Jack Vance, the great American science-fiction and fantasy writer

1. News for Jack Vance

   
   1. Jack Vance tributes pour in after his death

      The Guardian ‎- 1 day ago

      George RR Martin and Neil Gaiman among the hundreds paying tribute to a science fiction 'grandmaster'
   1. Jack Vance obituary

      The Guardian‎ - 13 hours ago
   2. Jack Vance: Game of Thrones author compared him to Tolkien Photo: jackvance.com

      Telegraph.co.uk‎ - 18 hours ago

2. Jack Vance - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

   en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jack_Vance‎

   John Holbrook Vance (August 28, 1916 – May 26, 2013) was an American mystery, fantasy and science fiction writer. Most of his work has been published under ...

    

    

    May 30, 2013, 5:33 pm 1 Comment

   Jack Vance’s Influential Prose Will Live On

   By CARLO ROTELLA

   Original photograph by Justin Stephens for The New York Times The Times Magazine, July 19, 2009.

    

   Jack Vance, the great American science-fiction and fantasy writer who died this week at 96, left a legacy of lasting influence. Not only are there dozens of his books for us to reread in perpetuity, but his distinctiveness as a stylist shaped many other writers’ sensibilities. When I was working on a profile of him for the magazine in 2009, I talked to one celebrated author after another who described to me the life-altering effects of encountering his work at an impressionable age. Michael Chabon, Dan Simmons, George R. R. Martin, Tanith Lee, Neil Gaiman, Terry Dowling, Dean Koontz — they all tell some variant of a story that goes, “I picked up a book by Jack Vance when I was 13 years old, and I was never the same again.” I was struck by how many of them credited him with helping to turn them into writers.
   
   Me, too. I was in my early teens when a friend lent me a copy of Vance’s “The Eyes of the Overworld.” In the first chapter, there’s this passing exchange at a bazaar that I included in the magazine’s profile:
   

   “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.”

   I tried to explain the effect his prose had on me: “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.”
   
   When I went to see Vance in his house up in the Oakland hills in 2009, our conversation had a time-capsule quality. Bundled up in a chair under a blanket, he wore a watch cap resonant of his long-ago stint in the merchant marine. He described his adolescent self, 80 years gone, waiting by the mailbox for the next issue of Weird Tales with his tongue hanging out, eager to be seized and shaken by the voices of H. P. Lovecraft and Robert E. Howard. When I told him about a certain formerly notorious science-fiction writer who had thrown a tantrum on the phone when I called to interview him for the story, Vance said, “Why, he’s nothing but a showoff and a jackass.”
   
   Vance was famously brusque, and he didn’t like to talk about the craft of writing. But the joy he took in language on the page was contagious. I won’t say that there will never be another like him. Part of his lasting importance lies in the fact that there’s a lot of writing, and more on the way, that owes something important to his.