rocket ships are just ways to get characters from one cogently
>>> imagined society to another; he prefers to tersely summarize battle
>>> scenes and other such potentially crowd-pleasing set pieces; and he
>>> capacity for nastiness. For example: �As he approached the outermost
>>> presently found that which he sought: a peasant turning the dank soil
>>> with a mattock. Cugel crept quietly forward, struck down the loon with a
>>>
>>> His loyal readers are fiercely passionate about him. An inspired crew of
>>> them got together in the late 1990s to assemble the Vance Integral
>>> anoints him the anti-Paul Auster), the V.I.E. volunteers painstakingly
>>> Web site where you can search the V.I.E. texts, which is how we know
>>> prose. It was an extraordinary display of true readerly love � a bunch
>>> treatment on their own time.
>>>
>>> Vance!� � will definitely be his last. Also arriving in bookstores this
>>> his first published stories, which he wrote on a clipboard on the deck
>>> of a freighter in the South Pacific while serving in the merchant marine
>>> during World War II. The roster of contributors to the collection
>>> includes genre stars and best-selling brand names, among them Simmons,
>>> Neil Gaiman, Terry Dowling, Tanith Lee, George R. R. Martin and Dean
>>> treasure by covering his songs.
>>>
>>> Right about now you might be thinking, Well, if Vance is as good as
>>> Simmons and Chabon and Rhoads say he is, and if he refused to give in to
>>> the demands of the genres in which he worked, then maybe he would have
>>> isn�t it a shame that he confined himself to adolescent genres in which
>>> would be wrong in its assumptions: wrong about Vance, about genre and
>>> sensibility.
>>>
>>> WHEN I WAS 14 or so, in the late �70s, I knew an Advanced Boy, a
>>> listening to, smoking or reading. I was impressed with myself for having
>>> stuff,� said the Advanced Boy. �Try this.� He handed me a paperback copy
>>> swords-and-sorcery attire and a buxom woman in regulation dishabille.
>>>
>>> I can remember the exact lines on the second page that sank the hook in
>>> me for keeps, a passing exchange of dialogue between two hawkers of
>>> sorcerous curios at a bazaar:
>>>
>>> thought to notice you examining the manner in which the timbers of my
>>> booth are joined. You will obtain a better view from within, but first I
>>> must shorten the chain of the captive erb which roams the premises
>>>
>>> �No need,� said Cugel. �My interest was cursory.� �
>>>
>>> experienced before. Vance didn�t even have to describe the �captive
>>> erb.� The phrase itself conjured up rows of teeth and the awful strength
>>>
>>> Cugel soon finds himself in Smolod, a village whose inhabitants wear
>>> magical eye cusps that transform their fetid surroundings into apparent
>>> the subworld La-Er during the Cutz Wars of the 18th Aeon. �I dimly
>>> recall that I inhabit a sty and devour the coarsest of food,� one elder
>>> like it.
>>>
>>> Cugel manages to steal a single cusp before fleeing Smolod ahead of an
>>> civilization go about the age-old business of lying, cheating and
>>> stealing to satisfy base desires as the enfeebled sun falters toward
>>> final darkness.
>>>
>>> I read the book in a kind of rapt delirium and went looking for more. In
>>> addition to picaresque fantasy, Vance has written science fantasy,
>>> planetary romance, extraterrestrial mystery, revenge sagas and
>>> less-classifiable speculative adventure tales on scales ranging from the
>>> short story to the multivolume chronicle. For good measure, he wrote 11
>>> mysteries under his given name, John Holbrook Vance, and three more
>>> under the floating pseudonym Ellery Queen. He had a brief stint early in
>>> his career as a writer for the Captain Video television series, and over
>>> the years several of his stories have been optioned, but Hollywood has
>>> mostly on language to achieve its effect, rather than on plot, character
>>> or high-concept premise.
>>>
>>> Vance believes that the musical flow of language is all-important to
>>> mute or undercut the action with a well-struck psychological grace note.
>>> After hunting down one by one the evil geniuses who slaughtered his
>>> family, the hero of the Demon Princes cycle becomes so subdued that his
>>> closing lines of the fifth and final novel. �Deflated, perhaps. I have
>>>
>>> strong drink and vengeance; touchy encounters with pedants, mountebanks,
>>> violently opinionated aesthetes and zealots, louts, bigots of all
>>> stripes and boyishly slim young women with an enigmatic habit of looking
>>> back over their shoulders. His stories sustain an anecdotal forward
>>> drive that balances his digressive pleasure in imagining a world and the
>>> hypnotic effect of his distinctive tone, which has been variously
>>> described as barbed, velvety, arch and mandarin.
>>>
>>> Reading Vance leaves you with a sense of formality, of having been
>>> present at an occasion when, for all the jokiness and the fun of made-up
>>> words, the serious business of literary entertainment was transacted.
>>>
>>> IT TURNS OUT that mine was a common reaction to a first encounter with
>>> stories.
>>>
>>> Dan Simmons was 12 when his older brother let him read �The Dragon
>>> Masters� and he suddenly found himself in the deep end of the pool. Neil
>>> Gaiman was 12 or 13 when he stumbled across a Dying Earth tale. �I fell
>>> in love with the prose style,� Gaiman said. �It was elegant,
>>> intelligent; each word felt like it knew what it was doing. It�s funny
>>> but never, ever once nudges you in the ribs.�
>>>
>>> Tanith Lee told me that in her early 20s she was �a great misfit,
>>> unhappy in my heart, and I knew I wanted to write.� Her mother bought
>>> her the first Dying Earth book, which invested Lee�s then-mopey
>>> existence with writerly possibility. �I loved the black humor, the
>>> her favorite lines from Vance: �I would offer congratulations were it
>>> not for this tentacle gripping my leg.�
>>>
>>> Michael Chabon, who did not contribute to the tribute volume, was 12 or
>>> American tradition that�s important and powerful but less recognized.
>>> sailor in his blue chambray work shirt, his jeans and a watch cap
>>> sitting on the deck of a ship in the South Pacific, imagining a million
>>> years in the future, this elaborate world going through its death
>>>
>>> Chabon contrasted Vance with Tolkien and C. S. Lewis, British dons who
>>> There�s none of that in Vance. The engineer in him is always on view.
>>> They�re always adventure stories, too, but they�re also problem-solving
>>> logic-love like Poe, the Yankee engineering spirit, married to erudite
>>> love of pomp and pageantry. And he has an amazing ear and writes a
>>>
>>> Most of these writers were adolescents when they first read Vance, who
>>> awoke in them an appreciation for the artistic possibilities of
>>> time with a beautiful sentence.
>>>
>>> VANCE LIVES IN the Oakland hills, in a house he tore down and rebuilt
>>> over the years in idiosyncratic form. He has a reputation for reclusive
>>> crabbiness, and encounters between strangers in his stories are often
>>> instinctively truculent. (A specimen exchange between a customer and a
>>> idea, I must say, has an innocent simplicity in its favor.� �) As I
>>> barking at my approach, I tried to banish the irrational expectation
>>> importunities. Begone.�
>>>
>>> But he was gracious and regaled me with stories about his adventures in
>>> the South Seas. He sat in a rocking chair at his desk, bundled up
>>> against the chill in windbreaker and watch cap, with a blanket around
>>> his shoulders and a heater by his slippered feet. Old age has stooped
>>> and diminished him, but his deep voice still carries a rasp of
>>> authority. He spends his days at his desk, listening to mysteries on
>>> tape (he has been blind since the 1980s), talking on the phone when
>>> somebody calls, listening to or playing the traditional jazz he adores.
>>> At one point during my visit he pulled down a baritone ukulele from the
>>> rack of stringed instruments behind him and strummed it with abandon as
>>> played � harmonica, washboard, kazoo and cornet.
>>>
>>> Unlike many of his characters, who are forever puffing themselves up (�I
>>> am studied in four infinities and I sit as a member of the Collegium�),
>>> deflected my questions about the fan letters in his file cabinets from
>>> the likes of the young Ursula K. Le Guin, the software zillionaire Paul
>>> Allen and the game designer Gary Gygax, whose Dungeons & Dragons
>>> borrowed heavily from Vance, but he was happy to explain how he once
>>> raised a sunken houseboat using an air compressor and eight 50-gallon
>>> drums.
>>>
>>> Vance never got rich, but he made enough to support his wife, Norma, who
>>> died last year after 61 years of marriage, and their son, John, now an
>>> Town, Kashmir � where they settled in cheap lodgings long enough for
>>> Vance to write another book. �We�d hole up for anywhere from a couple of
>>> portable typewriter. He�d write in longhand, and she�d type it up. First
>>> draft, second draft, third draft.�
>>>
>>> That he could make a good living as a genre writer was supremely
>>> important to Vance, who was born into a San Francisco family that fell
>>> on hard times during his early childhood. Growing up during the Great
>>> self-reliant handiness and genre fiction. He admired Edgar Rice
>>> Vance attended the University of California, Berkeley, but his practical
>>> education as a writer came from reading the pulps and other
>>>
>>> Other than mastery of tonal effects and a penchant for creating
>>> formidable matrons of advanced middle years, Vance would seem to have
>>> little in common with Wodehouse, least of all in his view of human
>>> cruelty comes easily to them. In �Araminta Station,� the first novel in
>>> his eco-political Cadwal trilogy, Vance mock-cites �The Worlds of Man,�
>>> occasion, Beyond, we discover nothing to indicate that the human race is
>>> everywhere and inevitably becoming more generous, tolerant, kindly and
>>> and drinking well and filling up their eyes with the beauty of the
>>> world. So what, then, inspired the pandemic interpersonal nastiness in
>>> he had to deal with. Times were tough, people were rugged. My guess is
>>> that pattern comes from his experiences in his early days, in California
>>>
>>> Vance takes pride in his craft but does not care to talk about it in any
>>> detail, going so far in his memoir as to consign almost all discussion
>>> of writing to a brief chapter at the end. Jeremy Cavaterra, a composer
>>> him (and who was recruited as a lifelong fan when he read �The Eyes of
>>> the Overworld� at age 14), said of this reticence, �Part of it is that
>>> he feels like it�s the magician telling you how the trick works, and
>>> part of it is that he writes by feel and doesn�t interrogate it.�
>>>
>>> young after skipping grades. The character of the awkward youth with a
>>> made-up world in his head recurs in his writing, as does the scene of
>>> popular kids tormenting a loner. The most prolifically homicidal of his
>>> strange dreamers is probably the Demon Prince Howard Alan Treesong, who
>>> speaks in the voices of imaginary avatars and terrorizes a school
>>> reunion. Norma used to say that her husband was Treesong. John told me
>>> that his father prefers to think of himself as a less dastardly Cugel.
>>> Put them together, Treesong the dreamer with streetwise Cugel, and you
>>> get Vance, whose long labor at his trade grew from a youthful discovery:
>>> you can turn idle dreaminess into purposeful art, and you can turn art
>>> into a paying gig.
>>>
>>> Now Vance has begun to lose words. When he made a little show of waving
>>> seemed quite right, so I didn�t say anything. During our conversation he
>>> science-fiction writers I grew up reading, as a jackass or a show-off.
>>> Volunteering the wrong word might qualify me as both. I went to get my
>>> drink, leaving him to consider the exact shape of the hole the lost word
>>> had left behind in his mind. It might not be lost forever, though. It
>>> to �Songs of the Dying Earth� or in Ursula K. Le Guin�s. Maybe even in
>>>
>>> Carlo Rotella is the director of American Studies at Boston College.
>>>
>>
>> Just read the article. Now I want to know which well known SF
>> authors Jack Vance thinks are a "jackass or a show-off." I can't
>> think he'd say that about Heinlein or Clarke, but I bet he had
>> Asimov in mind.
>>
>> -Al-
>
> Theres Harlan Ellison; he could be both at the same time. He isnt as
> famous as Clarke or Asimov, except maybe in his own mind.
Harlan passed through my mind, but I wonder if Vance would have
considered him one of the greats, on only a Johnny-come-lately? But
maybe Harlan was one of the two.
-Al-
Al Smith
Asimov was always ranked as one of the big three, along with
Heinlein and Clarke. I read a lot of his novels and stories and
enjoyed them -- I even read the "Foundation" trilogy which was a bit
ponderous and boring -- but I never considered him in the same rank
as Clarke or Heinlein. Asimov never really came up with much in the
way of big ideas. He is remembered for his three laws of robotics,
and that's about it. I suppose it could be said that he was forward
thinking with his whole concept of scientific prediction of social
trends, but that's not a very exciting idea -- at least, I didn't
find it exciting at age 14 or so, when I read about it. Still don't,
for that matter. Asimov is best remembered for being so damned prolific.
-Al-
Christopher Henrich
Al Smith <inv...@address.com> wrote:
> On 7/20/2009 8:45 PM, Mike Schilling wrote:
> > Al Smith wrote:
> >> Just read the article. Now I want to know which well known SF
> >> authors Jack Vance thinks are a "jackass or a show-off." I can't
> >> think he'd say that about Heinlein or Clarke, but I bet he had
> >> Asimov in mind.
> >
> > I think you're right. He thought Asimov's behavior at cons was marketing,
> > rather than the natural reaction of someone who'd always envied the cool
> > kids to finally finding a place where he was one of them.
> >
> >
>
> Asimov was always ranked as one of the big three, along with
> Heinlein and Clarke.
Always?? I remember hearing this assertion for the first time, probably
in the 1980's I was not convinced.
I think some marketeer, who cared not a whit for science fiction but had
an eye for sales, picked out those three names.
Heinlein, yes.
Clarke, maybe... more for the movie 2001 than anything else.
Asimov? I really think his "appeal" in the latter part of his career
was based on his willingness to write sequels, prequels, and
what-do-you-call-them? in-quels? linking up novels and series from the
1940's and 1950's. This was a a marketing-driven operation. Of course
the marketeers thought it was good. Should anyone else?
Why is not Poul Anderson on the short list of mid-century SF greats? I
think he beats out Asimov, and gives Clarke a hard fight. From the
marketeer's point of view he had a limitation: he tended to write
novellas and "short novels" at his best. E. g., many of the books in the
Flandry series are stitchups of two or three stories and still come out
slender. But they are rereadable. And so are the early stories on the
"Operation Chaos" series. And so are the early "Time Patrol" stories.
--
Christopher J. Henrich
chen...@monmouth.com
http://www.mathinteract.com
"A bad analogy is like a leaky screwdriver." -- Boon
Andrew Plotkin
> In article <h437m4$ihp$1...@news.eternal-september.org>,
> Al Smith <inv...@address.com> wrote:
>
> > Asimov was always ranked as one of the big three, along with
> > Heinlein and Clarke.
>
> Always?? I remember hearing this assertion for the first time, probably
> in the 1980's I was not convinced.
That's because it was a fannish cultural holdover from the late 1960s,
early 1970s. I think the definition shifted invisibly from "the
important authors writing SF now" to "the authors who got me reading
SF" to "the authors who influenced all the current SF writers."
Followed by "They sure had a lot of influence, didn't they?"
(However, the "Big Three" as I remember it included Asimov, Clarke,
Heinlein, and Bradbury. In various combinations.)
--Z
--
"And Aholibamah bare Jeush, and Jaalam, and Korah: these were the borogoves..."
*
Andrew Plotkin
> Here, Christopher Henrich <chen...@monmouth.com> wrote:
> > In article <h437m4$ihp$1...@news.eternal-september.org>,
> > Al Smith <inv...@address.com> wrote:
> >
> > > Asimov was always ranked as one of the big three, along with
> > > Heinlein and Clarke.
> >
> > Always?? I remember hearing this assertion for the first time, probably
> > in the 1980's I was not convinced.
>
> That's because it was a fannish cultural holdover from the late 1960s,
> early 1970s.
Hrm. I see I was failing to respond to what you actually said. Sorry,
context blowout.
"Big Three" was something I was aware of as soon as I started picking
up SF culture at all. Which couldn't have been later than 1980. (I was
browsing my father's Analog collection earlier than that.) The
Foundation trilogy was still a trilogy, Rama and 2001 had no sequels,
and people were still arguing whether _Number of the Beast_
represented Heinlein going nuts or transcending. (Okay, the concensus
was on "nuts".)
David Librik
>> famous as Clarke or Asimov, except maybe in his own mind.
>
>Harlan passed through my mind, but I wonder if Vance would have
>considered him one of the greats, on only a Johnny-come-lately? But
>maybe Harlan was one of the two.
The article doesn't say that Vance considered them great, but
that the interviewer considers them to be great. (Specifically,
"celebrated science fiction authors that I grew up reading")
The interviewer, Carlo Rotella, was born in 1964. So Harlan
Ellison would fit the description just fine.
- David Librik
lib...@panix.com
Sea Wasp (Ryk E. Spoor)
He was an absolute master of the short SF "Idea" story, better than
RAH, at least as good as Clarke. He was also the one who established the
SF mystery as a workable subgenre. And as you note he created the Laws
of Robotics, which changed the entire approach of the genre to the
concept of robots.
--
Sea Wasp
/^\
;;;
Live Journal: http://seawasp.livejournal.com
Sea Wasp (Ryk E. Spoor)
> In article <h437m4$ihp$1...@news.eternal-september.org>,
> Al Smith <inv...@address.com> wrote:
>
>> On 7/20/2009 8:45 PM, Mike Schilling wrote:
>>> Al Smith wrote:
>>>> Just read the article. Now I want to know which well known SF
>>>> authors Jack Vance thinks are a "jackass or a show-off." I can't
>>>> think he'd say that about Heinlein or Clarke, but I bet he had
>>>> Asimov in mind.
>>> I think you're right. He thought Asimov's behavior at cons was marketing,
>>> rather than the natural reaction of someone who'd always envied the cool
>>> kids to finally finding a place where he was one of them.
>>>
>>>
>> Asimov was always ranked as one of the big three, along with
>> Heinlein and Clarke.
> Always?? I remember hearing this assertion for the first time, probably
> in the 1980's I was not convinced.
Er, dude, that was like 30 years after it was first made. RAH, Clarke,
and Asimov were the Big Three.
>
> I think some marketeer, who cared not a whit for science fiction but had
> an eye for sales, picked out those three names.
>
> Heinlein, yes.
>
> Clarke, maybe... more for the movie 2001 than anything else.
Childhood's End. Rendezvous with Rama. A *SLEW* of classic short
stories (The Nine Billion Names of God, The Star, A Walk in the Dark,
The Wind From the Sun...)
2001 was a latecomer and more adding one more jewel to the crown than
being a career maker.
>
> Asimov? I really think his "appeal" in the latter part of his career
> was based on his willingness to write sequels, prequels, and
> what-do-you-call-them? in-quels? linking up novels and series from the
> 1940's and 1950's. This was a a marketing-driven operation. Of course
> the marketeers thought it was good. Should anyone else?
The original Robot stories and novels changed the face of SF in those
areas. The Foundation series had tremendous impact when first published
and still has resonance with many writers today. Asimov's countless
short stories included many gems of significance, perhaps the best known
being "Nightfall" and "The Dead Past".
He was one of the reigning stars of SF in those days; the 80s was after
the heyday of ALL of them, RAH included.
>
> Why is not Poul Anderson on the short list of mid-century SF greats?
He wouldn't make the top three for sure. He was good, and rated well,
but never in the top three for their era.
Miles Bader
> He was an absolute master of the short SF "Idea" story, better
> than RAH, at least as good as Clarke. He was also the one who
> established the SF mystery as a workable subgenre. And as you note he
> created the Laws of Robotics, which changed the entire approach of the
> genre to the concept of robots.
And anyway, it would seem rather weird to term Asimov a "jackass or a
showoff" -- his public persona, at least, seemed very straight-forward
and friendly. [I'd think RAH would be a better target for those terms,
actually, if one needs to pick from amongst the top-three...]
Though knows what kind of wacky internal squabbles were going on....
-Miles
--
Yo mama's so fat when she gets on an elevator it HAS to go down.
Sea Wasp (Ryk E. Spoor)
> "Sea Wasp (Ryk E. Spoor)" <sea...@sgeinc.invalid.com> writes:
>> He was an absolute master of the short SF "Idea" story, better
>> than RAH, at least as good as Clarke. He was also the one who
>> established the SF mystery as a workable subgenre. And as you note he
>> created the Laws of Robotics, which changed the entire approach of the
>> genre to the concept of robots.
>
> And anyway, it would seem rather weird to term Asimov a "jackass or a
> showoff" -- his public persona, at least, seemed very straight-forward
> and friendly.
If you were female it could go from amusing to highly creepy. If you
were male, he was a pretty bombastic personality and could feel OTT and
so on. This is from accounts I've heard from people who knew him; I saw
him once but never got to talk with him at any length.
Al Smith
Well, there's no question that Ellison is more full of himself than
any other science fiction writer.
-Al-
Al Smith
Asimov's ideas weren't important ideas. They didn't stick around, or
make any waves in science fiction, or in life.
Heinlein conceived the water bed (which was actually popularized),
rolling roads, powered military exo-armour, tribbles, the Crazy
Years, techno-fascism, intelligent computers, robotic vacuums,
freezing of corpses for later revival, and too many other major and
minor things to list. Our conceptions of ballistic interplanetary
space flight largely stem from Heinlein's writings.
Clarke conceived the communication satellite and popularized the
concept of a space elevator.
Other than the three laws, what outstanding concepts did Asimov
originate -- concepts that have carried over to other science
fiction writers, and into actual life?
-Al-
Sea Wasp (Ryk E. Spoor)
> Asimov's ideas weren't important ideas. They didn't stick around, or
> make any waves in science fiction,
You mention the Three Laws. Those alone had immense impact on SF, and
potentially may in real life -- albeit not exactly as he envisioned
them. The concept, however, carries over and has been used in many works
that he never wrote nor had interaction with.
And whether the ideas were important or not was irrelevant to the fact
that he was Damn Good at writing those stories, which is why he was one
of the top three SF authors of that era.
Kurt Busiek
<sea...@sgeinc.invalid.com> said:
> Christopher Henrich wrote:
>> In article <h437m4$ihp$1...@news.eternal-september.org>,
>> Al Smith <inv...@address.com> wrote:
>>
>>> On 7/20/2009 8:45 PM, Mike Schilling wrote:
>>>> Al Smith wrote:
>>>>> Just read the article. Now I want to know which well known SF
>>>>> authors Jack Vance thinks are a "jackass or a show-off." I can't
>>>>> think he'd say that about Heinlein or Clarke, but I bet he had
>>>>> Asimov in mind.
>>>> I think you're right. He thought Asimov's behavior at cons was
>>>> marketing, rather than the natural reaction of someone who'd always
>>>> envied the cool kids to finally finding a place where he was one of
>>>> them.
>>>>
>>> Asimov was always ranked as one of the big three, along with Heinlein
>>> and Clarke.
>> Always?? I remember hearing this assertion for the first time, probably
>> in the 1980's I was not convinced.
>
> Er, dude, that was like 30 years after it was first made. RAH, Clarke,
> and Asimov were the Big Three.
I became aware of this sort of thing in the late Sixties/early
Seventies. The impression I had was that Asimov, Heinlein, Clarke and
Bradbury were the Big Three, depending on who was talking.
kdb
--
Visit http://www.busiek.com -- for all your Busiek needs!
Martha Adams
wonderful about Vance's work, but two things in particular that he does
catch my attention.
The first is the academically dry beginning he uses in some of his
stories. You can't do that! So he does that, and it works.
The second is the throw-away cultures he adds in footnotes. One of
those could pass nicely as an abstract of a cultural anthropologist's
life work. Vance seems to puts those in there as random asides, as
after-thoughts. I think Vance's ability to do this, and they are so
*believable*, is one of the things he does that set Vance apart from all
other writers I've read.
Uh ...anyone for a bowl of Darsh ahagaree?
He's *92* now? And he's no longer writing? No more Vance? I hurt to
hear this, and it's a loss to the community. But I can imagine an
intense one-semester course, The Cultures of Jack Vance, as a required
mind-expander for students of cultural anthropology, and they'd come out
a lot better for the work.
Titeotwawki -- mha [2009 Jly 21]
=========================================================
"Al Smith" <inv...@address.com> wrote in message
news:h44ln9$69h$2...@news.eternal-september.org...
Michael Stemper
>On 7/21/2009 7:18 AM, Sea Wasp (Ryk E. Spoor) wrote:
>> He was an absolute master of the short SF "Idea" story, better than
>> RAH, at least as good as Clarke. He was also the one who established the
>> SF mystery as a workable subgenre. And as you note he created the Laws
>> of Robotics, which changed the entire approach of the genre to the
>> concept of robots.
>
>Asimov's ideas weren't important ideas. They didn't stick around, or
>make any waves in science fiction, or in life.
Search around for "AAAI" and "Three Laws" before you say
something like that.
>Heinlein conceived the water bed
He might have been conceived *on* one, since they date back to
the nineteenth century.
>rolling roads, powered military exo-armour, tribbles, the Crazy
>Years, techno-fascism, intelligent computers, robotic vacuums,
>freezing of corpses for later revival, and too many other major and
>minor things to list.
Most of which still don't exist, so these ideas don't seem to have
made any waves, either.
>Clarke conceived the communication satellite and popularized the
>concept of a space elevator.
Although I'm not much of a Clarke fan, these were more significant
than any of either Asimov's or Heinlein's ideas.
--
Michael F. Stemper
#include <Standard_Disclaimer>
Outside of a dog, a book is man's best friend.
Inside of a dog, it's too dark to read.
Al Smith
> Al Smith wrote:
>
>> Asimov's ideas weren't important ideas. They didn't stick around, or
>> make any waves in science fiction,
>
> You mention the Three Laws. Those alone had immense impact on SF,
> and potentially may in real life -- albeit not exactly as he envisioned
> them. The concept, however, carries over and has been used in many works
> that he never wrote nor had interaction with.
>
> And whether the ideas were important or not was irrelevant to the
> fact that he was Damn Good at writing those stories, which is why he was
> one of the top three SF authors of that era.
>
>
The Three Laws were an important contribution to science fiction,
granted.
-Al-
Christopher Henrich
Well, I think I've been set right.
>
> >
> > Why is not Poul Anderson on the short list of mid-century SF greats?
>
> He wouldn't make the top three for sure. He was good, and rated well,
> but never in the top three for their era.
--
William Hyde
wrote:
>
> Why is not Poul Anderson on the short list of mid-century SF greats?
That is a difficult question. He's very readable (and as you say, re-
readable), won a huge number of awards (seven Hugos and three Nebulae,
Google tells me), and was very productive.
He had his own voice, as well, a good knowledge of history and
mythology, and for all the optimism characteristic of the field, a
realism that goes down well (i.e. Flandry is not going to save the
empire, however great his achievements, at best he will postpone the
collapse a bit). I like his fiction a lot and back when I made lists
(which I couldn't do now), I usually put him in the top five.
Though he consistently wrote well, I think the reason he wasn't then
listed as one of the top few SF writers may be that he never had a
novel (or set of stories) that really shook the field, as early
Heinlein did, or Asimov's robot stories (alternate title "You're doing
robots all wrong, you idiots"). Something to make readers sit up and
pay attention.
Or it may just be that he was younger, still a bit of a new writer
when people were talking about the "big three" back in the 1960s.
William Hyde
Matt Hughes
> Or it may just be that he was younger, still a bit of a new writer
> when people were talking about the "big three" back in the 1960s.
One thing I've learned in this business: never discount the luck
factor.
Matt Hughes
http://www.archonate.com
Robert Bannister
Thank you, David, for finally editing that enormous message.
--
Rob Bannister
Robert Bannister
> He's *92* now? And he's no longer writing? No more Vance?
This is one of my pet grievances about writers: it takes me ages to find
an author I really like, and then I go find he or she is ill or dead.
It's just not fair play.
--
Rob Bannister
Robert Bannister
On the other hand, I can't think of an Asimov novel that I actually
disliked, whereas I hated all the later Clarke and Heinlein books.
--
Rob Bannister
Robert Bannister
> Why is not Poul Anderson on the short list of mid-century SF greats? I
> think he beats out Asimov, and gives Clarke a hard fight. From the
> marketeer's point of view he had a limitation: he tended to write
> novellas and "short novels" at his best. E. g., many of the books in the
> Flandry series are stitchups of two or three stories and still come out
> slender. But they are rereadable. And so are the early stories on the
> "Operation Chaos" series. And so are the early "Time Patrol" stories.
>
I liked Poul Anderson and also Damon Knight - didn't they collaborate at
some point or am I thinking of someone else?
--
Rob Bannister
Robert Bannister
> I became aware of this sort of thing in the late Sixties/early
> Seventies. The impression I had was that Asimov, Heinlein, Clarke and
> Bradbury were the Big Three, depending on who was talking.
It always seemed to me that people with "literary" tastes that lauded
Bradbury, who, in my memory, mainly wrote short horror stories. I'm
afraid I never liked him. Someone, no-one has mentioned is the British
writer, John Wyndham, even if he is best remembered for "The Day of the
Triffids". There was also James Blish, who wrote some good stuff, but
not always.
--
Rob Bannister
Martha Adams
news:7cn4h6F...@mid.individual.net...
===================================================
Well, *life* isn't fair, and I'm feeling it now. At age 78, there's
this ongoing nuisance that what I now know was my own personal Golden
Age is just ...all going away. George O. Smith; Ursula LeGuin's early
works; Lewis Padgett, Isaac Asimov (I read his Foundation Trilogy as it
first appeared in ASF); Arthur C. Clarke (Against The Fall of Night),
Cartier's drawings in ASF, etc etc, it all goes slowly dim in the past.
And now Jack Vance. My toughness against this kind of thing does not
develop. *Grump*.
Howard Brazee
wrote:
>I became aware of this sort of thing in the late Sixties/early
>Seventies. The impression I had was that Asimov, Heinlein, Clarke and
>Bradbury were the Big Three, depending on who was talking.
It changes over time. At one time A. E. Van Vogt was often mentioned
as such, but he isn't remembered that fondly now.
--
"In no part of the constitution is more wisdom to be found,
than in the clause which confides the question of war or peace
to the legislature, and not to the executive department."
- James Madison
Howard Brazee
wrote:
>The Three Laws were an important contribution to science fiction,
>granted.
But they were John Campbell's creation.
mimus
> "Robert Bannister" <rob...@bigpond.com> wrote in message
> news:7cn4h6F...@mid.individual.net...
>
>> Martha Adams wrote:
>>
>>> He's *92* now? And he's no longer writing? No more Vance?
>>
>> This is one of my pet grievances about writers: it takes me ages to
>> find an author I really like, and then I go find he or she is ill or
>> dead. It's just not fair play.
>
> Well, *life* isn't fair, and I'm feeling it now. At age 78, there's
> this ongoing nuisance that what I now know was my own personal Golden
> Age is just ...all going away. George O. Smith; Ursula LeGuin's early
> works; Lewis Padgett, Isaac Asimov (I read his Foundation Trilogy as it
> first appeared in ASF); Arthur C. Clarke (Against The Fall of Night),
> Cartier's drawings in ASF, etc etc, it all goes slowly dim in the past.
> And now Jack Vance. My toughness against this kind of thing does not
> develop. *Grump*.
I've only made two major accessions, author-wise, since the flippin' '70s,
and one was that madman Ron Goulart, who himself was active then and faded
in the '90s, I guess, at least as far as writing what I would call real
Ron Goulart novels (God help us), and the other was that madman
Pterry Pratchett, who is now apparently pretty seriously ill (although
with an illness that might in fact be long before serious impact).
Oh, well, I'm probably fading myself.
--
First you see things, then you hear 'em.
Pretty soon they're back-sassing you.
Bad fer the nerves.
< Laumer
Al Smith
You liked his "Foundation" trilogy? You must be the only one.
Older, famous SF authors have a tendency to coast on their
reputations. I didn't much like Heinlein's later books, either,
except for "Friday" which was pretty good (it had a poor ending). As
for Clarke, my sense is that he wasn't really doing the writing any
longer -- all his "collaborations" seemed to be somebody else
writing the books, and Clarke putting his name on the byline. A very
tacky practice in my opinion.
I don't think Asimov every had to get anyone else to write his books
for him, so he had that going in his favor. He's novels just weren't
as inventive as those of Heinlein and Clarke (their earlier and
middle novels, at any rate).
-Al-
Al Smith
> On Tue, 21 Jul 2009 15:28:03 -0400, Al Smith <inv...@address.com>
> wrote:
>
>> The Three Laws were an important contribution to science fiction,
>> granted.
>
> But they were John Campbell's creation.
>
They were an important contribution to science fiction, whoever came
up with them.
-Al-
Howard Brazee
wrote:
>> This is one of my pet grievances about writers: it takes me ages to
>> find an author I really like, and then I go find he or she is ill or
>> dead. It's just not fair play.
...
>Well, *life* isn't fair, and I'm feeling it now. At age 78, there's
>this ongoing nuisance that what I now know was my own personal Golden
>Age is just ...all going away.
It's irritating to suspect that one might not be around when an author
finishes a long series.
Sure, most are unending - but I expect to finish Brust's - neither of
us are that old, I hope.
Ted Nolan <tednolan>
Think of it as a business opportunity: Authors can pay you to not notice
them!
Ted
--
------
columbiaclosings.com
What's not in Columbia anymore..
Mike Schilling
> You liked his "Foundation" trilogy? You must be the only one.
Umm, it's a classic. It won the Hugo for best all-time series.
Dan Clore
> I don't think Asimov every had to get anyone else to write his books
> for him, so he had that going in his favor.
He did, however, include books edited by other people for him in his
tallies of books he'd written. Bloated the lists pretty good--
--
Dan Clore
My collected fiction, _The Unspeakable and Others_:
(Wait for the new edition: http://hplmythos.com/ )
Lord We�rdgliffe & Necronomicon Page:
http://tinyurl.com/292yz9
News & Views for Anarchists & Activists:
http://groups.yahoo.com/group/smygo
Strange pleasures are known to him who flaunts the
immarcescible purple of poetry before the color-blind.
-- Clark Ashton Smith, "Epigrams and Apothegms"
Matt Hughes
> He did, however, include books edited by other people for him in his
> tallies of books he'd written. Bloated the lists pretty good--
I don't understand. Editing and writing are two different functions,
often performed by two different people for the same title.
I have edited books, sometimes heavily, for other authors. My name
may appear as the editor on the copyright information page, but it is
the author's name that goes under the title.
Matt Hughes
http://www.archonate.com
mimus
Yep. One wouldn't call it "inspired", but it's definitely solid, and well
worthy of classic status.
--
The hell with the Galactic Overlords
and their tastes in literature.
< _The Day of the Burning_
Michael Stemper
>On 7/21/2009 8:25 PM, Robert Bannister wrote:
>> On the other hand, I can't think of an Asimov novel that I actually
>> disliked, whereas I hated all the later Clarke and Heinlein books.
>
>You liked his "Foundation" trilogy? You must be the only one.
Sure.
That's why it received a Hugo award for "best science fiction series
of all time". Because Robert stuffed the ballot box.
That's why the Foundation trilogy has gone through scores of printings,
in multiple languages. Nobody else liked it, but Robert, taking his
cue from the Clams, goes around the world, buying every copy that
he can find.
>I don't think Asimov every had to get anyone else to write his books
>for him, so he had that going in his favor. He's novels just weren't
>as inventive as those of Heinlein and Clarke (their earlier and
>middle novels, at any rate).
--
Michael F. Stemper
#include <Standard_Disclaimer>
You can lead a horse to water, but you can't make him talk like Mr. Ed
by rubbing peanut butter on his gums.
Michael Stemper
>On Jul 22, 3:00=A0pm, Dan Clore <cl...@columbia-center.org> wrote:
>> He did, however, include books edited by other people for him in his
>> tallies of books he'd written. Bloated the lists pretty good--
>
>I don't understand. Editing and writing are two different functions,
>often performed by two different people for the same title.
I believe that he's using "edited" in the sense of "selected the
content for". Ever heard of Martin Greenberg?
>I have edited books, sometimes heavily, for other authors. My name
>may appear as the editor on the copyright information page, but it is
>the author's name that goes under the title.
Unless it's a collection of short stories, in which case the editor's
name goes on the cover, and the authors' names go over their respective
stories. If they're lucky.
Matt Hughes
wrote:
> I believe that he's using "edited" in the sense of "selected the
> content for". Ever heard of Martin Greenberg?
Ah, of course. I was thinking "books = novels," as in the Clarke
"collaborations" discussed up-thread. But I suppose Asimov was as
much a brand name for sf anthos as Alfred Hitchcock was for crime.
Matt Hughes
http://www.archonate.com
Dan Clore
> In article
> <509b1045-b2f1-4cea...@a7g2000yqk.googlegroups.com>,
> Matt Hughes <arch...@googlemail.com> writes:
>> On Jul 22, 3:00=A0pm, Dan Clore <cl...@columbia-center.org> wrote:
>
>>> He did, however, include books edited by other people for him in
>>> his tallies of books he'd written. Bloated the lists pretty
>>> good--
>> I don't understand. Editing and writing are two different
>> functions, often performed by two different people for the same
>> title.
>
> I believe that he's using "edited" in the sense of "selected the
> content for". Ever heard of Martin Greenberg?
>
>> I have edited books, sometimes heavily, for other authors. My name
>> may appear as the editor on the copyright information page, but it
>> is the author's name that goes under the title.
>
> Unless it's a collection of short stories, in which case the editor's
> name goes on the cover, and the authors' names go over their
> respective stories. If they're lucky.
You got it. I was thinking of the anthologies. A lot of them are great,
but are they works that Asimov could justly include in a tally of books
he had written or even edited? Not really. He did write a paragraph or
two to introduce each story, usually, but still.
Al Smith
It was a boring set of novels. I really had to dig down deep for
reserves of concentration and endurance to finish the thing. I've
never felt the slightest inclination to read it a second time. Just
because it's famous doesn't mean it was any good. In my opinion it
was a failure.
-Al-
Al Smith
> Al Smith wrote:
>
>> I don't think Asimov every had to get anyone else to write his books
>> for him, so he had that going in his favor.
>
> He did, however, include books edited by other people for him in his
> tallies of books he'd written. Bloated the lists pretty good--
>
He was obsessed with writing more books than anybody else. I don't
know why he thought it was such a wonderful achievement -- Harlequin
Romance writers can churn out the novels, too. He must have spent
every day writing, and he must not have revised anything ... he
wouldn't have had time. That's a recipe for reams of mediocrity,
which is what the world got from Asimov. He had a pretty good mind,
but as the years pass I doubt his work is going to stand up to
criticism all that well.
-Al-
Scoop
: On 7/22/2009 10:00 AM, Dan Clore wrote:
: > Al Smith wrote:
: >
: >> I don't think Asimov every had to get anyone else to write his books
: >> for him, so he had that going in his favor.
: >
: > He did, however, include books edited by other people for him in his
: > tallies of books he'd written. Bloated the lists pretty good--
: He was obsessed with writing more books than anybody else. I don't
: know why he thought it was such a wonderful achievement --
Well, he grew up during the Depression. The only books he was used to were
the spotty second-hand ones the other children didn't want. Ol' Spotty
Second Hand Isaac, they called him, then...
.:.:.:.:.:.:.:. Neal Ross Attinson .:.:.:.:.:.:.:.
: Doing my best to complete the Nameless Mission :
.:.:.:.:.:. http://metaphorager.net .:.:.:.:.:.
Sea Wasp (Ryk E. Spoor)
Which is certainly your privilege. However, the evidence shows that a
LOT of people didn't hold that view. I've read Foundation at least four
or five times. I've read "The Caves of Steel" and "The Naked Sun" at
least that many.
--
Sea Wasp
/^\
;;;
Live Journal: http://seawasp.livejournal.com
Pedro Dias
author I vastly prefer, he's all we can talk about.
My dislike of Asimov is not really about the writing, though I never
loved his books: I had the misfortune of being asked to chaperone him
during a small convention at my school. The rumors of his behavior
toward women are, as far as I could tell from two evenings'
acquaintance (plenty, unfortunately), far short of the deeply
disturbing reality. As far as I'm concerned, the man was scum.
Martha Adams
news:1547d6ec-b1a3-494f...@k20g2000vbp.googlegroups.com...
I used to see and meet him here in Boston at Arisias and such before he
moved down to New York City. I'd like to mention his outspoken Jewish
character, not the usual style among us upcountry anglosaxons; and, that
with such a person, others may find their own standards challenged. But
if we follow this 'scum' evaluation, I think we lose much more than we
gain. Could we just drop that line of thought and look at his work?
Looking at Asimov or Vance or Cabell or Tolkein, these are all
*different writers* who have each their own styles. I've greatly
enjoyed some of the works of each of these and didn't care for other
works by the same writers. Why was that? I think too broad an
evaluation only hurts the work, all uses of 'all' are dangerous.
Titeotwawki -- mha [2009 Jly 22]
Robert Bannister
> On Tue, 21 Jul 2009 09:21:10 -0700, Kurt Busiek <ku...@busiek.com>
> wrote:
>
>> I became aware of this sort of thing in the late Sixties/early
>> Seventies. The impression I had was that Asimov, Heinlein, Clarke and
>> Bradbury were the Big Three, depending on who was talking.
>
> It changes over time. At one time A. E. Van Vogt was often mentioned
> as such, but he isn't remembered that fondly now.
>
I still have a couple of his on my shelves, and I was most disappointed
when I re-read him. At age 12, he was one of my favourites.
--
Rob Bannister
Al Smith
I read the "Naked Sun" a couple of times. It was OK -- not terrific,
but passable. Can't recall if I read "Caves of Steel" or not -- it
doesn't resonate, so it may be one of Asimov's that I didn't come
across back when I was reading science fiction. Asimov just doesn't
do much for me.
-Al-
Schrodingers Hat
mste...@walkabout.empros.com (Michael Stemper) wrote:
>In article <h45s7m$gqf$1...@news.eternal-september.org>, Al Smith <inv...@address.com> writes:
>>On 7/21/2009 8:25 PM, Robert Bannister wrote:
>
>>> On the other hand, I can't think of an Asimov novel that I actually
>>> disliked, whereas I hated all the later Clarke and Heinlein books.
>>
>>You liked his "Foundation" trilogy? You must be the only one.
>
>Sure.
>
>That's why it received a Hugo award for "best science fiction series
>of all time". Because Robert stuffed the ballot box.
>
>That's why the Foundation trilogy has gone through scores of printings,
>in multiple languages. Nobody else liked it, but Robert, taking his
>cue from the Clams, goes around the world, buying every copy that
>he can find.
>
I think I saw him in Barnes and Noble in Gulfport MS. Looks like (and
smells like) he doesnt spend on much else. I gave him my set; not
gonna read it again. Last I saw he was thumbing down I10 headed for
New Orleans. He didnt look happy. I hope some space dudes came and
rescued him in their flying saucer and got him at least as far as
Slidell where I know there is a set of hard back "Foundations" in the
Goodwill store. I got all the PKD's, so tough titty.
The hat on the cat.
Schrodingers Hat
wrote:
<snip>
>
>
>Harlan passed through my mind,
<snip>
>
>-Al-
WOW! Like, you must have a seriously big consciousness, man, for
Harlan to fit in it. Did he write any stories while he was in there,
like when he sat in that store window and tickled his typewriter,
while all the plebs marvelled at him through the window? Is this what
he does now? Writes in other peoples heads? What a dude!
The hat on the cat
Lawrence Watt-Evans
wrote:
>He was obsessed with writing more books than anybody else. I don't
>know why he thought it was such a wonderful achievement -- Harlequin
>Romance writers can churn out the novels, too.
The record holders are all mystery writers, actually; romance writers
tend to not last as long. Georges Simenon and John Dickson Carr both
turned out far more books than Asimov, and they didn't count paste-ups
and anthologies to do it.
> He must have spent
>every day writing, and he must not have revised anything ... he
>wouldn't have had time.
You grotesquely misjudge his writing speed. His output really wasn't
as prodigious as all that.
--
My webpage is at http://www.watt-evans.com
I'm selling my comic collection -- see http://www.watt-evans.com/comics.html
I'm serializing a novel at http://www.watt-evans.com/realmsoflight0.html
Mike Schilling
> On Tue, 21 Jul 2009 15:28:03 -0400, Al Smith <inv...@address.com>
> wrote:
>
>> The Three Laws were an important contribution to science fiction,
>> granted.
>
> But they were John Campbell's creation.
Campbell helped Asimov codify his ideas. That's what editors do.
Al Smith
Do you have anything intelligent to say? Or are you just good for
meaningless insults?
-Al-
Howard Brazee
<mscotts...@hotmail.com> wrote:
>>> The Three Laws were an important contribution to science fiction,
>>> granted.
>>
>> But they were John Campbell's creation.
>
>Campbell helped Asimov codify his ideas. That's what editors do.
He didn't "help", he came up with them, told them to Asimov, who
hadn't thought of them before. John said they were implicit, but
they weren't implicit to just Asimov's story or stories at the time,
but to other some other authors' stories as well.
Asimov took them and ran with them.
Mike Schilling
> On Wed, 22 Jul 2009 01:41:25 -0700, Mike Schilling wrote:
>
>> Al Smith wrote:
>>
>>> You liked his "Foundation" trilogy? You must be the only one.
>>
>> Umm, it's a classic. It won the Hugo for best all-time series.
>
> Yep. One wouldn't call it "inspired", but it's definitely solid,
> and
> well worthy of classic status.
And one certainly wouldn't call it unpopular when it won that sort of
award based on fan voting.
Al Smith
> On Wed, 22 Jul 2009 23:59:06 -0700, "Mike Schilling"
> <mscotts...@hotmail.com> wrote:
>
>>>> The Three Laws were an important contribution to science fiction,
>>>> granted.
>>> But they were John Campbell's creation.
>> Campbell helped Asimov codify his ideas. That's what editors do.
>
> He didn't "help", he came up with them, told them to Asimov, who
> hadn't thought of them before. John said they were implicit, but
> they weren't implicit to just Asimov's story or stories at the time,
> but to other some other authors' stories as well.
>
> Asimov took them and ran with them.
>
I hadn't heard this before. If it's so, it's interesting that the
one thing Asimov is most famous for was conceived by somebody else.
-Al-
Al Smith
The "Foundation" trilogy is one of those works that people think
they are supposed to be impressed by, and if they don't show that
they are impressed, they will appear stupid to their peers, so they
pretend that they like it -- sort of like "Remembrance of Things
Past" by Proust, which not one in a thousand literary critics who
talk about it has ever actually read (because it's boring as stink
-- I know, I tried to read the damned thing).
-Al-
Michael Stemper
>Kurt Busiek wrote:
>> I became aware of this sort of thing in the late Sixties/early
>> Seventies. The impression I had was that Asimov, Heinlein, Clarke and
>> Bradbury were the Big Three, depending on who was talking.
>
>It always seemed to me that people with "literary" tastes that lauded
>Bradbury, who, in my memory, mainly wrote short horror stories.
_The Martian Chronicles_
_"R" is For "Rocket"_
"S" is For "Space"_
_I Sing the Body Electric!_
_The Illustrated Man_
All collections of short stories, yes. All SF and well worth reading.
> I'm
>afraid I never liked him.
Your loss, but he definitely wrote SF.
> Someone, no-one has mentioned is the British
>writer, John Wyndham, even if he is best remembered for "The Day of the
>Triffids".
I wouldn't be surprised if more people remember him for _The Chrysalids_
(U.S. title _Re-Birth_), due to the Boucher anthology.
--
Michael F. Stemper
#include <Standard_Disclaimer>
No animals were harmed in the composition of this message.
Mark Stephen
> On Wed, 22 Jul 2009 17:54:21 -0400, Al Smith <inv...@address.com>
> wrote:
>
>> He was obsessed with writing more books than anybody else. I don't
>> know why he thought it was such a wonderful achievement -- Harlequin
>> Romance writers can churn out the novels, too.
>
> The record holders are all mystery writers, actually; romance writers
> tend to not last as long. Georges Simenon and John Dickson Carr both
> turned out far more books than Asimov, and they didn't count paste-ups
> and anthologies to do it.
>
>> He must have spent
>> every day writing, and he must not have revised anything ... he
>> wouldn't have had time.
>
> You grotesquely misjudge his writing speed. His output really wasn't
> as prodigious as all that.
>
>
As long as we are not talking about Vance, how about a nod to Fred Pohl?
I didn't much care for his collaborations with Jack Williamson, but
apart from that I'd rate his solo and collaborative output as good to
excellent, and his years as an influential editor did little to detract
from his productivity over a very long career,
Mark
Michael Stemper
>On 7/23/2009 8:03 AM, Howard Brazee wrote:
[the Three Laws]
>> He didn't "help", he came up with them, told them to Asimov, who
>> hadn't thought of them before. John said they were implicit, but
>> they weren't implicit to just Asimov's story or stories at the time,
>> but to other some other authors' stories as well.
>>
>> Asimov took them and ran with them.
>
>I hadn't heard this before. If it's so, it's interesting that the
>one thing Asimov is most famous for was conceived by somebody else.
It's pretty well-known. I believe that he even discusses the meeting
in the notes to one of his many self-collections.
Mike Schilling
> On Wed, 22 Jul 2009 23:59:06 -0700, "Mike Schilling"
> <mscotts...@hotmail.com> wrote:
>
>>>> The Three Laws were an important contribution to science fiction,
>>>> granted.
>>>
>>> But they were John Campbell's creation.
>>
>> Campbell helped Asimov codify his ideas. That's what editors do.
>
> He didn't "help", he came up with them, told them to Asimov, who
> hadn't thought of them before. John said they were implicit, but
> they weren't implicit to just Asimov's story or stories at the time,
> but to other some other authors' stories as well.
Really? Who else was writing about robots that had what amounts to a moral
code?
Butch Malahide
Wayne Throop
: Butch Malahide <fred....@gmail.com>
: Eando Binder?
Not a formal system, though. The issue is a bit distinct. We see Adam
Link's internal mental landscape (more or less), and his reasons for moral
behavior are not really explored in the same way. Not really the case
with Asimovian robots; indeed, it's arguable (for most of his works up
to Bicentinnial Man) whether they *have* a mental landscape in any useful
sense. Asimov approached the whole problem in a very different way.
FWIW, Hogan's "Two Faces of Tomorrow" dealt with the issue with an
interesting spin; basically from the viewpoint that you *couldn't* do
it Asimov's way, you had to do have the robot learn empathy first, ie,
*give* it an internal landscape, and have it recognize that other items
in the world have them as well, rather than just applying cold rules.
Because rules can always be subverted (more or less). (Or at least
that's one interpretation.) (This is before Hogan went completely off
the rails... he was only partway off the rails at the time.)
Wayne Throop thr...@sheol.org http://sheol.org/throopw
Robert Bannister
> In article <7cn50tF...@mid.individual.net>, Robert Bannister <rob...@bigpond.com> writes:
>> Kurt Busiek wrote:
>
>>> I became aware of this sort of thing in the late Sixties/early
>>> Seventies. The impression I had was that Asimov, Heinlein, Clarke and
>>> Bradbury were the Big Three, depending on who was talking.
>> It always seemed to me that people with "literary" tastes that lauded
>> Bradbury, who, in my memory, mainly wrote short horror stories.
>
> _The Martian Chronicles_
> _"R" is For "Rocket"_
> "S" is For "Space"_
> _I Sing the Body Electric!_
> _The Illustrated Man_
>
> All collections of short stories, yes. All SF and well worth reading.
>
>> I'm
>> afraid I never liked him.
>
> Your loss, but he definitely wrote SF.
>
>> Someone, no-one has mentioned is the British
>> writer, John Wyndham, even if he is best remembered for "The Day of the
>> Triffids".
>
> I wouldn't be surprised if more people remember him for _The Chrysalids_
> (U.S. title _Re-Birth_), due to the Boucher anthology.
>
>
that was also made into a film.
--
Rob Bannister
Howard Brazee
wrote:
>As long as we are not talking about Vance, how about a nod to Fred Pohl?
>I didn't much care for his collaborations with Jack Williamson, but
>apart from that I'd rate his solo and collaborative output as good to
>excellent, and his years as an influential editor did little to detract
>from his productivity over a very long career,
And he's still blogging.
Lawrence Watt-Evans
_The Midwich Cuckoos_, a.k.a. _Village of the Damned_.
Robert A. Woodward
"Mike Schilling" <mscotts...@hotmail.com> wrote:
(let's reduce the newsgroup list a bit)
Eando Binder? (the Adam Link stories). Eric Frank Russell's "Jay
Score" might count also (though that story appeared in the same
issue of _Astounding SF_ as "Liar").
--
Robert Woodward <robe...@drizzle.com>
<http://www.drizzle.com/~robertaw>
Patok
>
> Asimov was always ranked as one of the big three, along with Heinlein
> and Clarke.
Hold on, hold, hold your horses! Heinlein big three - no way! The
big three (if there has to be something like that that), are Clarke,
Asimov and Simak! Heinlein belongs in the elite - yes, but maybe in the
big ten. No way is he better than Simak.
--
You'd be crazy to e-mail me with the crazy. But leave the div alone.
Mike Schilling
> In article <7cn50tF...@mid.individual.net>, Robert Bannister
> <rob...@bigpond.com> writes:
.
>
>> Someone, no-one has mentioned is the British
>> writer, John Wyndham, even if he is best remembered for "The Day of
>> the Triffids".
>
> I wouldn't be surprised if more people remember him for _The
> Chrysalids_ (U.S. title _Re-Birth_), due to the Boucher anthology.
I certainly do.
Mike Schilling
Adam Link wasn't a monster, but he wasn't exactly a moral exemplar
either.
Mike Schilling
That is, you don't like it, so, based on no evidence whatsoever, you
assume that anyone who does is a liar.. Thanks for letting me know so
early that you're not worth talking to.
Eric Walker
[...]
> Hold on, hold, hold your horses! Heinlein big three - no way! The
> big three (if there has to be something like that that), are Clarke,
> Asimov and Simak! Heinlein belongs in the elite - yes, but maybe in the
> big ten. No way is he better than Simak.
The phrase "Big Three" is not subject to analysis: it is a historical
record of how a certain trio of writers are known. Opinions may vary
wildly on the actual merits of "The Big Three"--I find them trivial--but
the denomination is just that: a denomination.
--
Cordially,
Eric Walker, webmaster
Great Science-Fiction & Fantasy Works
http://greatsfandf.com
Now with forums.
Ahasuerus
> On Fri, 24 Jul 2009 02:26:59 -0400, Patok wrote:
>
> [...]
>
> > Hold on, hold, hold your horses! Heinlein big three - no way! The
> > big three (if there has to be something like that that), are Clarke,
> > Asimov and Simak! Heinlein belongs in the elite - yes, but maybe in the
> > big ten. No way is he better than Simak.
>
> The phrase "Big Three" is not subject to analysis: it is a historical
> record of how a certain trio of writers are known. Opinions may vary
> wildly on the actual merits of "The Big Three"--I find them trivial--but
> the denomination is just that: a denomination.
Nor does it necessarily reflect their actual popularity during the
Golden and Silver Ages. For example, during the 1940s Doc Smith, van
Vogt and Kuttner/Moore were more popular among ASF readers than Asimov
-- see http://home1.gte.net/wsbainbridge/dl/anlab.htm#Part3 and
especially http://home1.gte.net/wsbainbridge/dl/anlab.htm#Part5
Joseph Nebus
>On Wed, 22 Jul 2009 17:54:21 -0400, Al Smith <inv...@address.com>
>wrote:
>>He was obsessed with writing more books than anybody else. I don't
>>know why he thought it was such a wonderful achievement -- Harlequin
>>Romance writers can churn out the novels, too.
>The record holders are all mystery writers, actually; romance writers
>tend to not last as long. Georges Simenon and John Dickson Carr both
>turned out far more books than Asimov, and they didn't count paste-ups
>and anthologies to do it.
And what Asimov was interested in, besides writing as much as
he could because he really liked writing, was writing a diveristy of
things. He didn't get into every century of the Dewey Decimal System,
but it's hard to find anyone else who's come so close.
>> He must have spent
>>every day writing, and he must not have revised anything ... he
>>wouldn't have had time.
>You grotesquely misjudge his writing speed. His output really wasn't
>as prodigious as all that.
I was mildly horrified to run across in _I. Asimov_ his estimate
of how much he actually did write for pay over his career. He calculated
it to average a scant 1,000 words per day, which over the course of 40
years does indeed add up to an impressive total. Even the last 20 years,
when he really accelerated to the book-a-month club level, he figured at
only 1,700 words per minute.
(Checking that, and using his standard of ``about 70,000 words''
as a book length, since that's what his editors wanted when he started
out and that's what he imprinted on, I made this out as eight books per
year. Add in anthologies or books made from reassembling parts of other
books and that gets to the twelve or thirteen a year easily.)
Considering that --- when he knew what to type --- he could type
on the order of a hundred words per minute, that implies that he would
be able to publish five hundred books while working seventeen minutes a
day. Of course, thinking up what to type is the hard part.
--
Joseph Nebus
------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Lawrence Watt-Evans
<mscotts...@hotmail.com> wrote:
>Al Smith wrote:
>>
>> The "Foundation" trilogy is one of those works that people think
>> they are supposed to be impressed by, and if they don't show that
>> they are impressed, they will appear stupid to their peers, so they
>> pretend that they like it -- sort of like "Remembrance of Things
>> Past" by Proust, which not one in a thousand literary critics who
>> talk about it has ever actually read (because it's boring as stink
>> -- I know, I tried to read the damned thing).
>
>That is, you don't like it, so, based on no evidence whatsoever, you
>assume that anyone who does is a liar.. Thanks for letting me know so
>early that you're not worth talking to.
As Steven Brust says, everyone generalizes from a single example. Or
at least, he does.
Al Smith
You must be quite young, to assume that every comment concerns you
personally. If you enjoyed the "Foundation" trilogy, good for you. I
didn't, and I'm willing to bet that many of those who have written
in praise of it, or included it in lists of the most important SF
books and series, have never even finished it.
-Al-
Matt Hughes
> As Steven Brust says, everyone generalizes from a single example. Or
> at least, he does.
Apart from idiocentricity (I may have just made that word up, though I
doubt it), I think we're all influenced by living in the age of the
common man (which now includes the common woman). We have a tendency
to preface an opinion with a remark like, "Well, I'm just Joe
Average," when we are probably well below or well above the median in
particular capacities.
Compare that to the attitude of a member of the eighteenth century
gentry.
Matt Hughes
http://www.archonate.com
Mike Schilling
What gives you the impression I took it personally? See, unsupported
assertsion like this are a waste of my time. I'm not offended, just very
unimpressed.
Mike Schilling
>
> I was mildly horrified to run across in _I. Asimov_ his estimate
> of how much he actually did write for pay over his career. He
> calculated it to average a scant 1,000 words per day, which over the
> course of 40 years does indeed add up to an impressive total. Even
> the last 20 years, when he really accelerated to the book-a-month
> club level, he figured at only 1,700 words per minute.
Only?
Mike Schilling
> On Fri, 24 Jul 2009 01:23:17 -0700, "Mike Schilling"
> <mscotts...@hotmail.com> wrote:
>
>> Al Smith wrote:
>>>
>>> The "Foundation" trilogy is one of those works that people think
>>> they are supposed to be impressed by, and if they don't show that
>>> they are impressed, they will appear stupid to their peers, so they
>>> pretend that they like it -- sort of like "Remembrance of Things
>>> Past" by Proust, which not one in a thousand literary critics who
>>> talk about it has ever actually read (because it's boring as stink
>>> -- I know, I tried to read the damned thing).
>>
>> That is, you don't like it, so, based on no evidence whatsoever, you
>> assume that anyone who does is a liar.. Thanks for letting me know
>> so early that you're not worth talking to.
>
> As Steven Brust says, everyone generalizes from a single example. Or
> at least, he does.
One of my favorite lines, up there with "The truth is precious -- let us
conserve it." and "There's no limit to the amount of work a man can do,
provided it's not the work he's supposed to be doing.".
Joseph Nebus
>Joseph Nebus wrote:
>Only?
Well, when you think of all the minutes there *are* to have in
a day, though, it adds up.
--
Joseph Nebus
------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Al Smith
That's your pose and you're sticking to it? Fine with me.
-Al-
Mike Schilling
I'm not telling you to stop posting. If you enjoy making up nonsense, knock
yourself out.
Greg Goss
>On 7/23/2009 11:52 AM, Mike Schilling wrote:
>> mimus wrote:
>>> On Wed, 22 Jul 2009 01:41:25 -0700, Mike Schilling wrote:
>>>
>>>> Al Smith wrote:
>>>>
>>>>> You liked his "Foundation" trilogy? You must be the only one.
>>>> Umm, it's a classic. It won the Hugo for best all-time series.
>>> Yep. One wouldn't call it "inspired", but it's definitely solid,
>>> and
>>> well worthy of classic status.
>>
>> And one certainly wouldn't call it unpopular when it won that sort of
>> award based on fan voting.
>>
>
>The "Foundation" trilogy is one of those works that people think
>they are supposed to be impressed by, and if they don't show that
>they are impressed, they will appear stupid to their peers, so they
>pretend that they like it -- sort of like "Remembrance of Things
>Past" by Proust, which not one in a thousand literary critics who
>talk about it has ever actually read (because it's boring as stink
>-- I know, I tried to read the damned thing).
Campbell kept putting each episode on the cover of his magazine. He
must have thought people liked it.
I liked it, though I haven't read it in a few decades.
--
Tomorrow is today already.
Greg Goss, 1989-01-27
Greg Goss
>Lawrence Watt-Evans <l...@sff.net> writes:
>
>>You grotesquely misjudge his writing speed. His output really wasn't
>>as prodigious as all that.
>
> I was mildly horrified to run across in _I. Asimov_ his estimate
>of how much he actually did write for pay over his career. He calculated
>it to average a scant 1,000 words per day, which over the course of 40
>years does indeed add up to an impressive total. Even the last 20 years,
>when he really accelerated to the book-a-month club level, he figured at
>only 1,700 words per minute.
... per minute. I was happy when I got my speed over 75.
Miles Bader
> Miles Bader wrote:
>> And anyway, it would seem rather weird to term Asimov a "jackass or a
>> showoff" -- his public persona, at least, seemed very
>> straight-forward and friendly.
>
> If you were female it could go from amusing to highly creepy. If
> you were male, he was a pretty bombastic personality and could feel
> OTT and so on. This is from accounts I've heard from people who knew
> him
Ah, well... child-hood images crushed ... :/
At least he didn't start a nasty-ass religion ... :)
-Miles
--
Come now, if we were really planning to harm you, would we be waiting here,
beside the path, in the very darkest part of the forest?
Rob Friefeld
> Just read the article. Now I want to know which well known SF
> authors Jack Vance thinks are a "jackass or a show-off." I can't
> think he'd say that about Heinlein or Clarke, but I bet he had
> Asimov in mind.
>
> -Al-
He might have had PKD in mind. I remember Vance disparaging his
costumes, his airs, his teenage groupies.
Rob Friefeld
Gary
two, newsgroups. It is considered highly inappropriate to broadcast your
message to a wide selection of newsgroups merely to have more people read
it. Note also that many people automatically ignore articles posted to
more than two or three groups."
http://faqs.cs.uu.nl/na-dir/finding-groups/general.html
q.v. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Crossposting
Maureen
> I'm willing to bet that many of those who have written
> in praise of it, or included it in lists of the most important SF
> books and series, have never even finished it.
You've got it the wrong way round, my friend. Most people who praise
the Foundation series and vote for it, read it when in junior high or
high school, and loved it with the pure fiery love of the adolescent.
Nobody assigned it to them, and indeed, admitting to adult love of the
book is more likely to expose one to scorn than not.
I read the trilogy the wrong way round, because my father owned Second
Foundation but none of the others. My mother disapproved of me reading
his sf collection, and so I was forced to read it only when my parents
weren't watching or at home. At this point, I was already familiar
with a fair amount of both modern and period sf as well as other
novels. Asimov was one of my favorites for at least five years after
reading Second Foundation; I've read at least a hundred of his books.
And it certainly wasn't because they had any snob appeal, or because
anyone was forcing me to track down his stuff. In my town, most of his
books were checked out fairly often, so indeed there was an added
degree of difficulty.
The charm of the Foundation books are their big story (particularly to
any teenager who loves Roman history) and the many twists and tricks
in the stories' problems and solutions (especially attractive to
mystery readers). The Robot stories are mostly problems and mysteries,
but with a good deal more emotional punch to his characters. (And yes,
of course it's because he was a geek writing for persecuted geeks.
Perhaps you were not one, or perhaps you grew out of being
persecuted.) His writing was clear, and he had a knack for being
extremely readable. He also had a gift for nonfiction, particularly
explanatory prose. He was an immediate pleasure as well as being
thought-provoking and emotion-evoking; and I have no doubt that he
will be read as long as there are seventh graders.
Jack Vance (to get back on topic) is an incredibly opaque writer. I
cannot tell you how many times I bounced off his writing, in spite of
the many little jokes and interesting settings, and in spite of so
many recommendations by people I respected. It was not until I turned
twenty-eight or so that I was able to appreciate him, at which point I
of course pillaged every used bookstore and library in town. Even now,
I have to be in the right mood to read his work. The Vancian pleasures
are impossible to describe; they can only be experienced.
Now Vance -- that would be a writer who would tempt people to
snobbery, except that he is indeed so much fun in his own way.
If you really want some analogy to Proust for impressing the hoi
polloi, it would either have to be Stapledon or Delany's Dhalgren.
People would be impressed by your scope in the one case and your gorge-
strength in the other.
Maureen
Eric Walker
[...]
> Jack Vance (to get back on topic) is an incredibly opaque writer. . . .
"Opaque" in its metaphorical sense means (per my desk dictionary) "hard
to understand; obscure". I am wondering if that is the sense in which
you meant the term, because while his style--though there is a key to it--
may not appeal to all, I would be puzzled by an assertion that it is
actually difficult to understand.
> I cannot tell you how many times I bounced off his writing, in spite of
> the many little jokes and interesting settings, and in spite of so many
> recommendations by people I respected. It was not until I turned
> twenty-eight or so that I was able to appreciate him, at which point I
> of course pillaged every used bookstore and library in town. Even now, I
> have to be in the right mood to read his work. The Vancian pleasures are
> impossible to describe; they can only be experienced.
That last I would more or less concur with, though I think "impossible to
describe" is perhaps better as "difficult to describe", and certainly
difficult to describe in any short compass. There are several sites and
pages that do attempt, with (I suppose) varying degrees of success, to
describe Vance, and some, I think, manage it. There is Nick Gevers'
"Lord of Language, Emperor of Dreams"--
http://www.infinityplus.co.uk/nonfiction/jvprofile.htm
--and my own effort--
http://greatsfandf.com/AUTHORS/JackVance.php
--which links Gevers' and a few others.
> Now Vance -- that would be a writer who would tempt people to snobbery,
> except that he is indeed so much fun in his own way. . . .
Fun, indeed and indeed.
Patok
Oh, OK, thanks for the explanations. I obviously didn't know that
it was the way they were referred to back then. Should have suspected
something and googled, though.