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.
沒有留言:
張貼留言
注意：只有此網誌的成員可以留言。