{"id":1518,"date":"2014-08-02T16:37:16","date_gmt":"2014-08-02T20:37:16","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/cloggie.org\/books2\/?p=1518"},"modified":"2014-08-02T16:37:16","modified_gmt":"2014-08-02T20:37:16","slug":"fantasms-and-magics-jack-vance","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/cloggie.org\/books2\/2014\/08\/fantasms-and-magics-jack-vance\/","title":{"rendered":"Fantasms and Magics &#8212; Jack Vance"},"content":{"rendered":"<p><img loading=\"lazy\" decoding=\"async\" src=\"\/pictures\/books\/fantasms-and-magics.jpg\" width=\"232\" height=\"375\" alt=\"Cover of Fantasms and Magic\" class=\"alignleft\" \/><\/p>\n<p class=\"small\"><strong><br \/>\nFantasms and Magics<br \/>\nJack Vance<br \/>\n192 pages<br \/>\npublished in 1978<br \/>\n<\/strong><\/p>\n<p>\nThere was a time when I devoured each Jack Vance book I could find, back in my personal Golden Age of science fiction (which is age twelve, as you know Bob). I wasn&#8217;t the only one: Vance has always been popular in The Netherlands and most of his novels and story collections have been translated. His appeal is not hard to understand: a great sense of style, excellent writing and a flair for creating exotic yet believable worlds and the science not <cite>too<\/cite> rigorous. Granted, some of his novels and especially his series did not so much end as gutter out because he lost interest in them halfway through, but you don&#8217;t really read Vance for the plot anyway. With Vance, you&#8217;re there for the journey, not the destination.\n<\/p>\n<p>\nBecause of this I&#8217;ve therefore always found him better as a novel than a short story writer, though he has indeed written several classic science fiction and fantasy stories. None of them are in this collection though, which is a bit of a grab bag. There&#8217;s one classic <cite>Dying Earth<\/cite> story in here for example, also included in the actual <cite>Dying Earth<\/cite> collection. Worse, this is a reprint of a previous Vance collection, <cite>Eight Fantasms and Magics<\/cite>, with two of the stories removed, including the best one, &#8220;Telek&#8221;.\n<\/p>\n<p>\nNevertheless this is an entertaining read, perhaps not the best introduction to Vance, as there are better novels or collections for this, but not something to skip either, though the original collection may be a better one to seek out.\n<\/p>\n<ul class=\"nobullet\">\n<li>\nThe Miracle-Workers<br \/>\nThis is the longest story in the collection and features an old theme of Vance: a decadent society that has forgotten about the high technology it uses, prefering magic (or &#8220;hoodoo&#8221; here) instead.\n<\/li>\n<li>\nWhen the Five Moons Rise<br \/>\nA horror story set on a planet where if the five moons rise together, nothing is what it seems.\n<\/li>\n<li>\nNoise<br \/>\nStranded on a strange planet one man makes first contact with a very alien civilisation.\n<\/li>\n<li>\nThe New Prime<br \/>\nThe tests designed to objectively find the right ruler for a galaxy of two billion suns may not be as perfect as thought.\n<\/li>\n<li>\nGuyal of Sfere<br \/>\nOne of Vance&#8217;s elegiac Dying Earth stories, set in an age where technology for all intents and purposes has become magic and surviving humans have no real purpose in life other than to entertain themselves during their long lives.\n<\/li>\n<li>\nThe Men Return<br \/>\nIn a world where madness reigns, being sane is not a survival trait.\n<\/li>\n<\/ul>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>Fantasms and Magics Jack Vance 192 pages published in 1978 There was a time when I devoured each Jack Vance book I could find, back in my personal Golden Age of science fiction (which is age twelve, as you know Bob). I wasn&#8217;t the only one: Vance has always been popular in The Netherlands and [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":7,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[3],"tags":[633,331],"class_list":["post-1518","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-science-fiction","tag-fantasms-and-magics","tag-jack-vance"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/cloggie.org\/books2\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1518","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/cloggie.org\/books2\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/cloggie.org\/books2\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/cloggie.org\/books2\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/7"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/cloggie.org\/books2\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=1518"}],"version-history":[{"count":7,"href":"https:\/\/cloggie.org\/books2\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1518\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":3292,"href":"https:\/\/cloggie.org\/books2\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1518\/revisions\/3292"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/cloggie.org\/books2\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=1518"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/cloggie.org\/books2\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=1518"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/cloggie.org\/books2\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=1518"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}