Jack Vance
John Holbrook Vance was an American writer of fantasy, science fiction, and mysteries. He wrote several mystery novels under pen names, including Ellery Queen.
Vance won the World Fantasy Award for Life Achievement in 1984, and he was a Guest of Honor at the 1992 World Science Fiction Convention in Orlando, Florida. The Science Fiction and Fantasy Writers of America made him its 15th Grand Master in 1997, and the Science Fiction Hall of Fame inducted him in 2001, its sixth class of two deceased and two living writers.
His most notable awards included Hugo Awards in 1963 for The Dragon Masters, in 1967 for The Last Castle, and in 2010 for his memoir This Is Me, Jack Vance!; the Nebula Award in 1966, also for The Last Castle; the Jupiter Award in 1975 and the World Fantasy Award in 1990 for Lyonesse: Madouc, and the Edgar Award in 1961 for the best first mystery novel for The Man in the Cage.
His first publications were stories in science fiction magazines. As he became well known, he published novellas and novels, many of which were translated into French, Dutch, Spanish, Russian, Italian, and German. An Integral Edition of all Vance's works was published in 44 volumes and in 2010 a six-volume The Complete Jack Vance was released. A 2009 profile in The New York Times Magazine described Vance as "one of American literature's most distinctive and undervalued voices". He died at his home in Oakland, California, on May 26, 2013, aged 96.
Biography
Vance's great-grandfather is believed to have arrived in California from Michigan a decade before the Gold Rush and married a San Francisco woman. Early family records were apparently destroyed in the fire following the 1906 San Francisco earthquake. Vance's maternal grandfather, L. M. Hoefler, was a successful lawyer in San Francisco.Vance grew up in the family's large house in San Francisco on Filbert Street. When Vance's father left the family to live on his ranch in Mexico, the family's house in San Francisco was rented out to the father's sister. With the separation of his parents, and the loss of use of the San Francisco house, Vance's mother moved him and his siblings to their maternal grandfather's California ranch near Oakley in the delta of the Sacramento River. This setting formed Vance's love of the outdoors, and allowed him time to indulge his passion as an avid reader of his mother's large book collection, which included Edgar Rice Burroughs’ Tarzan of the Apes and his Barsoom novels and Jules Verne's The Mysterious Island. When Vance explored the nearby town, he started reading pulp fiction magazines at the local drugstore.
With the death of his grandfather, who had supported the family, which coincided with the economic challenges of the Great Depression, the Vance family’s fortune dwindled, and Vance was forced to leave junior college and work to support himself, assisting his mother when able. Vance plied many trades for short stretches: as a bellhop, in a cannery, and on a gold dredge. Vance described this era as a time of personal change: “Over a span of four or five years, I developed from an impractical little intellectual into a rather reckless young man, competent at many skills and crafts, and determined to try every phase of life.”
He subsequently entered the University of California, Berkeley, and over the next six years studied mining engineering, physics, journalism, and English. Vance wrote one of his first science fiction stories for an English class assignment: his professor commented in a scornful tone, "We also have a piece of science fiction"—Vance's first negative review.
He worked as an electrician in the naval shipyards at Pearl Harbor, Hawaii, for "56¢ an hour," and worked for a time as part of a degaussing crew. The attack on Pearl Harbor took place about a month after he quit.
Vance graduated in 1942. Weak eyesight prevented military service. He found a job as a rigger at the Kaiser Shipyard in Richmond, California, and enrolled in an Army Intelligence program to learn Japanese, but washed out. In 1943, he memorized an eye chart and became an able seaman in the Merchant Marine. In later years, boating remained his favorite recreation; boats and voyages are a frequent motif in his work. He worked as a seaman, a rigger, a surveyor, a ceramicist, and a carpenter before he established himself fully as a writer, which did not occur until the 1970s.
Image:Jack Vance Banjo Kazoo.jpg|thumb|left|200px|Jack Vance playing the jazz banjo and kazoo in 1979 in San Francisco
From his youth, Vance had been fascinated by Dixieland and traditional jazz. He was an amateur of the cornet and ukulele, often accompanying himself with a kazoo, and was a competent harmonica player. His first published writings were jazz reviews for The Daily Californian, and music is an element in many of his works.
In 1946, Vance met and married Norma Genevieve Ingold, another Cal student. Vance continued to live in Oakland, in a house he built and extended with his family over the years, including a hand-carved wooden ceiling from Kashmir. The Vances traveled extensively, including on one around-the-world voyage, and often spent several months at a time living in places like Ireland, Tahiti, South Africa, Positano and on a houseboat on Lake Nagin in Kashmir.
Vance began trying to become a professional writer in the late 1940s, as part of the San Francisco Renaissance, a movement of experimentation in literature and the arts. His first lucrative sale was one of the early Magnus Ridolph stories to Twentieth Century Fox, who also hired him as a screenwriter for the Captain Video television series. The proceeds supported the Vances for a year's travel in Europe. There are various references to the Bay Area Bohemian life in his work. In the 1950s, Vance started a pottery and ceramics hobby, buying a kiln; this interest was an influence on his story "The Potters of Firsk”.
Science fiction authors Frank Herbert and Poul Anderson were among Vance's closest friends. In the early 1950s, when Frank Herbert was a reporter, he interviewed Vance, and the men became friends. They moved to Mexico with their families to establish a "writer's colony" at Lake Chapala, near Guadalajara. In 1962, Vance, Herbert, and Anderson jointly built a houseboat which they sailed in the Sacramento Delta. Vance's interest in houseboats led him to depict them in "The Moon Moth", The Palace of Love, and Wyst: Alastor 1716.
In the early 1980s, Vance became increasingly interested in sailing, and he started building a 36-foot trimaran. Later, he owned Venture, Columbia, and finally Hinano. While Vance derived pleasure from his sailing hobby, his increasingly poor eyesight and the high costs of outfitting, berthing, and maintaining the vessel led him to sell Hinano. Vance's failing eyesight also led him to cease his amateur jazz hobby.
Although legally blind since the 1980s, Vance continued to write with the aid of BigEd software, written especially for him by Kim Kokkonen. His final novel was Lurulu. Although Vance had stated Lurulu would be his final book, he subsequently completed an autobiography, which was published in July 2009.
Death
Vance died on the morning of May 26, 2013, at the age of 96 in his home in the Oakland Hills. Vance's son John Holbrook Vance II described the cause as the complications of old age, saying "everything just finally caught up with him". Tributes to Vance were given by various authors, including George R. R. Martin, Michael Moorcock, Neil Gaiman, and Elizabeth Bear. Steven Gould, president of the Science Fiction Writers of America, described Vance as "one of the greatest science fiction and fantasy writers of the 20th century". A memorial site set up by his family to post tributes received hundreds of messages in the days following his death.Work
Vance made his debut in print with "The World-Thinker", a 16-page story published by Sam Merwin in Thrilling Wonder Stories, Summer 1945. His lifetime output totals more than 60 books—perhaps almost 90. His work has been published in three categories: science fiction, fantasy, and mystery. Among Vance's earliest published work was a set of fantasy stories written while he served in the merchant marine during the war. They appeared in 1950, several years after Vance had started publishing science fiction in the pulp magazines, under the title The Dying Earth.Vance wrote many science fiction short stories in the late 1940s and through the 1950s, which were published in magazines. Of his novels written during this period, a few were science fiction, but most were mysteries. Few were published at the time, but Vance continued to write mysteries into the early 1970s. In total, he wrote 15 novels outside of science fiction and fantasy, including the extended outline, The Telephone was Ringing in the Dark, published only by the VIE, and three books published under the Ellery Queen pseudonym. Some of these are not mysteries, such as Bird Isle, and many fit uneasily in the category. These stories are set in and around his native San Francisco, except for one set in Italy and another in Africa. Two begin in San Francisco but take to the sea.
Many themes important to his more famous science fiction novels appeared first in the mysteries. The most obvious is the "book of dreams", which appears in Bad Ronald and The View from Chickweed's Window, prior to being featured in The Book of Dreams. The revenge theme is also more prominent in certain mysteries than in the science fiction. Bad Ronald was adapted to a TV film of the same name aired on ABC in 1974, as well as a French production in 1992; this and Man in the Cage are the only works by Vance to be made into film to date.
Certain of the science fiction stories are also mysteries, penned using his full name John Holbrook Vance, three under the house pseudonym Ellery Queen, and one each using the pseudonyms Alan Wade, Peter Held, John van See, and Jay Kavanse. Some editions of his published works give his year of birth as 1920. In addition to the comic Magnus Ridolph stories, two major stories feature the effectuator Miro Hetzel, a futuristic detective, and Araminta Station is largely concerned with solving various murders. Vance returned to the "dying Earth" setting to write the picaresque adventures of the ne'er-do-well scoundrel Cugel the Clever, and those of the magician Rhialto the Marvellous. These books were written in 1963, 1978 and 1981. His other major fantasy work, Lyonesse, was completed in 1989 and set on a mythological archipelago off the coast of France in the early Middle Ages.
Vance's stories written for pulps in the 1940s and 1950s covered many science fiction themes, with a tendency to emphasize mysterious and biological themes rather than technical ones. Robots, for example, are almost entirely absent, though the short story "The Uninhibited Robot" features a computer gone awry. Many of the early stories are comic. By the 1960s, Vance had developed a futuristic setting that he came to call the Gaean Reach, a fictional region of space settled by humans. Thereafter, all his science fiction was, more or less explicitly, set therein. The Gaean Reach per se is loose and expanding, old Earth being the center. Each planet has its own history, state of development and culture. Within the Reach conditions tend to be peaceable and commerce tends to dominate. At the edges of the Reach, out in the lawless Beyond, conditions are usually much less secure.
Vance influenced many writers in the genre. Most notably, Michael Shea wrote a sequel to Eyes of the Overworld, featuring Cugel the Clever, before Vance did one himself. Vance gave permission, and the book by Shea went into print before Vance's. Shea's book, A Quest for Simbilis, is entirely in keeping with the vision of Vance. Cugel is a complete rogue, who is nevertheless worthy of sympathy in always failing to achieve his goals.