MetaFilter posts tagged with Vance

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

y2karl — Thu, 22 Oct 2009 14:52:17 -0800

...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.

y2karl — Wed, 10 Apr 2002 01:42:51 -0800

A Few Words About Jack Vance. Gersen entered a hall with a floor of immaculate white glass tiles. On one hand was the display wall, characteristic of middle-class European homes; here hung a panel intricately inlaid with wood, bone and shell: Lenka workmanship from Nowhere, one of the Concourse planets; a set of perfume points from Pamfile; a rectangle of polished and perforated obsidian; and one of the so-called "supplication slabs"* from Lupus 23II.
* The nonhuman natives of Peninsula 4A, Lupus 23II, devote the greater part of their lives to the working of these slabs, which apparently have a religious significance. Twice each year, at the solstices, two hundred and twenty-four microscopically exact slabs are placed aboard a ceremonial barge, which is then allowed to drift out upon the ocean. The Lupus Salvage Company maintains a ship just over the horizon from peninsula 4A. As soon as the raft has drifted out of sight of land, it is recovered, the slabs are removed, exported and sold as objets d'art.
(Not for season ticket holders to The Short Attention Span Theater -More within)

y2karl — Tue, 02 Oct 2001 23:19:40 -0800

A veritable potpourri of je ne sais quoi : so, I'm just dinkin' around, looking things up from my wish list, compiled before I got online at home, tonight's quest was 'Virgil Finlay,' and I back into this incredible virtual theme park devoted to the greatest living American science fiction author (that lifted straight from my show's, ahem, links page, that), imo--no humble here and now--and it's got starcharts of the Oikumene and maps and meals...gee, did I say it was a French site? And Rpgs and on and on and on...You 'could her nipples be any harder?' Klingon forehead hair splitting color TV babies have no idea: the technology does not exist to take his work to screen. The man is the premiere prose stylist of the genre and this concept has merit, I tells ya...