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Jack Vance is my favorite author. He writes science fiction, fantasy, mystery...you name it. Actually, he doesn’t really write any of those. Rather, he writes straight through and across all those boundries. There is some of each in most of what he writes. It makes him hard to classify, and untiringly popular with a great many fans. But not so much with publishers who don’t know where to pidgeon-hole him. Editors are further annoyed by his habit of contracting the old-fashioned way...for the printing of editions. So they may only lease his talent and not own him outright as they are able to get away with all too often. Their modern habit is to try and get away with paying authors an up-front fee, plus royalties, and then enjoy forever the right of printing works as much as they like (or never again) on nothing more simple advertising whim. That doesn’t cut it with Jack.
Jack has been writing since ten years even before I was born, and is getting quite elderly now. Although gone blind quite some years ago, still he writes. I do enjoy quite a number of authors: Harrison, Herbert, Heinlein, et al. But Jack Vance towers above them all. His writing is timeless “ meaning that often a reader can’t tell when it was written. Thus most of his works will never age.
I own copies of everything Jack’s ever published “ most of those hardcover, and nearly every one of them signed. You can see Jack signing some of them during my visit in one of the pictures.
Prolific reading is but one of my hobbies. Another of these is Espranto. When my fluency in the artificial languaged attained a level where I felt I should translate something, of course I wanted to translate Jack. But Jack has often been accused of being relclusive. This reputation accrued from his seldom bothering to attend major SF events. Yet when I went to contact him with the idea of leasing translation rights, I made contact easliy. How? I looked him up in the telephone directory. When I called, Jack answered the phone himself. And we made a deal in two minutes flat. And later I even got invited to his home. So much for his being a recluse. If you like, visit my translation site Mistera Sturno for three Vance short stories in Esperanto.
Please go check out the Vance Integral Edition. The VIE is a project thought up by Paul Rhodes, an artist and one of Jack’s most ardent fans. Paul and quite a number of others are slaving away to re-publish all of Jack’s works in a 44-volume collector’s edition. The photos above were taken at Jacks’s house during a research session of the VIE. We were there to study original manuscripts so as to bring the edition to complete integrity with with the originals. Some of the stories, sadly, were distorted over the years (tarted up according to Jack) by hack editors employed by the publishing houses. My contribution to the effort was OCR scanning: five novels and quite a few stories. I’m also working on a MySQL & Perl/Tk database of all the worlds of the Gaean Reach (if you’re a Vance fan, you’ll know what that is).
