Subscribe...his books Camp Concentration, On Wings of Song and 334 remain vivid in my mind thirty years later.About once a week, I think about some aspect of one thing or another from what he wrote--fairies and fairy traps from On The Wings of Song; Birdie Ludd's problems of creativeness in 334, the would be child murderers in Angouleme therefrom or the syphilitic prisoner genii in Camp Concentration, under constant surveillance, and how, too late, the experiment gets shut down on the spot by their terrified wardens when they decide they'll just work out their secret escape plan by just talking about alchemy and stuff right there in the out right on mike open air.
'All Vance's novels have exotic locales and cultures, resourceful heroes, and vigorous action, but in Emphyrio they are raised to the pitch of perfection, making the novel a tremendous pleasure to read, and giving it also a mysterious beauty'Not to mention the Moon Moth and Green Magic.
Kim Stanley Robinson
'Mr. Vance has written a fine book. Reading Emphyrio is like looking at the world through the wrong end of a telescope… and this combination of strange things seeming familiar and familiar things suddenly becoming strange is the oddest and the finest in the world… I really cannot do it justice. Mr. Vance knows about childhood, grief, love, social structure, idealism, and loss, but none of these breaks the perfect surface of the hook; everything is cool, funny, and recognisable while at the same time everything is melancholy, real, and indescribably strange.'
Joanna Russ, The Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction
I have spoken of, and tried--in vain I know (for, as I said, only long, continuous reading brings out the subtleties)--to illustrate Vance's ability to create fully sensed, in-depth, complex, real-seeming worlds. If you don't already know Vance, you may be thinking along the lines of "Now that's well and fine, but most good authors can construct complex worlds in some degree of detail; why is this guy harping so on Vance?" I will put aside the deeper depth and richer richness and more elegant elegance Vance achieves compared to most worldmakers to focus on what makes him extraordinary--no, more than extraordinary, unique. That special something is--we should have drum rolls here--Vance's ability to conjure up whole and complete worlds and societies so quickly, so easily, that he can use them as throwaways.Great Science-Fiction & Fantasy Works - Science-Fiction and Fantasy Books by Jack Vance
Every SF&F author is bound to imagine a world different from our own in some way or ways, and to convey to us with a scope commensurate with the scale of the difference the nature and flavor of that world. Good SF&F authors imagine complex worlds for their tales; what Jack Vance does is imagine thoroughly complex worlds so easily, so capably, that he can use them as toys irrelevant to his tales; he does it just for fun; and he throws one after another of these full-scale worlds away in a few pages or, sometimes, a mere few paragraphs. They are like doodles in the margin, yet each is something that most other writers, even good ones, would have had to labor long and hard over as a prime project.
Lawrence Person: Early in your career, critics placed you both inside and outside the New Wave. How heavily did the New Wave influence your own work, and did you feel you were a part of it?Suns New, Long, and Short: An Interview with Gene Wolfe
Gene Wolfe: I don't think I was heavily influenced by the New Wave. If I was a part of it, I was only a very remote, peripheral person. I suppose the epicenter of the New Wave was J. G. Ballard, although you might dispute that, and certainly I was at a great distance from J. G. Ballard. But if I could sell a story because of that connection, I was happy to do it...
Lawrence Person: How heavy an influence was Jack Vance, and how much did you use The Dying Earth as a conscious template for The Book of the New Sun?
Gene Wolfe: It was very considerable. I did not try to write an imitation of The Dying Earth. I certainly took that idea from Jack Vance. I had read that years and years before and had been enormously impressed with it. So yeah, he was a very considerable influence. I'm sure that's where I got the basic idea that's behind The Book of the New Sun, the idea of remote antiquity and looming catastrophe.
Disch was an often brutal satirist who wrote a beloved children's book about sweet-natured household appliances, an ironist who would cheer up a visitor by reading aloud poems ostensibly penned by Paddington the Bear, in Paddington's voice. He reveled in coincidence, in life and art. With Naylor, he wrote a marvelous historical novel, "Neighboring Lives," that explored the web of connections between Victorian thinkers and artists in Pre-Raphaelite London. Naylor gave him joy; "On Wings of Song" was dedicated to him.
Almost exactly a year after Naylor's death in September 2004, Disch began writing a sequence of poems, an extraordinary efflorescence of grief he shared on his blog. Eventually there were 31 of them. He titled the sequence "Winter Journey" after Schubert's lieder cycle "Winterreise" (a work Naylor loved). The poems are tragic, bitter, bleakly funny, romantic, heart-rending -- and also accessible. I can imagine, by some divine fluke, the book becoming a surprise, posthumous bestseller -- an irony Disch would have appreciated.
"The song does not end," Disch wrote in the closing pages of "On Wings of Song."
... and though he had written that song before he'd learned to fly himself, it was true. The moment one leaves one's body by the power of song, the lips fall silent, but the song goes on, and so long as one flies the song continues. He hoped, if he were to leave his body tonight, they would remember that. The song does not end.
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posted by OmieWise at 5:19 AM on July 7, 2008