The Dobson edition is a reprint of The World Between and Other Stories which was bound with Monsters in Orbit (Ace 1965) and contains the stories: The World Between Brain of the Galaxy The Devil on Salvation Bluff The Men Return NOTE: The same title is used on ebook collections from Gateway and...
I've been holding off on writing my Jack Vance reviews for a while because I loved The Dying Earth stories so much that I'm still struggling with how to write the perfect review to make everyone run out and buy a copy. Since then, however, I've been slowly assimilating many of his other works ...
Nutshell: assorted losers use the always already imminent destruction of the Earth as an excuse for grave breaches of sense & decency; sadly, the destruction of this Earth is not presented herein.Though the volume designates a metonym by which the setting stands for a particular subgenre, the se...
quintessential Jack Vance adventure novel. swiftly-paced, drily witty, deeply ironic, byzantine in its layers of back-story and multiple displays of world-building yet happily trim and stripped-down in its actual verbiage, featuring a sardonic young hero, his icy love interest and various mysteri...
ORIGINALLY POSTED AT Fantasy Literature.As I'm writing this, Jack Vance's under-appreciated Lyonesse trilogy has been off the shelves for years. My library doesn't even have a copy — it had to be interlibrary loaned for me. Why is that? Publishers have been printing a seemingly endless stream of ...
As a standalone book, Lurulu isn't a great success. It's short, and it depends heavily on what went before. (Though there is a nice summary of Ports of Call, which is well worth reading, as it describes that book in even more colorful terms than the book itself.)As a sequel, or considered as the ...
In Lyonesse: The Green Pearl and Madouc the magical lands of high enchantment - the Elder Isles, the land, long-vanished beneath the ocean, from which King Arthur's ancestors fled to Britain - come to brilliant life again. In this ancient land the realm of chivalry and the world of faerie exist s...
The Blue World by Jack Vanceaka The KragenThe Blue World is a science fiction novel with an interesting setting of a vast, open ocean world without any landmass. The story behind the idea for the book is that, apparently, Frank Herbet discussed his idea for the novel Dune—which is set in a harsh ...
This third book of the Durdane trilogy provides a satisfying and somewhat surprising conclusion to the story, which I will not give away because it’s worth reading.Gatzel Etzwane again provides the single point of view. He would like to return to his relatively free and simple life as a musician,...
Part of what makes Jack Vance such a master is the casual way he conjures entire planets full of dynamic societies, even for minor stopovers in the story. This may be partially due to the fact that he goes out of his way to present deadly wilderness alongside civilization. There's a fair amount...
This novella won Vance his second Hugo Award and his first Nebula after it appeared in Galaxy in 1966. Vance’s specialty was a unique blend of science-fantasy riddled with exotic locales, star-faring feudalisms, and rich alien cultures, something that a Hard SF purist might blanch at. But without...
The first in another trilogy by Vance (The Cadwal Chronicles), this one set on the planet Cadwal, orbiting a star in what is known as the Wisp. As is common with Vance, we follow the fortunes of a young man (in this case Glawen Clattuc) growing up in a society with both advantages and injustices....
Half a century after he started publishing, Vance showed in this story that he still had his gift. For Vance fans, the characters are familiar types, but the writing flows just as smoothly as ever.Ports of Call is a travelogue, somewhat in the mode of Big Planet (but broader) or Space Opera (but ...
The first volume in Vance's Lyonesse trilogy felt like such a departure for the author--not that it didn't have his characteristic wit and oddness, but I really felt it was one of the first times that I was invited to feel for his characters. His usual fare is light and disconnected, skipping acr...
First, the Tor paperback edition has the least appropriate cover art imaginable: for this series in particular, Vance has absolutely no interest in the technology that allows his characters to travel the breadth of the Gaean Reach, and there is no description of what happens between the purchase ...
A six-year boy is found nearly beaten to death and, in order to save his life, a portion of his memory is erased. He recovers and is adopted and becomes Jaro Fath, an outcast youth on the socially stratified planet Thanet. As Jaro gets older, his desire to find out about his past intensifies un...
The second book in Jack Vance's Cugel saga, and third novel in 'The Dying Earth' series, 'The Skybreak Spatterlight' once again follows the rogue Cugel across fantasy wastelands in a world where the sun threatens to extinguish at any moment. Given the book's nature as a sequel, spoilers for the p...
I have already gushed enthusiastic about the opening volume in the Dying Earth epic. It seems I should have kept some of the hyperbole in reserve for later books, as the appeal of the setting and of the characters show no sign of slacking with this second book. It's also interesting to note that ...
"By an axiom of cultural anthropology, the more isolated a community, the more idiosyncratic become its customs and conventions. This of course is not necessarily disadvantageous."The Rhune are an aloof and eccentric culture. Lords of a beautiful, mountainous realm on the planet Marune of the Ala...
This is not my favorite Vance book (that honor goes to Eyes of the Overworld), not by a long shot but it shares so many characteristics that make Vance's books such a joy to read. Every Jack Vance book I've read demonstrate such fantastic knowledge about so many aspects of the world and this book...
An opera company composed of aliens from a world no human is familiar with makes a concert hall appearance on Earth. Their music is strange, somewhat disconcerting, but the performance closes to rave reviews. The next day, every one of the aliens has vanished. They didn't leave by spaceship, and ...
Showboat World is not a sequel to Big Planet. It shares the first book's planetary setting and introduces new, native characters and a different scenario, revolving around the traveling 'showboats' that ply entertainment spectacles around the Tinsitala Steppe region. The back cover led me to be...
The name of the planet is Trullion! World #2262 of the Alastor Cluster! The descriptions of this beautiful world and its backwoods society of islands and watery fens were the best part of the novel. As always, the author conveys a lot with a little; his spare prose is wonderfully stylish and his ...
Rhialto the Marvellous closes the initial collection of Dying Earth stories, as chronicled by Jack Vance, a master of invention who took me on an incredible journey through eons of history, hundreds of lost civilizations and quirky cultures, multicolored vistas of exotic lands, weird trees and ch...
A schoolteacher fights to prove that her father’s suicide was actually murder Ann hasn’t seen her mother in 3 years, and she doesn’t miss her at all. But without warning, Elaine shows up on her daughter’s doorstep, dead broke and hungry for scotch. Ann’s father has just come into an inheritance, ...
The Gray Prince – the novel – is reserved, dry, sly, a streamlined adventure, a mystery box full of more mystery boxes, a meditation on manifest destiny, a critical contemplation on colonialism that left me a little disturbed. The Gray Prince – the character – is a fool, a clown, an object of exp...
Picaresque Irish adventurer Paddy Blackthorn is caught attempting to steal an interstellar space drive and is sentenced to death by the ruling council of mutant humans. The mutants' creator bequeathed them the secret of the drive, and with it a monopoly on space travel, which allows them to domin...
On Wyst, world 1716 of the Alastor Cluster, millions of people live together in harmony, work only a few hours each week, and share the fruits of their labor equally. Wyst seems a utopia. But the Connatic, mysterious ruler of the Alastor Cluster, knowing better that to take utopia at face value, ...
In the purview of the Ulfs, such a provocation compelled retort, since a person who suffered shame by the purposeful act of another carried the stink of the occasion upon him until his enemy had been punished or until he had died in the attempt. Hence, as Aillas went about his affairs, he felt co...
Adam Reith looked aft in dismay, then ran to the control belvedere. Lifting the voluted bronze housing, he peered here and there among the scrolls, floral hatchings, grinning imp faces which almost mischievously camouflaged the engine.[ii] He was joined by the Dirdirman Ankhe at afram Anacho. Rei...
“Are you Magnus Ridolph?” The tone was direct with overtones of bellicosity. Magnus Ridolph wondered which of his creditors had been so importunate as to pursue him out here on the quiet blue sand beside Veridical Sea. Unfortunate—impossible to avoid him now. Magnus Ridolph said frankly, “I am he...
Water chuckled under the stern as wind from the south worked up a chop against the current, and with the anchor rope slack the vessel moved restlessly from side to side. Zamp stretched and groaned, climbed from bed, pulled the bell-cord for his breakfast, and arrayed himself in his morning robe. ...
He whistled, he caroled, he was plainly in high spirits. Around his finger he twirled a bit of wrought bronze — a circlet graved with angular crabbed characters, now stained black. By excellent chance he had found it, banded around the root of an ancient yew. Hacking it fr...
There was no unanimity of feeling regarding the event. King Casmir left the informal style of life at Sarris with reluctance. Queen Sollace, on the other hand, could hardly wait to put the rustic deficiencies of Sarris behind her. Cassander cared little one way or the other; boon companions, flir...
In my freshman year I wrote a long novelette, which I never submitted for publication, but which I later cannibalized.During my sophomore year, since I was still an English major, I took a course in creative writing. The professor was George Hand: a tall, saturnine gentleman, stern and doctrinair...
Damar, a thin sickle, hung low, backlighting the featureless black hulks to the east. No light showed; the air was cool and fresh; the only sound to be heard was the scrape of Ghyl’s footsteps. He let himself into the workroom. The odor of wood and finishing oil came to hi...
They stood in a bath of canary-yellow light and the sky over them had taken on an odd amber hue. Paddy and Fay crossed the balcony, stepped aboard an escalator which dropped them down, down, down to the white-columned city below. They passed great residences perched on led...