Jack Vance – Wis[s]e Words

Jack and Jack, Kirby and Vance

Published on May 30, 2012Leave a comment

cover of the Moon Moth comics adaptation

Tom Spurgeon recommends the comics adaptation of Jack Vance’s short story The Moon Moth

This has to be the oddest stand-alone science fiction comic I’ve read in years. While I can’t tell yet how good it is, it was certainly memorable and I encourage those of you that like such things — and as much as the new science fiction-oriented Image stuff is on everyone’s minds I’m thinking that’s a lot of you — pick this one up and take a look. Jack Vance has an almost Kirby-sized issue with neglect in terms of his influence and the ubiquity of his approach.

Interesting to compare Vance to Kirby, where I can sort of see what Tom means as both were incredibly influential on their own terms and somewhat neglected now, though I do think Vance does not quite have the stature in science fiction that Kirby has in comics, if only because the field is more contested. The true difference between the two is of course that Vance got to keep the copyright and trademarks for all his stories and Kirby could not, which means that we did get a fan driven Vance Integral Edition, but not a Kirby equivalent.

City of the Chasch — Jack Vance

Published on February 11, 2012Leave a comment

Cover of City of the Chasch

City of the Chasch
Jack Vance
172 pages
published in 1968

When I first started to discover science fiction (longer ago than I care to recall) Jack Vance was one of the more popular writers to be translated into Dutch and the local library therefore had a shitload of his books. I therefore read quite a lot of his work, including the whole Planet of Adventure/Tschai, the Mad Planet (as it was called in Dutch) tetralogy, in one of those big omnibuses Meulenhof specialised in. There’s little I remember off it, to be honest, other than that it was a typical Vancean planetary romance.

Jack Vance is of course the master of this subgenre, effortlessly creating new worlds and societies for his stories, always exotic and strange yet believable and with their own logic. Sometimes the stories he sets in these worlds disappoint, as was the case for me when I reread Big Planet two years ago. For City of the Chasch I had less expectations, just because I remembered less about it, but I was still a bit disappointed with it. Like Big Planet, the worldbuilding here is more sketched in than fleshed out, not as rich and interesting as I had hoped it would be. I had planned to read the next books in the series immediately (I’m still missing the fourth) after I’d finished this one, but now I’ll think I’ll pass.

Big Planet – Jack Vance

Published on June 17, 2010

Cover of Big Planet

Big Planet
Jack Vance
158 pages
published in 1951

It’s always dangerous to reread books you fondly remember from your youth. As Jo Walton put it, between the time you last read it and your rereading it, a book might have been visited by the suck fairy, which has taken all the awesome bits you remember and replaced them with dullness. Worse, the racism or sexism fairy may have also visited… I was therefore taken a risk in rereading Big Planet, one of the earliest Jack Vance novels I had ever read. Would it still be the great planetary romance I remember, or would all the adventure and wonder have been sucked out of it?

It turned out to be a bit of both. Not as good or great an adventure as my memory had made it, but still worth reading on its own accord. What my memory had made of Big Planet was much more exotic and detailed than it turned out to be, the real thing much more sketched out than filled in and how could it not with only 158 pages to play with. Nevertheless Big Planet is an important novel in Jack Vance’s development as a writer, as well as influential on other writers, as it shaped the planetary romance subgenre. Planetary romance being any science fiction story which takes place on a single planet and where most of the book revolves around the exploration of the planet, the stage more important than the actors on it.