The master craftsman of word-smiths … the voice of angels in a world-wise throat … Jack Vance.
He was good from the outset: the style and the substance alike.
Vance is hailed as a stylist, and with good reason.
But the substance is there too, in rich measure: Vance was a natural born story teller who had things to say and reasons to say them, a modern-day Jack London sailing the space-lanes.
Like many, I discovered Vance in my teens (the mid-1970s) via The Dying Earth.
Forty-some years, and many Vance novels and short stories later, the work I like to call out for special attention is his early (1956) novel To Live Forever. It shows great maturity for so early a work, and presages the central concerns that Vance will elaborate in his subsequent work.
I think of it sometimes when I read someone extolling their interpretation of Ayn Rand. (It’s the extolling that I find problematic, not Rand as such.) Neo-Randians need to lighten up and have some fun. Try To Live Forever – it’s got all the extolling of self-reliance that you are hoping for, and the cold pitiless individual-atomizing universe that will be the death of us all in due course which you celebrate in fear and delight … and yet recognizes (the part I like) that No Man Is An Island and that Bad Things Happen when we forget it or try to pretend otherwise.
