Totality - 'The Vance Vocabulary Search Tool' - As in [Sean Connery] ''Vance, Jack Vance...[/Sean Connery]

October 22, 2009 2:52 PM

...chotz: that music with which an Eisel surrounds himself, to project his mood, or to present an ideal version of his personality... The 'personal music' is produced by an ingenious mechanism programmed, not by musicians, but by musicologists--so, the word chotz appears ten times. As in ..Jubal, becoming aware of the now irrelevant chotz, in irritation switched to Far Clouds in Stately Formation. The chotz setting Far Clouds in Stately Formation appears but once. Mordant appears 23 times, Cognomen, eight. Put in Emphyrio and one finds that it appears 70 times and thus--Too many results (more than 50). Your question is nuncupatory. Please refine your query... while amber appears 65 times to the same response.
Totality - 'The Vance Vocabulary Search Tool'
You will be given 500 sols to begin with--use them wisely.

Other Vancean sites worth a mention here now include Foreverness which, among may wonders, includes links to the first chapters of Maske:Thaery, The Star King and The Green Pearl, among others. For the newcomers, they certainly give the flavor.

And here are some pages from the handwritten first draft of Maske: Thaery, where we met Jubal Droad--a Glint of high ilk--and learned of the chotz. Another wonder at the Vance Museum is the cover of Thrilling Wonder Stories 27:2 (Summer 1945), with Vance's first published story within. An apt and auspicious title, all things considered. And here is yet another manuscript--Assault on a City. Vance's own title for the story, by the way, was The Insufferable Red Headed Daughter of Commander Tynott O.T.E. And the manuscript comes complete with Vancean footnotes, backwads. (So, that's how he wrote them...)

To sum up, then:

Your concepts have merit," said Ifness benignly.

posted by y2karl (5 comments total)

I thought, hey - that looks good. When I went to register, it kept rejecting my registration, no matter what user name I chose. Then, I tried pretending I was already registered, which I was, of course.

Then, disappointingly, it claimed that perruptor could not be found. A flaw exists.
posted by Kirth Gerson at 3:39 PM on October 22, 2009

"disbursion with intent to suborn ransackment, illicit possession of antiquities and revilery."

Crap, I've been trying to stop obsessively rereading my Vance collection. Every few months or so I'll remember some passage I like, and in the process of looking it up, end up rereading the entire book.
posted by gamera at 3:57 PM on October 22, 2009

Interesting to see those handwritten drafts, and how many edits they have. I love Vance to death, but he doesn't really seem like a multiple-drafts kind of guy.
posted by dfan at 5:11 PM on October 22, 2009

I ran into registration troubles too.
posted by Kattullus at 8:06 PM on October 22, 2009

"...nor trinkets like that foppish bedazzlement Cugel wears in his hat."

ahh brilliant.

I once tried to keep a toll of the number of deaths Cugel the Clever was responsible for, then I realised it was unreckonable. At least one entire town....

If you espy a man approaching with an unusual hat of several folds, who walks with his legs bent at the knees, make haste from the vicinity and do not return until the disaster has passed.
posted by Homemade Interossiter at 3:46 AM on October 23, 2009