We’re celebrating the release of DCC Dying Earth all this Month with articles in honor of Jack Vance.Where to Start With Jack Vanceby Bill WardJohn Holbrook “Jack” Vance (1916-2013) was an extraordinarily prolific and award-winning author across multiple genres, but it is for his work in the science fiction field that he is most celebrated. ‘Science Fiction’ as a genre and marketing category is an extremely big tent—including everything from nuts-and-bolts stories describing the physics of orbital bodies to swashbuckling tales of ray-gun-wielding heroes racing skyships over the ruined landscapes of Mars. Vance’s own unique voice arose at a time when popular adventure stories shifted from the lost corners of the Earth to the unimagined frontiers of space and time, with scientific trappings, exotic settings, and odd terminology seasoning the already familiar dish of two-fisted pulp adventure. But Vance wasn’t really a pulp writer, though his earliest sales were to places such as Startling Stories and Thrilling Wonder Stories, and his work throughout his career always placed solid plotting, a swift pace, and efficient storytelling at center stage. He emerged in the post-pulp era after WWII, a time of transition away from classic adventure serials toward speculative stories of space travel, alien encounters, and technological progress. Indeed, this period is often termed the Golden Age of Science Fiction, and Vance would become one of its leading lights – and biggest mavericks. Far from writing stories in the Campbellian mode such as contemporaries Frederick Pohl and James Blish, Vance did his own thing, his ‘science’ elements far more focused on biology and anthropology than astrophysics and robotics. Many of his earliest sales are mystery stories in a sci-fi setting, and his debut novel—really an interconnected series of short stories—is about as convincingly described as a fantasy book as is possible, despite it being set on a far-future earth a billion years hence experiencing the last gasp of a dying star. Like all truly great artists, Vance has a distinctive, near-inimitable, authorial voice; joining the list of other true originals in seeing his surname rendered into an adjective—Vancian. A Vancian story might be said to be a picaresque tale following a strongly motivated and highly-capable protagonist through a series of colorful, imaginative, and occasionally farcical adventures against a kaleidoscopic backdrop of endlessly inventive human cultures. But is in the nature of Vance’s prose, a...