Jack Vance

Jack Vance: The Man Who Invented How Wizards Forget

To get to sea in 1943 he memorised the eye chart. Vance's eyesight was too poor for military service, so he learned the letters by heart and shipped out as a Merchant Marine able seaman. Four decades later he was legally blind and still writing, using software a programmer built specifically for him. In between he produced more than sixty books, gave Dungeons & Dragons its magic system, and became — in Michael Chabon's words — "the most painful case of all the writers I love who I feel don't get the credit they deserve."

The Delta Ranch

John Holbrook Vance was born on 28 August 1916 in San Francisco and spent his early childhood on Filbert Street. When his parents separated and his father left for Mexico, the family moved to his maternal grandfather L. M. Hoefler's ranch near Oakley, in the Sacramento River delta. The delta gave him the outdoors; his mother's library gave him Edgar Rice Burroughs and Jules Verne. Both stayed with him — the fascination with landscape as a character, and the pulp romance of elsewhere.

Berkeley, Six Years, Four Subjects

He spent six years at the University of California, Berkeley, cycling through mining engineering, physics, journalism and English before graduating in 1942. The Depression paid for it in the usual way: he worked as a bellhop, a cannery hand, a gold dredge operator, an electrician, a surveyor, a carpenter and a seaman. His first published writing was not fiction at all but jazz reviews for *The Daily Californian*. Weak eyes kept him out of the services, so he worked as a rigger at the Kaiser Shipyard before the eye chart trick got him aboard ship.

The Pulps and The Dying Earth

His debut story, "The World-Thinker," appeared in *Thrilling Wonder Stories* in the summer of 1945, and he published prolifically through the late 1940s and early 1950s. Then, in 1950, came *The Dying Earth*, the foundational book of a sequence he returned to for more than thirty years — through *The Eyes of the Overworld*, *Cugel's Saga* and the Rhialto stories, until 1984.

The other worlds accumulated fast. *Big Planet* (1952) and *Showboat World* (1975); stories including "Telek" (1952), "The Moon Moth" (1961) and "The Last Castle" (1966); the loosely linked Gaean Reach; the Demon Princes revenge sequence; Planet of Adventure, set on Tschai; the Durdane trilogy; the Alastor Cluster novels; the Lyonesse trilogy; the Cadwal Chronicles; Ports of Call, closing with his last novel, *Lurulu*. He also wrote fifteen mystery novels under his full name John Holbrook Vance and under the house pseudonym Ellery Queen, usually set in San Francisco or somewhere he had travelled; *The Man in the Cage* took the Edgar Award in 1961. Remarkably, he did not become a full-time writer until the 1970s.

Boats, Jazz, Kashmiri Ceilings

He married Norma Genevieve Ingold in 1946 and they stayed together until her death on 25 March 2008. They travelled without much regard for convenience, living in Ireland, Tahiti, South Africa, Positano and Kashmir, and Vance kept building and extending their house in the Oakland hills, including hand-carved Kashmiri ceiling elements. He played cornet, ukulele and harmonica, with a real passion for Dixieland and traditional jazz. In the early 1980s he took up sailing seriously, building or owning a 36-foot trimaran he never finished, the 17-foot cutter *Venture*, the 35-foot ketch *Columbia* and the 45-foot *Hinano*. Maintenance costs and failing vision eventually forced him to sell them.

Blind, Still Writing

He was legally blind from the 1980s. It ended the jazz and the boats but not the fiction: he went on working with BigEd, a program written for him by Kim Kokkonen. His autobiography, *This Is Me, Jack Vance!*, came out in July 2009 and won him a Hugo — his third, after *The Dragon Masters* and *The Last Castle*, the latter of which had also taken a Nebula.

Why Jack Is Called a Genius

The gift is language, and it is unusually specific. Locus describes his "sophisticated, often playful use of language," which undersells the mechanism: Vance builds worlds through diction rather than exposition. His characters speak in elaborate courtesies, baroque insults and legalistic circumlocutions, and the way a Vance character addresses a stranger tells you the entire social structure he comes from — its snobberies, its taboos, what it does to people who breach them. No infodump is required. The style is instantly identifiable and has never been successfully imitated.

The second claim is generative. Vance invented systems other people could build on. The magic of *The Dying Earth* — wizards memorising a handful of spells that vanish from the mind the instant they are cast — was adopted wholesale into Dungeons & Dragons as "Vancian magic," and through D&D into most fantasy gaming since; *The Dying Earth* and *The Eyes of the Overworld* appear on the game's inspirational reading lists in both the first and fifth editions. Gene Wolfe credited him as an influence on *The Book of the New Sun*; Dan Simmons' *Hyperion Cantos* carries explicit echoes; George R. R. Martin wrote homages into *A Song of Ice and Fire* and edited the tribute anthology *Songs of the Dying Earth* in 2009. Locus judged that he "redefined the nature of planetary romance." A 2009 *New York Times Magazine* profile called him "one of American literature's most distinctive and undervalued voices," and the SFWA president Steven Gould, on his death, called him "one of the greatest science fiction and fantasy writers of the 20th century."

The counter-case is embedded in the praise. Almost every endorsement comes from inside the genre or from other novelists; Chabon's complaint is precisely that the wider culture never arrived. Three Hugos, one Nebula and an Edgar across nearly seven decades is a thin trophy shelf for someone described as a great writer, and one Hugo was for a memoir. Sixty-plus books written at a pace that left little room for revision produced a great deal of formula: the revenge quest and the picaresque rogue recur constantly, plots are often loose or episodic, and characters function as positions in a comedy of manners rather than as psychologically realised people. Vance's genius is one of voice and invention. It is not depth, and pretending otherwise would misdescribe what he actually did.

Legacy

Vance died on 26 May 2013 at his home in the Oakland hills, aged 96, of complications of old age. George R. R. Martin, Michael Moorcock, Neil Gaiman and Elizabeth Bear were among those who paid tribute. He had already collected the World Fantasy Award for Life Achievement in 1984, Guest of Honour status at the 1992 World Science Fiction Convention, the SFWA Grand Master Award in 1997 as its fifteenth recipient, and induction into the Science Fiction Hall of Fame in 2001.

His most unusual monument is bibliographic. Roughly 300 internet volunteers spent 1999 to 2006 assembling the Vance Integral Edition — forty-four volumes collecting his entire body of work, plus a forty-fifth holding the three Ellery Queen novels. Afton House Books issued *The Complete Jack Vance* in six volumes in 2010, and Spatterlight Press has kept DRM-free editions in print since 2012. Few writers have had their collected works assembled by so many strangers, unpaid, while they were still alive to see it.

Achievements

• Notable work: Dying Earth
• Notable work: Lyonesse Trilogy
• Notable work: Cugel's Saga
• Affiliated with United States Merchant Marine
• Educated at University of California, Berkeley
• Worked as writer, novelist and science fiction writer