In Which We Are Still Abandoned On Alphanor

Lurulu

by ALEX CARNEVALE

We think of Milton blindly dictating his version of familiar events. Or Helen Keller, feeling through the pages of an autobiography she could never truly experience except through touch. It must have been more difficult for Jack Vance, the man who invented the genre of fantasy as we know it, to lose his own sight.

Vance is no longer among us. Before his passing this week, he was nearly completely blind. When he began his writing career, he could see. Vance served and saw the world as a member of the Merchant Marines, and his early works betray that sensibility, although the locations and places they describe resemble those of Earth only in their underlying approach.

 His first efforts in the genre were straightforward science fiction with an urbane, heroic protagonist and usually a romance along the way. Today writing a story that deals with any element of the fantastic merely involves rehashing some old theme and giving it a new twist. There is little true originality in the field. When Vance began his career, there existed no Dungeons & Dragons (much of what became the franchise was essentially taken from Vance's series The Dying Earth), there existed no Tolkien-esque template derived from an academic background in mythology. Fantasy writing had no hold or status even as part of a niche.

Science fiction too was merely in its infancy, still trodding through the now stale stories of Asimov and his predictable peers. For Vance to write such fantastic tales took a mind of almost unlimited imagination. His early books like The Five Gold Bands are mere imitations of the pages of such traditional science fiction magazines. To be successful as a writer (and you could survive writing for the magazines alone during this period) making your work saleable was the prime concern. Editors were steeped in a certain iteration of the genre not because they could not recognize good writing, but because they knew their audience.

Reading Vance's first efforts today shows only an inkling of what was to come. It was with his novella The Dragon Masters that Vance first showed his command of dialogue and setting, the two aspects of genre writing where he not only exceeded the work of his peers, but went beyond any of the fiction of the period. Finding a good satirist in a morbid and depressing time is incredibly difficult, but that is what makes it so essential.

Reading the massively entertaining tribute volume to Vance released in 2009, Songs of the Dying Earth, you can get a decent enough sense of the man's style. Vance is great fun to imitate. Many of our finest writers can boast of a prose style that approaches poetry, but Vance's vocabulary was almost unlimited in scope. It is only one of the ways in which he outdoes his spiritual progenitor, Jonathan Swift.

If Vance could not find the right word for something in English, he merely redefined it or invented it. Many of his most memorable concepts were both new to the world of science fiction and new to the universe at large. Yet is Vance's places which are the most sublime. Vance is better than an anthropologist; he describes cultures that never existed as if they were surviving and thriving. And the food! Who could ever forget chatowsies, ahagaree or pourrain?

Jack's characters were sometimes criticized for being too stale or formulaic. If that is true than I can't think of a reason why I remember them all individually, even think of some of their decisions or sayings whenever I close my own eyes. For Vance, character was all about what you did, but that also included what you said and whether you actually lived up to it. Plenty of people in Vance's worlds spoke of certain positive things, like ending poverty or disease, or freeing the enslaved, but he left serious redoubt as to whether or not these individuals (1) were telling the truth or (2) had the same idea of enslavement as you or me.

In what follows I will explain the importance of each of Vance's varied novels, but these past years I kept returning to his last novels, the two-book collection consisting of the masterful Ports of Call and Lurulu. Ostensibly comic novels set in space, like almost all of Vance's work they picaresque jaunts into a familiar universe.

It seemed crucial that Vance explore it one final time, in the guise of interplanetary traders looking for the coda containing their own peace and happiness, called lurulu. It was essential to the story that this kind of lifelong achievement was completely reflective of the individual, and all of the protagonists were allowed their own kind of happiness, in their own way.

I could not help but think of Vance himself then, as I am sure he intended. His novels are wholly unautobiographical, taking place as they do in worlds so unlike our own, but the idea of him finding his own bliss had never occurred to me, since I was only concerned about how his novels brought me closer to mine. We are all selfish, Vance tells us, but that's all right.

Alex Carnevale is the editor of This Recording. He is a writer living in Manhattan. His Reader's Guide to the Novels of Jack Vance appears below. You can find an archive of his writing on This Recording here. He last wrote in these pages about James Agee.

Reader's Guide to the Novels of Jack Vance (Don't Argue)

The Dying Earth

The early volumes of The Dying Earth are old now, and the style is quite ancient, even for Vance. Still, his typical humor is on display, particularly in the wizard novella Rhialto the Marvellous, the type of conventional fantasy subject matter he rarely focused on. For our modern purposes, he did not really get going until his classic Don Quixote sendup in three short novels: The Eyes of the Overworld, Cugel the Clever and Cugel's Saga. Although decades elapsed before his last story with his comic fop, Cugel's tales are not just comedies, because around the humor lives a merciless and unforgivingly familiar world. Gotta read these every year.

Maske: Thaery

It took me some time to warm up to this story, but once I was able to see it for what it really was - that is, one of the best secret agent novels in a field crammed with mediocre ones - I was able to enjoy it. Horrendous title though.

The Demon Princes

Penned in the mid-60s, The Demon Princes is basically a proto-Kill Bill that involves protagonist Kirth Gersen hunting the men who killed his family. The single-mindedness of the five short novels that comprise the series is what gives them their charm. Gersen's methods and travails are both funny and moving, and the consideration of karmic revenge at hand actually turns this kind of behavior into a genuinely interesting intellectual topic instead of simply a vacuum for explosions and violence. The best of the books, with its extended musings on one of Vance's favorite topics, social class, is clearly The Face, and anyone who argues is mad. Collected together, this is the most fun you can have without a vibrator.

The Cadwal Chronicles

Possibly my favorite of Vance's books, the Cadwal Chronicles — Araminta Station, Ecce and Old Earth, and Throy are definitely not for beginners either. They are quite pedantic and overlong in parts, but this is simply another aspect of their charm. Vance made a habit of taking up subjects that other authors would not touch. Here he considers the topic of preserving a planet's natural environment, and the complications that ensue when well-meaning people stifle the tide of progress. To turn that into a hilarious comedy is quite the feat indeed. The motivations at play are quite mature for Vance, and the love story is his very best.

The Languages of Pao

Vance obviously loved playing around with language, and he was deeply interested in how changing what something was called affected the surrounding culture. At first I was a little cold on this dystopic story, but I later appreciated the ideas in it a lot more. Unlike most of Vance's work, it has little to no romance in it, and a limited set of characters and situations. Still, it's a fascinating treatise.

Alastor

Vance's three novels set in the Alastor universe don't really connect in any obvious way. The second, Marune, is one of Vance's least compelling narratives, taking up as it does the familiar cliche of a character who does not remember his past. Trullion in contrast is regarded as one of Vance's most famous works. It is a brilliant mystery with many exciting revelations, and the culture it presents is both behind and ahead of its time. It is the source of Vance's famous fictional sport hussade, which I still need to play. The last novel in the series, Wyst, is basically Vance dabbling in the idea of a monoculture and it's a great adventure novel too.

Durdane

Vance's Durdane trilogy (The Anome, The Brave Free Men,  and The Asutra) is often overlooked. I don't want to say it is for good reason, since they are very good, but something was missing here. I think the problem is in the characters. It's hard to really identify with the heroes' struggle, and the surrounding world-building is a bit confusing at times. The aliens themselves are also not Vance's best. Still I've probably reread these books as much as anything except for The Eyes of the Overworld.

The Gray Prince

Vance disdained ideology. His attack on identity politics is contained in this slim novel, which concerns a world in which the status of a group of autochthons is very much in doubt. The Gray Prince was also his comment on the significance of national borders (and by extension the plight of Israel), and as such, deserves to be made a part of every single international relations course offered. It's also a thriller of sorts that considers ideas like racism and poverty in a way accessible to those who might not normally be intrigued by them.

Showboat World

Vance's comic novel of a world in which the only true life consists of stage shows traveling up and down rivers is a bit slight compared to his other works, but it's great fun nonetheless. His love for the theater pops up all over his oeuvre.

Planet of Adventure  

Very misunderstood. In the guise of an adventure novel Vance placed the story of Adam Reith, a strange from Earth who crash lands on a savage planet called Tschai, where four different alien races conflict with humans in various way. Planet of Adventure is first and foremost Vance's funniest novel, but within that comic stricture are overarching themes not really approached by other authors. The best of the four sections is of course, The Dirdir, which finds Reith and his compatriots murdering the lion-men Dirdir in their own hunting grounds in order to collect sequins from their evil victims. Not all of Vance's work is so clearly conducive to cinematic adaptation, but given all the other junk that is being adapted into film and television, you would have to think someone would take a serious look at this eventually. A masterpiece.

Lyonesse

Vance clearly labored on this extremely long fantasy saga, and the only text available contains a number of contradictions and errors. The three books — Suldrun's Garden, The Green Pearl, and Madouc — are sort of all over the place at times. They contain, however, the best of Vance's serious writing, and the unexpected shock death in the first novel basically ensured Ned Stark would die much much later on. The female characters here simply shine. Lyonnesse is definitely flawed and not for those new to Vance; however, its depiction of war, slavery and politics in the Elder Isles is so impressively detailed, with the characters so remarkably themselves, that is is worth coming back to once you get the hang of JV.

To Live Forever

One of Vance's early novels, the very idea of a character named Gavin Waylock is enough to recommend it. A dystopian novel that asks whether or not life extension is maybe not the best idea for a free society.

The Blue World

I guess they just stole Waterworld from this? Not sure how that works. The idea of a planet without land and what the people would do who lived on it is here not simply fodder for Dennis Hopper's coke-fueled monologues. A great adventure novel with a relentless and scintillating atmosphere that really deserves more attention.

Big Planet

It is seriously astonishing that this was written in the 1950s, because at this time nothing on its scope or theme had ever been accomplished in fiction. The atmosphere that surrounds the characters here is arguably more important the events or people themselves. In this way Vance posited one possible direction for fiction, in which the real events to take notice of occurred in the minds of the reader long after those described in the novel had finished. In short, a perpetual process of world-building.

Night Lamp

Vance's later novels were clearly hampered by the fact that they had to be dictated. At times, some of them seem a little distracted, and have trouble correctly revisiting themes or places in the same manner as the old Vance. Night Lamp suffers from this kind of inconsistency in character and plot, and its world is maybe not as impressively detailed as some of Vance's other novels in that vein. Still, no one ever gets tired of the war against slavery, and the cultural notes at play here generate an amazing travelogue.

The Many Worlds of Magnus Ridolph

The ideal introduction to Vance's satire comes in this slim volume of detective stories. In some ways, Ridolph's ungainly form is a loathsome sight for both his friends and adversaries; in others he is a conveyer of justice unlike any other. Here Vance is reduced to the simple mysteries he found in everything, and the work shines.

In Which We Look To The Future Of Our Race

Fear of the Unknown

by ALEX CARNEVALE

It is difficult to find the good parts of Edward Said's Orientalism. This is a book so in love with itself that it cites Henry Kissinger as being a man of considerable naivete. Said called himself a "humanist," which was a way of putting aside the perspective you were writing from, a neat rhetorial trick. Orientalism is actually at base a book about why renaming things is a powerful political tool, and if the book influenced any of the political actions in the Arab world that used this transcendent tactic, that might even be a point in the tome's favor.

Then again, it's somewhat charming that Said had the temerity to approach the topic at all. Most of Orientalism, in fact, is about all the slightly more dishonest things that have been written about the non-European world, which in its totality constituted the focus of the Jerusalem-born politician's writing. Said was above all a politician-martyr, and when he died in 2003 he left behind a legacy of us versus them political effluvium that has haunted political science departments across the eastern seaboard. Said wasn't so much a thinker as an advocate for his cause, and in fact Orientalism today would actually be more appropriate as a pamphlet.

For one of the book's epigraphs, Said quoted Disraeli's saying that the Orient was a career. I have always found this to be among the funniest lines in the book, since Said goes to extraordinary trouble to refute Disraeli's contention, while every part of his life embodied it. Said believes that our knowledge of the Orient is "ignorant, but complex" — the kind of observation that wouldn't stand up to the scrutiny of a dinner party if you didn't already want to believe it. The very fact that Westerners were able to make careers of it suggests they understood it far better than Said believed. Said retroactively applied the current political attitude towards the Arab world to its history, with varying results.

Much to Said's probable disgust, we are being assaulted with Western literature and art about the non-European world. Every single newsmagazine did a special issue focused on China, currently the most economically powerful nation in the world. Although our American engagement with the Arab world hasn't been all negative in the wake of attacks by Muslim extremists, it has naturally been the focus of many films and novels. China has begun to receive the same treatment.

with mahmoud darwishPaolo Bacigalupi's novel The Wind-up Girl shared the 2010 Hugo, science fiction's most prestigious award with its more readable, more serious China Mieville counterpart The City & the City. It won the Nebula by itself. The fact that Bacigalupi's book won an award of any kind (it placed 9th on Time's best books of the year for no discernible reason) should be a surprise to enthusiasts of any kind of literature. The City & the City blew The Wind-up Girl away. As Michael Moorcock put it about Mieville's book in The Guardian:

As in no previous novel, the author celebrates and enhances the genre he loves and has never rejected. On many levels this novel is a testament to his admirable integrity. Keeping his grip firmly on an idea which would quickly slip from the hands of a less skilled writer, Miéville again proves himself as intelligent as he is original.

In contrast, The Wind-up Girl is a borderline offensive Vernor Vinge imitation that approaches the genius of its model at no real point. To talk about China, Bacigalupi sets his story in a futuristic Bangkok. He then does us the disservice of filling this city with every science fiction cliche imaginable. Many major cities, including New York, are buried underwater, in a conceit as transparent as Law & Order cases ripped from similar headlines. Levees keep Bangkok dry and tight, and it's probably no coincidence Bacigalupi dedicates his novel to Spike Lee. Well, he should have.

Paolo Bacigalupi

The Wind-up Girl of the book's title is a so-called New Person, which is incidentally where they got the name New Meadowlands from. Emiko spends most of her time being raped onstage for the fun of visiting tourists and businessmen (get it?!?). Emiko is so "creative" that if she gets too wound up — if her systems overheat, and she tries to flee her enslavement — she could die within minutes. In other words, the inventor of an artificial intelligence decided that it was worth the trouble to create this being but not worth the trouble to have simple safeguards to prevent it from being completely destroyed if it ran too far or too fast. Bacigalupi is about as imaginative as the worst science fiction and fantasy we've seen on television, the absurd scenarios of Surrogates or The Event, or the Battlestar Galatica reduxes that posit humans under the control of technology.

All science fiction looks towards the future of our race, but that is a broad brush. But some of science fiction — the part of it that I despise — is really just the simple reiteration of Luddite fears. In Bacigalupi's world, generot has taken hold and famine rocks the world. This is only one of his incredibly boring reversals of what applying technology to the creation of food has actually been able to accomplish in the world. Bacigalupi simplifies things even worse than Said does, and he does it for the same political reason.

In reality, the history of the non-European and European worlds are not so strange to each other. Men like Bacigalupi and Said imagine a great gap between us and them. Bacigalupi's non-European protagonist is a so-called "yellow card"; as if throwing one more Nazi cliche on the rest of his claptrap wouldn't hurt. Hock Seng is former Chinese man who wants to steal Western technology in order to make a better life for himself. In order to not make this toadying, desperate character offensive, Bacigalupi turns him into a hero. His counterpart in the sweatshop business is the American representative of a Michael Moore corporation that's trying to do what Disraeli said was possible. Reducing the world economy to a simplistic black and white for the purposes of fiction is bad for both the world economy and fiction.

Anyway, there was a lot more exciting science fiction and fantasy published in 2010 that didn't necessarily win gaudy honors. Here were a few of my favorites:

Songs of the Dying Earth (eds Gardner Dozois and George R.R. Martin). This voluminous celebration of Jack Vance is all the more extraordinary because it comes while the now-blind and no longer writing legend is still alive. Most of what isn't some Tolkien-cliche in modern fantasy comes from Vance's Dying Earth series, and he's the ideal vehicle for other writers to inhabit. Stories from the late Kage Baker, Jeff VanderMeer, and Martin himself stand out. One of the best tribute collections in the short history of them.

Dragon Haven (Robin Hobb). The Alaskan-raised Margaret Lindholm had most of her success under the Hobb pen name. Her latest series has been her most engaging, set the in world of her Tawny Man and Liveship Traders trilogies. As sad as it is to say, it's still relatively unique to find exciting female characters in the male-driven world of fantasy, and Hobb's have interesting dilemmas that do more the rehash tired debates. She takes two of fantasy's most dull cliches - dragons, and homosexual love - and makes them seem fresh. This second book in the Rain Wilds chronicles doesn't necessarily imply a third, but the prolific Hobb is working on one anyway.

The Sorcerer's House (Gene Wolfe). The year's most entertaining novel is a midwestern America puzzle that reimagines the world of Faerie in the setting of a modern mystery. Unlike its spiritual twin Pandora by Holly Hollander, Wolfe uses the epistolatory style to create an inventive mystery that requires several re-readings to digest fully. And once you're done with that, the finest American writer today's new novel, Home Fires, hits shelves in January.

Black Hills (Dan Simmons). Simmons' efforts once tended more towards epic space opera and horror. Now his love of historical fiction has allowed him to define a new genre. If you're interested in early America and Orson Scott Card hasn't already ruined it completely for you, Dan's latest is up to his usual par. It's not for everyone in the way that his Hyperion quadrilogy captivated so many readers, but it's still a lot of fun on its own.

2011 promises a much better slate, including Wolfe's Home Fires, Michael Swanwick's Dancing With Bears, Richard K. Morgan's The Cold Commands, Patrick Rothfuss' The Wise Man's Fear, ideally George R.R. Martin's long awaited A Dance with Dragons, Jo Walton's Among Others and Joe Abercrombie's The Heroes.

Alex Carnevale is the editor of This Recording. He last wrote in these pages about Sofia Coppola's Somewhere. He tumbls here and twitters here.

"Black and Blue" - Miike Snow (mp3)

"Burial" - Miike Snow (mp3)

"Faker" - Miike Snow (mp3)