by Belle Waring on July 27, 2024
Do you all experience flow? Or rather, as I think everyone does at times, do you experience it often? Obviously I have written plenty of words in my life, but this is not generally something you experience when writing blog posts unless you are maybe excoriating someone in an unnecessarily profane way that is–fundamentally–unfair. Like, I hear from other people that this is a thing that might happen, I personally would never stoop to such levels, not even if I were blogging about J.D. Vance.
So, painting something, not a wall, that lets you achieve flow. Maybe even a wall, truly! I paint things with tiny details, sometimes setting the stork scissors to gnaw at the smallest sable brush till only a few hairs remain, fit for the fishscale mail on a lead orc figurine. Not lately, though. No, because I have been WRITING whole-ass NOVELS. Now, you will hear of my speed and think, huh, those must all suck because that is some Danielle Steele shit and first of all, how dare you. How dare you! Danielle Fernandes Dominique Schuelein-Steel has written 190 books, have you? Separately, her books do actually suck.
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by Henry Farrell on July 17, 2013
_The Languages of Pao_ is occasionally discussed as an example (along with 1984) of the Sapir-Whorf hypothesis in fiction. The imagination of the people of Pao is limited by their language, which enforces a culture of passivity and fatalism under all except the most extraordinary of circumstances. When their Panarch (under the tutelage of the Breakness ‘wizards,’ none of whose powers are supernatural) introduces new, artificially crafted languages to selected groups within this population, he is able to create new dynamic warrior, mercantile and technocratic elites, to his ultimate undoing. None of this need detain us; the philosophical discussion is no more and no less than one might expect of a highly intelligent pulp writer in the 1950s. Far more interesting is the guiding wisdom of the Breakness wizards themselves.
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by Henry Farrell on June 13, 2013
These columns are discussed in the first part of _Cugel’s Saga._ The villagers of Tustvold, sprung from the dubious stock of fugitives from the Rhab Faag, have a curious social structure in which the women do all the work, and the men spend their days at the tops of columns whence they “absorb a healthful flux from the sunlight.”
>”The higher the column the more pure and rich is the flux, as well as the prestige of place. The women, especially, are consumed with ambition for the altitude of their husbands.”
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by Henry Farrell on May 30, 2013
Described in the early chapters of _Cugel’s Saga_, Master Twango’s manse is a study-in-miniature of society as a web of contractual relations and power asymmetries. When Cugel takes up the role of ‘overseer’ for Master Twango, he is informed by his predecessor that “[a]t Flutic all is exact, and every jot balances against a corresponding tittle.” This description is misleading; the subsequent suggestion that “[c]onditions at Flutic are always optimum[sic] and at worst meticulous” is more apt in its sly hint that the books are jiggered.
> “At Flutic,” said Weamish, “nothing is left to chance. Twango carefully distinguishes sentiment from business. If Twango owned the air, we would pay over coins for every gasp.” [click to continue…]
by Henry Farrell on May 29, 2013
Locus has a “short obituary here”:http://www.locusmag.com/News/2013/05/jack-vance-1916-2013/. As the “discussion”:https://crookedtimber.org/2013/05/28/the-sociology-of-jack-vance/comment-page-1/ in comments below makes clear, his fiction had problems, including attitudes towards women and gay people that might most kindly be described as antediluvian. Still, his prose style was gorgeous, distinctive and exact. He had a profound influence on the genres of science fiction and fantasy (Gene Wolfe is perhaps his most obvious heir, even if he took Vance’s ideas in directions of his own). Yet if I were to compare him to someone, I’d look not to another f/sf author but to Edward Gibbon, another author who combined reactionary politics with a dash of iconoclasm. I can’t help but think that Vance had read Gibbon and been shaped by him. Vance’s particular sort of sociological curiosity, his lovely long sentences in which structural complexity is used deliberately to convey irony and ambiguity, and his uncanny ability to choose precisely the _right words_ from a rich and idiosyncratic vocabulary, have no modern analogue.
You don’t read Vance for the politics, or for the plot (which was usually either slapdashly cobbled together from standard parts or an out-and-out picaresque). You read him for the language – the magisterial cadences of an Augustan, miraculously transported to the modern era and become a pulp writer, describing starmenters, Ioun stones and Demon Princes. His body of work is extensive. One place to start is his last really good book, _Night Lamp_, a standalone that nicely conveys his strengths, while being more gentle in its politics than some of his other work. The society described in the first half of the book (including a wonderful setpiece around a disastrous academic conference) is a lovely and funny sociological fantasia. As already said, I’ll be publishing several posts on Vance that I had already planned over the next few months (that this should start just after his death is an accident entire – I’ve been meaning to do this for years, and was finally prompted to get up off my arse by a conversation last weekend with a friend who had read the draft versions and asked what I planned to do with them).