“While we are alive we should sit among colored lights and taste good wines, and discuss our adventures in far places; when we are dead, the opportunity is past.” -- Jack Vance

Born in 1916, the supremely estimable Jack Vance would have turned eleventy yesterday. Right after I realized that fact, I also realized that I had never written a post dedicated to Mr. Vance for the DMR Books blog. I had mentioned him many times, to be sure, but I had never given the man his proper due. That injustice ends now.

For those who don't know, Jack Vance is a titan in the fields of both fantasy and sci-fi adventure--on top of a successful run as a writer of mysteries. Works like The Dying Earth, The Dragon Masters and The Last Castle are still considered classics in their genres. As the official Jack Vance website states:

'Among his awards are: Hugo Awards, in 1963 for The Dragon Masters, in 1967 for The Last Castle, and in 2010 for his memoir This is Me, Jack Vance!; a Nebula Award in 1966, also for The Last Castle; the Jupiter Award in 1975; the World Fantasy Award in 1984 for life achievement and in 1990 for Lyonesse: Madouc; an Edgar (the mystery equivalent of the Nebula) for the best first mystery novel in 1961 for The Man in the Cage; in 1992, he was Guest of Honor at the WorldCon in Orlando, Florida; and in 1997 he was named a SFWA Grand Master. A 2009 profile in the New York Times Magazine described Vance as "one of American literature’s most distinctive and undervalued voices." '

Impressive...and that just scratches the surface.

I can't recall when I first heard of Jack Vance; not precisely, anyway. I'm pretty sure I read about him before really reading anything he wrote. That would've been in 1980, when I picked up The Spell of Conan. Just all-around, that book was my own personal 'Appendix N'. Beside all of the Howardian material, there was an excellent essay, "The Dying Earth", by Robert E. Briney. It contained a short excerpt from Vance. That excerpt plus the essay pre-sold me on what many consider Vance's greatest work: The Dying Earth.

I'm fairly certain it was after that when my mom bought me a used copy of Flashing Swords! #1 for Christmas. It contained "Morreion" by Vance, which was a story set in the same universe as The Dying Earth but published years later. While I quite like it now, it was the wrong story at the wrong time. It was basically wizards intriguing and fighting each other and I just sort of bounced off of it. However, Lin Carter stated in the intro that Jack was a proud member in good standing of the Swordsmen and Sorcerers' Guild of America (S.A.G.A.), so I figured "Morreion" was just an aberration of some kind.

Fast-forward about five years. I found a Lancer copy of The Dying Earth. Mind blown. The language was like Dunsany and Clark Ashton Smith distilled down, all in the service of telling tales about a phantasmagorical Earth at the end of time. Others had been enthralled before me, authors such as Tanith Lee, Dan Simmons, Michael Shea, Gene Wolfe, Roger Zelazny, Glen Cook, Lin Carter and Robert Silverberg.

From there, I bought The Eyes of the Overworld, one of the first Sword-and-Sorcery novels to ever appear in paperback, and its sequel, Cugel's Saga. Both books recounted the Dying Earth adventures of Cugel, an utter scoundrel who is handy with a blade and far less handy with magic.

Soon after, I picked up Vance's award-winning 'Lyonesse' novels, which are medieval epic fantasies told as only he could tell. Jack's writing style for virtually all of his SFF fiction is inimitable with his wry, very understated humor poking through here and there. The characters in his tales are more than capable of deeply insulting or threatening each other in a courtly style.

I then branched out into Jack Vance's sci-fi novels. Jack had started out writing SF for the pulps and that was the genre wherein he wrote the most stories for several decades. I picked up The Dragon Masters and The Last Castle, both of which richly deserve their status as SF classics. After that, I read the 'Demon Princes' novels, which comprise one of the great tales of revenge within the sci-fi genre. I also bought the hardcover of Araminta Station when it first came out and purchased the rest of the 'Cadwal Chronicles' novels as they were published. When I bought Lurullu and learned that Vance had stated it was, unequivocally, his last book, that was truly a sad day. In consolation, I still have many of his SF works to read.

Jack's style, as I've said, is unique and inimitable. I can also state that his imagination was truly top-tier. Without a doubt, Vance dreamed up cool things and concepts which no SFF writer had thought of before. His stories are set from pre-Arthurian times right up until the last days of Earth and far across the galaxy. So, get out there and grab a cheap used paperback or e-book and see for yourself.

Raise a glass in honor of the birth of Jack Vance, sword-brothers. We'll never see his like again.