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John Holbrook Vance (b. , Alan Wade, Peter Held, and John van See. He has won numerous awards and honors: (the mystery equivalent of the Hugo) for the best first mystery novel in 1961 for ''The Man in the Cage''; in 1990 he was named a SFWA Grand Master; and in 1992 he was Guest of Honor at the WorldCon in Orlando, Florida . He is generally highly regarded by critics and colleagues, some of whom have suggested that he transcends genre labels and should be regarded as an important writer by mainstream standards. For instance, Poul Anderson once called him the greatest living American writer "in" science fiction (not "of" science fiction). BIOGRAPHY Vance's grandfather supposedly arrived in California from Michigan a decade before the Gold Rush and married a San Francisco girl. (Early family records were apparently destroyed in the fire following the 1906 San Francisco Earthquake ). Vance grew up on a ranch in the area of the San Joaquin Valley around the delta of the Sacramento River and was an avid reader of the popular adventure-oriented Pulp Fiction of the 1920s. He left high school early and worked for some years as a construction worker and bell-hop, in a cannery and on a dredger before entering the University Of California, Berkeley where over a six-year period he majored in mining engineering and also studied physics, journalism and English, but took time off to work as an electrician in the naval shipyards at Pearl Harbor , Hawaii . Vance graduated in 1942 and did war service as a seaman in the Merchant Marine . Contrary to a tenacious legend, he was not torpedoed twice nor even once. This was probably invented in the early days by an editor to enhance Vance's attraction in a blurb. See the interview in Cosmopolis #39 June 2003 . In later years blue water sailing remained one of his favorite recreations; and ships, boats and/or water voyages are frequently encountered in his novels and stories (either directly, as in ''Showboat World'' and ''Trullion'', or indirectly, in the guise of starships and star voyages, as in ''Ports of Call''). He worked as a carpenter for some years while establishing himself as a writer. At university and afterwards Vance was active in Jazz bands as a horn player, and his first published writings were reviews of jazz concerts, as a columnist for ''The Daily Californian''. Music of various kinds is an element in many of his works, from grand opera (in ''Space Opera'' ) to village dance bands (Kirth Gersen poses as a flute player in ''The Book of Dreams'') to the world of Vance's classic short story 'The Moon Moth', whose inhabitants converse in elaborately prescribed modes of song, accompanying themselves on hand-held keyed percussion instruments. Vance is an able player of the jazz banjo and kazoo. In 1946 Vance met and married Norma Ingold. During the 1950s they travelled extensively in Europe as well as once spending several months in a Tahiti an beach house in the 1960s. He has lived most of his adult life in the hills above Oakland , California, not far from Robert Silverberg and Charlie Brown , the publisher of Locus . He began his full-time writing career in the late 1940s, the period in which the San Francisco Renaissance --a broad movement of experimentation in literature and the arts (ranging from poetry through architecture)--was in its early stages. Vance's own references to Bay Area bohemian life (directly in his early mysteries and in disguised form in his science-fiction novels) suggest affinities with this movement although not with its beat-generation wing. Certainly Vance's "Sailmaker Beach," the bohemian quarter of Avente on the planet Alphanor, is an overlay of San Francisco's North Beach , while the mad poet Navarth is said to be based on Kenneth Rexroth . Frank Herbert and Poul Anderson were among Vance's closest friends in the Bay Area science-fiction community and at one point the three jointly owned a houseboat in the Delta region of California. Vance was also a member of the Swordsmen And Sorcerers' Guild Of America (SAGA) , a loose-knit group Heroic Fantasy authors founded in the 1960s, some of whose works were anthologized in Lin Carter's '' Flashing Swords! '' anthologies. Although Vance has become legally blind in his old age, he continues to write with the aid of special software, his most recent novel being the whimsical Lurulu . He lives high in the Oakland Hills in the same hand-crafted house that he and his wife bought in the 1950s on a steep hillside lot and have continuously up-graded with such amenities as a hand-carved wooden ceiling from Nepal in the tavern-like dining room. OUTPUT AND CHARACTERISTICS He first ventured into print as a science-fiction author with the story 'The World-Thinker' in 1945. Since then he has written over sixty books. Many fall into series: perhaps the most notable are the four-book '' Dying Earth '' series, the source of numerous imitative works by many authors; the powerful five-novel '' Demon Princes series'', considered by some his acme; the four-novel ''Tschai'' series (also commonly known as the '' Planet Of Adventure '' series); the '' Durdane '' trilogy; the '' Alastor Cluster '' threesome; the '' Big Planet '' twosome; and the ''Lyonesse'' Fantasy Trilogy ; but there are others. Many of Vance's science-fiction series and stand-alone novels belong to a large vision of man's future that embraces a vast star region called the '' Gaean Reach '' along with its piratical, lawless extension, the id-region known as "Beyond." (Key centers of power in the Reach are "Old Earth" and the planet "Alphanor," the latter being central to the "Rigel Concourse of Worlds.") The Gaean Reach is depicted both in its earlier and later stages as lacking in much central authority (no "Federation" and certainly no Asimovian empire) but a certain degree of interstellar authority both in the Reach and Beyond is exerted by an Interpol type agency called the IPCC, which at a later stage in interstellar history is supplanted by the mysterious "Historical Society," a group of social scientists who are also specialists in covert action. In the Demon Princes series, the term Oikumene is used for the Reach. There is considerable overlap, but whether the Oikumene and the Gaean Reach are the same is open to question. Touching on the Gaean Reach but politically separate is "Alastor Cluster," a peaceful star federation held together by a Ruritanian style ruler, the "Connatic," with the help of a pirate-fighting navy called the "Whelm." Vance's series and individual novels may occur at various times in that future history, but the connections are not necessary to understanding each individual series (though they allow Vance the opportunity to use in one series delightful references to certain persons, such as Navarth , the mad poet, and certain imagined books, such as the multi-volume study ''Life'' by Baron Bodissey , mentioned in others). Vance's Science Fiction and Fantasy novels are typically straightforward, linear narratives, which can easily seduce a careless reader into mistaking them for mere Space Opera , although they are much more than that. (For Vance's idea of space opera, see his novel Space Opera .) Vance's tales characteristically feature a strong protagonist — sometimes strong by nature, sometimes forced to strength by circumstance — in quiet but tense opposition to an enfeebled society that he eventually redeems, often without its plaudits or even its notice. A typical example is the comparatively early and widely-admired novel ''To Live Forever'' (1956), which portrays a vast urban Dystopia of the far future (‘Clarges, the last Metropolis of the world’) whose society has discovered the secret of Immortality . To combat the threat of Overpopulation society has been rigidly segregated into five classes whose life-spans (from 80 years to infinity) are ranked according to ‘achievement, ingenuity, color and drive’. The ultimate goal is to join the immortal Amaranth society, but the actions of the protagonist Gavin Waylock eventually shatter this static society and make possible the exploration of the stars. This dark tale has been claimed by some as Vance's 'first adult novel'. Other books — a minority, but an important one in his oeuvre — display Anti-hero es (such as the ironically mistitled 'Cugel the Clever' in his ''Dying Earth'' tales) receiving the slings and arrows of what they — but not we — regard as outrageous fortune. Vance's works by and large are, under the hood, morality plays, howsoever subtle. Yet even a cut-throat, a trickster and a robber, suitably chastised by his vicissitudes, may finally triumph, as Cugel does in the sequel to ''The Eyes of the Overworld''. The ''Lyonesse'' series of fantasy novels constitute the exception to these rules; they are much more complexly plotted, intercutting the affairs of several different protagonists. But the chief attractions of Vance's novels are not their linear plots, but Vance's exquisite and bone-dry ironic language and his rich evocation — often in but a few words — of alien, complex, absurd, yet thoroughly human societies. Vance often creates in what amounts to a throwaway paragraph a world more fully realized than many writers manage in an entire doorstop-thick volume. An example of his inventiveness is his creation of several fictional games which feature in some of his novels, notably Hussade in the ''Alastor Cluster'' books and Hadaul, a martial arts sport, in ''The Face''. Vance's prose style probably attains its most perfect form in stand-alone novels such as ''The Last Castle'' and ''Maske: Thaery''. Another of Vance's special talents is the telling of tales-within-tales by use of chapter-heading quotations (notably, in the ''Demon Princes'' books, the adventures of one Marmaduke, quoted from ''The Avatar's Apprentice'', a tale from ''A Scroll from the Ninth Dimension''). In addition, Vance has a rare ability to use footnotes as an effective component of his novels, although parallels can be seen in the work of Flann O'Brien , especially ''The Third Policeman'', and in Conan Doyle 's asides (which might as well be footnotes) in which he titillates readers of his Sherlock Holmes stories with obscure references to the likes of the Giant Rat Of Sumatra . Often, Vance exposes the rather arbitrary nature of society by means of linguistic footnotes on untranslatable terms. These terms outline concepts central to the society described, but utterly alien to the reader. Indeed, Vance's ability to "explain" without diminishing the reader's mystification is part of the charm of his works, which are rich in the " Negative Capability " lauded by John Keats and essential to fantasy or science fiction. The fact that one never quite figures out what a " Deodand " looks like, or has never heard of the Flesh Cape of Miscus, in no way impairs one's ability to follow the story. A commonplace in Vance's works is the village (or planet) whose inhabitants practice with utmost sincerity a belief system which is absurd, repugnant, or both. Besides their Picaresque potential, Vance uses these episodes to satirize dogmatism in general and religious dogmatism in particular. Indeed, there is a great deal of the 18th-century '' Philosophe '' in Vance, who in his ''Lyonesse'' trilogy pokes particular fun at Christianity . Where so many peoples over the aeons have held so many disparate beliefs, Vance implies, who has the right to impose his dogma on others? But, in one of paradoxes so typical for Vance, nearly all his heroes are engaged in exactly that - they are constantly forcing their convictions on others, and tend to answer questions about their right to do so with a swordstroke or projac-blast. They are not interested, however, in promoting religious beliefs, but in basic honesty and ethical behaviour. This skepticism is tied to Vance's individualism, which is both an ethical and an aesthetic imperative for him and his characters. Thoreau's desire that there be as many different sorts of person as possible seems to be applied in practice in Vance's fiction along with the idea of a world, or a region of space, big enough to encompass all human types (as in ''Big Planet'' or the Alastor Cluster novels). His Enlightenment values appear again in his assumption that everyone should be free to realize himself in his own manner, provided that this self-realization doesn't act to the detriment of others. Often Vance's villains are grandiosely creative--and sadistic--personalities who destroy the lives or property of others in order to pursue their own obsessive visions. But after depicting their downfall, Vance leaves his readers with a lingering sense of regret. For instance, his darkly ambiguous hero, Kirth Gersen, after effectuating his revenge slaying of the unspeakable Lens Larque, proceeds to carry out the action that completes Larque's grand design (and does so with motives not very different from Larque's). {Link without Title} Vance favors aristocratic characters for the scope that status or wealth can undeniably provide, and he enjoys creating freakishly indivdualistic aristocratic societies (such as in the second ''Alastor'' novel, or like the Ska in ''Lyonesse''). A favorite theme of his (exemplified in ''The Last Castle'') is the decadent aristocratic society whose pursuit of aesthetic individualism has left it unable to cope with the challenges of reality, which may require cooperation and sacrifice. This tension recurs in Vance, though usually his protagonists find it possible to be both aesthetes and heroes. But Vance never assumes that aristocracy automatically confers merit. He is ruthless in his satire of pompous notables who think that noble birth saves them the obligation to be gracious or interesting. Pretension is always a vice in Vance. But he always distinguishes between pretension and actual elevation. One of the many charms of his work is the Shakespearean manner in which scoundrels and princes alike bargain and banter in elegant language. Vance wrote two novels that can be regarded as "political." The first, ''The Brains of Earth'', is a gruesome Orwellian satire on all attempts to impose rigid ideologies on societies or individuals. The second, ''The Gray Prince'', depicts the endless regress of grievances that can come into play in the context of ethnic liberation movements. This book has been accused of political incorrectness, because its villain, apparently based on Vance's fellow Oakland resident, the late Huey Newton of the Black Panthers , is a non-white leader of a tribal people on a planet where white ranchers control the land. But the villain is a nuanced character, the "joke" turns out to be on both settlers and revolutionaries, and the villain lives to fight another day. The second volume of the ''Durdane'' trilogy also deals, to a lesser extent, with political issues; in portraying Durdane's revolution, Vance displays a good understanding of the French revolution and the dangers of fanaticism (his hero just barely keeps things under control). Vance's emphasis on individualism prevents him from being a relativist. Indeed, his values sometimes assert themselves as socially conservative, as with his disdain for homosexual behavior: the few homosexuals in Vance's work are all villains, principally King Casmir Of Lyonesse , Faude Carfilhiot and the wizard Tamurello , all from the Lyonesse trilogy. One Dying Earth story, "The Murthe," is especially explicit in insisting that women's and men's natures are different and that any deviations from one's gender norm are to be avoided. This ontological "sexual conservatism" also manifests itself in male-female relations. Nevertheless, Vance has created lively and heroic female characters, such as Glyneth in the ''Lyonesse'' books; after Glyneth marries, she drops offstage for the last book in that trilogy, but is replaced by another assertive female character, Madouc. Further examples of female protagonists quite as capable as their male equivalents may be found in, among other titles, ''Monsters in Orbit'', ''Ecce and Old Earth'', ''A Room to Die In'', ''The Dark Ocean'', ''Night Lamp'' and the short story "Assault on a City", which also features one of Vance's nastier male villains. POSSIBLE INFLUENCES Vance has spoken of his fondness for the writings of P.G. Wodehouse and a certain influence of Wodehouse can be discerned in some of Vance's writings, especially in his portrayals of overbearing aunts and their easily intimidated nephews. The Wodehouse influence, however, may not be as pronounced as that of L. Frank Baum (see Baum's Vance-like use of stilted dialogue for comic effect in '' The Tin Woodman Of Oz ''). Whatever the relative weight of these and other models, Vance has proven himself a master of episodic farce in such works as ''Showboat World'', "The Kokod Warriors" (a short story), and the celebrated chapter in the ''The Book of Dreams'' in which Howard Alan Treesong returns to his Gladbetook High School reunion...to get even. In an interview published in 1986, Vance stated that 'the best way to teach someone to be a writer is to force them to read twenty books I would set out for them': he then names, in addition to Wodehouse and Baum, Cervantes 's Don Quixote , Kenneth Grahame 's ''The Wind in the Willows'', Richard Adams 's ''Watership Down'' and ''The London Times Historical Atlas'' ('my favourite book - I don't know of anything more clutching for the imagination'). He has, in fact, no clear ancestor in English-language fiction, but some intriguing parallels in tone, language, narrative structure and character could be drawn with the novels of Thomas Love Peacock and James Branch Cabell . Similarities can also be discerned in some of the writings of Washington Irving , who had a Vance-like fascination with rogue personalities and an ability to describe their competition and machinations in arch language and with a wry humor. Additionately, the Zothique cycle of short stories by Clark Ashton Smith clearly influenced to some degree The Dying Earth . AS MYSTERY WRITER The mystery novels of Vance are chiefly valuable today for what they reveal about his evolution as a science-fiction and fantasy writer (he stopped working in the mystery genre in the early 1970s except for science-fiction mysteries--see below). ''Bad Ronald'' is especially noteworthy for its portrayal of a trial-run version of what is perhaps Vance's greatest character-- Howard Alan Treesong of ''The Book of Dreams''. ''The Deadly Isles'' reveals, in its portrayal of Tahiti in the 1960s, some of the secret ingredients of master chef Vance's ability to cook up alien worlds with virtually no effort. The award-winning ''The Man in the Cage'' is a taut thriller set in North Africa at around the period of the French-Algerian war. ''A Room to Die In'' is a classic 'locked-room' murder mystery featuring a strong-willed young woman as the amateur detective. ''Bird Isle'', a mystery set at a hotel on an island off the California coast, embodies Vance's taste for farce. In particular, the two Sheriff Joe Bain mysteries--and especially ''The Pleasant Grove Murders''--can still be read with pleasure, although more for the delightful California characters (such as Bain's New Age girl friend Luna) than for the actual crime investigations. Vance has produced more successful mysteries set within his science-fiction universe. Most notable among these mixed-genre efforts are the "Galactic Effectuator" novelettes featuring Miro Hetzel, a Sam Spade type character, and the recent ''Night Lamp'', which borrows deftly from P.D. James ' ''An Unusual Job for a Woman''. An early 1950s short story series features Magnus Ridolph, an interstellar adventurer and amateur detective (similar to Leslie Charteris ' Simon Templar - but elderly and not prone to knocking anyone down) whose exploits appear to have been inspired, in part, by those of Jack London 's South Seas adventurer, Captain David Grief. PUBLICATION For most of his career Vance's work suffered the vicissitudes common to most writers in his chosen field: ephemeral publication of stories in magazine form, short-lived softcover editions, insensitive editing beyond his control. As he became more widely recognized conditions improved, and his works became internationally renowned among aficionados. Much of his work has been translated into several languages. THE VANCE INTEGRAL EDITION The Vance Integral Edition , a 5 year nonprofit effort involving about 300 volunteers internationally, has collected all of Vance's work into a uniform set of volumes. The texts have been, to a great extent, and as far as possible, restored to the often degraded original texts. The VIE editors returned to manuscripts, when available, or compared published editions. Usually hundreds of restorations were made in a typical novel, sometimes dramatic ones. Editors changed endings, dropped paragraphs, dumbed down vocabulary, and rewrote sections. VIE editorial processes and results were discussed extensively in Cosmopolis, the project monthly publication, available on the VIE site. The VIE set presents the totality of his work (minus the three Ellery Queen novels, which, in corrected texts, are available in a supplemental VIE volume). Some of Vance's texts are difficult to acquire. The VIE also includes some unpublished texts, such as 'Wild Thyme and Violets', and 'STARK' or 'Star Ark' a plan for a series of novels about a generational star ark. The VIE uses the original titles for Vance's books chosen by Vance himself that were rejected by publishers. For instance, ''Showboat World'' is published in the VIE under the title ''The Magnificent Showboats of the Lower Vissel River, Lune XXIII South, Big Planet'', a typical Vance trick for promoting the illusion of almost infinite spaciousness and variety. TRIVIA The Demon Princes are five briefly-allied galactic criminal kingpins who joined to conduct an infamous slaver raid on a planet colony (the Mount Pleasant massacre). Kirth Gersen's relatives were all slain or enslaved except for his grandfather, who then raised him on Old Earth and Alphanor as an instrument of vengeance. The Demon Princes, in order of publication of the novels in which they are featured, are: Attel Malagate ("Malagate the Woe"), Kokor Hekkus (aka "Billy Windle"), Viole Falushe (born Vogel Filschner), Lens Larque and Howard Alan Treesong. If one were to send a letter to Howard Alan Treesong when he was a teenager, one would address it to: Howard Hardoah, Home Farm, Gladbetook, Land of Maunish, Moudervelt, Van Kaathe's Star, The Oikumene. SELECTED BIBLIOGRAPHY Note: The series with asterisks below are the ones that apparently take place within the Gaean Reach/Alastor Cluster universe. (The informal grouping labeled "Gaean Reach" is individual non-series novels which also seem to be set in this universe.) The Big Planet twosome is asterisked because ''Showboat World'' contains Gaean Reach references (this makes the earlier novel by extension a Gaean Reach book even though it was written before Vance began to use the geographical terminology of his mature career). The Magnus Ridolph stories and the two Jean Parlier novels can be regarded as taking place during earlier centuries of the interstellar expansion of Old Earth and hence are pre-Gaean Reach tales. The two Miro Hetzel novelettes definitely take place within the Gaean Reach.
Dying Earth Series
Lyonesse Trilogy
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