A Look at Jack Vance’s The Dragon Masters
We’re celebrating the release of DCC Dying Earth all this Month with articles in honor of Jack Vance. A Look at Jack Vance’s The Dragon Masters by Fletcher Vredenburgh My father has a great love of Jack Vance which I suspect was for his satirical and sarcastic tone as much as the plots. The treasure trove of sci-fi books stored in our attic included many, many of his works. One it lacked, though, was the novella, The...
Howard and James’ Ten Vance Favorites
We’re celebrating the release of DCC Dying Earth all this Month with articles in honor of Jack Vance. Howard and James’ Ten Vance Favorites Recently the Skull issued a decree to various minions, bonded thralls, pseudo-sandestins, and temps from the secretarial pool to provide for his edification a list of their favorite works from the great and powerful wordsinger Jack Vance. Much of these replies were inferior, riddled...
Classic Covers: More From Jack Vance
We’re celebrating the release of DCC Dying Earth all this Month with articles in honor of Jack Vance. With hundreds of titles in dozens of editions in as many different languages, a catalog of Jack Vance’s prolific output is a feast of diverse and changing visual styles over many years. With cover illustrations as varied as Frazetta-style sword-and-sorcery, heady new age semiotics, surreal horror, literal Tolkien fantasy,...
The Dying Earth: A Case for Sword-and-Sorcery
We’re celebrating the release of DCC Dying Earth all this Month with articles in honor of Jack Vance. The Dying Earth: A Case for Sword-and-Sorcery by Brian Murphy Travel into the future: to an earth with a dwindling red sun that meekly fills a dark blue sky; an earth that is on the brink of dying out; an earth where science and magic mean the same thing. ~ back cover blurb, Tales of the Dying Earth, Tor Books In 1950...
What is the Dying Earth?
What is the Dying Earth? by Bill Ward “A dim place, ancient beyond knowledge. Once it was a tall world of cloudy mountains and bright rivers, and the sun was a blazing white ball. Ages of rain and wind have beaten and rounded the granite, and the sun is feeble and red. The continents have sunk and risen. A million cities have lifted towers, have fallen to dust. In place of the old peoples a few thousand strange souls live. There is...
Words Weird and Wonderful: Jack Vance’s Dying Earth
We’re celebrating the release of DCC Dying Earth all this Month with articles in honor of Jack Vance. Words Weird and Wonderful: Jack Vance’s Dying Earth by Bill Ward By no means secondary to his innovations in diction, Jack Vance’s exacting employment of etymological rarities, conjugational novelties, and antiquated antiquaria conspires to produce a style that may only be satisfactorily appellativized as...