Vance in the NYT

Emphyrio starts off in what seems like a conventional 50s sci-fi trope – the generalised 3rd world translated to a dim and distant backwater of the galaxy, but rapidly mutates into a more interesting excursion on colonial exploitation, IIRC. Any book in which the aristocracy are literally inhuman monsters garbed in a simulacrum of human flesh…

(Also has the great bit in which why being expelled from the city is such a one-way procedure…)

The three Alastor novels are quite interesting from a sociological perspective. “Alastor: Trullion” was written in the early seventies and depicts the development and eventual decline of an ascetic, work-centered subculture within an—apparently at least—carefree and easygoing society. It’s like a weird inversion of 60’s hippie counterculture (the novel was written in the early seventies I think). It also includes some intriging bits on the relationship of music and sports with war, violence and sex.

“Alastor: Wyst” features the rare exception to the “Vance writes weak female characters” rule in the figure of Skorlet. It’s an interesting dystopia… apparently Vance intended it as a satire of the welfare state but I think towards the end it also satirizes prejudices rooted on tradition.

What else… the fiercely misogynistic chillite cult in “The Anome” is an interesting cultural construction, they remind me a bit of the “no girls allowed” rule at Mount Athos.

Finally, the strange institution of “awaile” in “Servants of the Wankh” is reminiscent of, well, “amok”, “going postal”, and high school shootings.

Great post–I look forward to your sociologies-of-Vance piece.

The “Alastor” novels are all set in different, carefully constructed societies (where the society affects how the story plays out). Vance’s own social opinions are sometimes evident (in “Wyst” for instance, which has a reductio ultra absurdum welfare state) but not painfully so: he’s always writing fiction, not propaganda.

I think Vance plots better than people seem to be giving him credit for. But plot itself has a very poor literary reputation these days, so it may be a way of secretly praising him.

sg: Yes, the magic system in D&D is based on several key elements from the story “Mazirian the Magician” in The Dying Earth: (1) whimsically named spells; (2) which have to be memorized; (3) and which can only be used once before having to be re-memorized; (4) each magician has a limited capacity for memorization; (5) which can be improved with practice. “They would be poignant corrosive spells, of such a nature that one would haunt the brain of an ordinary man and two render him mad. Mazirian, by dint of stringent exercise, could encompass four of the most formidable, or six of the lesser spells.”

and it’s a really important part of the flavour of early D&D (less over time). So we have Vance to thank (whether for good or ill is a matter of personal preference) for this. Yay Jack.

I would also note his difficulties in creating complex characters, especially female ones

To say nothing of homosexual characters, who are invariably villains when they appear at all – Casmir and Tamurello come to mind.

Vance’s view of women seems to be summed up in “The Murthe,” a good story but not one to warm the heart of any feminist reader, except perhaps one with a term paper to write on “The Murthe.” Can’t fault him for not jumping out of his early-20th-century skin, I suppose.

… And definitely, his facility at sketching bizarre social customs, in such a manner as to suggest that our own are equally bizarre in their own way, is one of the great charms of his work. I tend to think of Vance as an Enlightenment philosophe, looking at his running commentary on religious and political authority.

I think Casimir and Tamurello are almost the /only/ homosexual characters in Vance. And their sexuality is pretty secondary to their wickedness.

Incidentally, _Suldrun’s Garden_ is the rule-breaker for Vance, as it has a reasonably well-developed female character — yeah, she’s passive, but she’s a complete character — and also a complex plot, or really several interwoven plots.

Doug M.

Sociology in Vance, huh. Well, what about the basic premise of the Demon Princes series: interstellar travel so cheap, and habitable planets so plentiful, that anyone who wants a planet of his own can not only have one, but can probably keep it secret. The results: a small sphere of space which remains governable (the Oikumene), and a large anarchic space where criminals, religious zealots, adventurers etc. can pursue their various ends (the Beyond).

Consider the various ad-hoc institutions which Vance has arise in this situation. The IPCC, which seeks out criminals beyond. The deweaseling corps, “the only disciplined organization of Beyond”, which exists to expose and kill IPCC agents. Interchange, which standardizes the ransom process for kidnap victims (kidnapping being ridiculously easy).

There are parallels between the world of the Demon Princes and the internet. In both cases, something which had been scarce is now plentiful and cheap (space travel, information transfer). Like Beyond, the internet resists governance: there is effective (despite being hardly organized) opposition to taxation of internet commerce; it is impossible to truly squelch any kind of communication, no matter how offensive (even child pornography); criminals and spammers operate from what amount to secret planets, and can reach anywhere instantly.

“Somewhat limited gamut” would have been funnier without “somewhat limited.”

I’ve been reading Vance for nearly 50 years now. As far as weakness in regards to plot, it seems to me that it manifests primarily in his endings, whether in one-off novels or, particularly, in a series. Still, much can be forgiven if you have an appreciation for his wonderful style. Just as I can pick out Mahler from just a few chords, I think I could pick out a bit of Vance from a few lines of dialogue or character description.

Just as I can pick out Mahler from just a few chords, I think I could pick out a bit of Vance from a few lines of dialogue or character description.

It’s true, there is something that dialogue and character description that lends itself to an adjective “Vancian.”

The aforementioned Dying Earth roleplaying game. for instance, rewards players for managing to have their characters speak in this manner.

I read the Times article this morning, and wasn’t impressed. The quoted passage, which appears to be a ponderously humorous “spider to the fly” story in which an elaborately polite style fails to mask a transparently villainous intent — a technique that has been around for a very long time to good effect, as for example in the character of the Bicolored Python Rock Snake in Kipling’s “The Elephant’s Child” — contains two soliscisms:
“I thought to notice you” – “I thought to” means “it occurred to me,” which makes no sense. He apparently means “I thought I noticed you,” but uses” I thought to,” which is old-fashioned and therefore overly formal, but unfortunately incorrect.
“My interest was cursory” – “cursory” means perfunctory or superficial. Applying it to one’s interest in something is incorrect or at least unidiomatic. What he intends, I think, is something like idly curious, which isn’t what it “cursory” means.

What I suspect from this and the “somewhat limited gamut” line is a writer with a wobbly command of the stylistic devices he likes to use.

He says he “thought to notice” and means he believed to notice, when in fact he saw clearly. The circumspect speech is customary. This is not remotely close to a solecism, and I’m a bit surprised that a native speaker of English would think it so, if you are. It is also not in the least unidiomatic to describe interest as cursory.

(a) How much, if any, distance is there between Vance himself and his fictional sociologist Unspiek, Baron Bodissey?

(b) Are ungoverned societies all the same?

(c) In Vance, to what extent are hierarchies innate or actively chosen? Take, for example, the ostensibly hierarchical, but actually fiercely egalitarian society found in ‘Big Planet’. I forget which one – guests sleeping in book room. But Henry will work it out.

(d) ‘IPCC’ – morphic resonance or what?

(e) Before writing ‘Showboat World’, did Vance ever encounter the museum ship ‘Success’?

Yes, but “somewhat limited” is telegraphing the joke. Vance should have trusted “between amused indifference and easy condescension” to bear the weight, as it easily could have.

Dorothy Parker’s more famous quip, that Katherine Hepburn’s acting “ran the gamut from A to B,” gets it right.

# 11 “Blue World” is not early Vance; I think it came out in the mid-60s, around the same time as “Emphyrio” but after the more philosophically based “Languages of Pao” and, not mentioned here yet, “To Live Forever”.

# 17 I don’t recall the Institute ever being credited with possessing immortality. That, OTOH, is the theme of “To Live Forever,” in which the Amaranth (Class Five) are immortal. In a society of scarcity, the Emigration Office executes citizens when they reach their appointed age; strict selection (meritocratic or corrupt) allows a small proportion of each cohort to move to the next higher Class with longer life (the classes are Brood, Wedge, Third or Slope, Verge, and Amaranth). Typically for Vance, the hero is a refugee from the system (why, we learn at the end) who has become a free individual with no fixed life expectancy but also no chance of becoming Amaranth. So he destroys the system.

I can’t remember what Vance I first read, it may have been a Dying Earth story or “The Dragon Masters”. It was well over 35 years ago, in any event. In 1976 I had hoped to welcome Vance to Denmark, but his travels took him past, though I received a courteous letter from South Africa. In 1977 I persuaded Poul Anderson to introduce us, and we (fiancée and I) visited the Vances in Oakland a couple times. I am sorry to hear that his wife died, and I hope he manages to finish his autobiography.

Many, if not most of Vance’s sf novels and stories share the theme of an individual (reminiscent in more ways than one of Van Vogt’s “competent man” or Heinlein’s system-breakers) who, without always intending to, breaks open a stagnant society: see all those mentioned as well as “The Dragon Masters”, “The Last Castle”, “The Miracle Workers”, the Durdane trilogy, the Araminta novels, etc. etc. “The Moon Moth” is odd man out here, as it ends with the outsider protagonist being accepted by the rigidly hierarchical society to which he is emissary. Whether any sociology can be developed from this scheme I don’t know.

Trivia dept.: “Baron Bodissey” is the nom de guerre of a right-wing American blogger who runs the website “Gates of Vienna”.

Finally, a candidate for sociological analysis might be “The Gray Prince”, a stand-alone novel about a planet with a strange apparent history, settled by technological Earthers on one continent and neo-feudal land-barons on another. Again, the story revolves around the undermining of this system by outsiders, although Vance springs a huge surprise about the history of the planet along the way. The novel is execrated by many for its apparent glorification of the feudal culture of the land-barons, but that requires not reading between the lines. And who wouldn’t want to be a land-baron, anyway?

Incidentally, Suldrun’s Garden is the rule-breaker for Vance, as it has a reasonably well-developed female character—yeah, she’s passive, but she’s a complete character—and also a complex plot, or really several interwoven plots.

Well, look what happens to her. And then look what happens to Glyneth — lively female character, then she marries, and poof! disappears from Book 3, ’cause she is having babies.

I have Vance firmly placed in the box marked “reactionary artists whose work I love anyway”.

Exactly right.

I have to support Vance in his inclusion of “somewhat limited” here. It sustains the narrative voice as that of dry observation rather than inserting a joke directly in the narrative. And Vance is always detached – he would never pun or joke directly in the omniscient voice.

As far as solecisms go, the wondrous thing is that in the seeming oddity of his word choices, Vance actually redefines and expands how words can be used. Any reader familar with his work can have no doubt that he is in complete command of his vocabulary and diction. The occasional true lapse might occur once or twice in a whole book (and it is difficult to say how many of these are the results of editorial interference). It’s an amazing balancing act, pure artifice sustained at great length. His imitators have been many, but they never match the man’s ear, the balance of the phrases, sentences, paragraphs.

More on “I thought to notice”: a Google book search brings up the same wording in 19th century writers several times, including Thackeray. The point is that while Fianosther is being pompous, Vance is never pompous: he has his blowhards and prevaricators, and his men of action, and they speak as they should.

“Of those authors only Jack Vance and R. A. Lafferty (another overlooked, fine stylist) were writers whose work I really loved and respected.”

Ray Lafferty is indeed another brilliant stylist, and sui generis writer, overlooked by the mainstream. His politics were also unique, somewhat conservative, highly Catholic, and just odd. I’ll never forget the time he wrote the 1979 Worldcon committee (which I ended up being Director of Operations for, and retroactive Vice-Chair), denouncing us all as Nazis for allowing the Worldcon to become “politicized” by allowing Guest Of Honor Harlan Ellison to use it as a forum to campaign for passage of the ERA (the convention being held in Arizona, one of the few remaining states that had not passed the ERA, and thus was being boycotted by NOW, and Ellison was a huge supporter of NOW, doing many speaking/fund-raising engagements on its behalf). (Harlan’s solution was to keep his commitment to show up at the con, a commitment made long before the boycott, but to vow not to spend a penny in the state, and to urge everyone else to do their best to spend no money in Arizona; he rented an RV and lived out of it throughout his week in town, while also talking up the ERA at every opportunity he could.)

Now, this “politicization” of the Worldcon was surprisingly controversial, as many fans took the view that somehow the world of science fiction should be isolated from Outside Politics (such as the mere idea that women should have equal political rights — but, then, that idea wasn’t even accepted in the country as a whole, of course), so Lafferty was hardly the only person to contribute to what became a huge uproar in the sf world at the time, but he was the only person to somehow find it a reason to call the organizers “Nazis.”

On the other hand, you could find him at endless numbers of sf conventions, wandering the halls late at night, from party to party, always a drink in his hand, always aimiably soused, and more often than not until he was dozing off in a lobby chair in the no longer early morning.

Sf writers can be peculiar, and Lafferty was, unsurprisingly, one of the more peculiar. And brilliant as a stylist.