#jack vance

[simon-roy]

The idea of logging on a colonized alien planet brings my mind back to the planet Lalonde from Peter F. Hamilton's Night's Dawn books - a world that had very hard wood as its only meaningful export, and was also stuck developing its economy from agriculturalism (due to investment shortages, though).

All this is to say - Hey! What are some foundational inspirations for your sci fi verse? You gotta have some like recommendations of classic or older sci-fi for us, right? What are some of your suggestions of books and authors to read?

OK SO - My sci-fi tastes have sort of ended up in some very specific niches. Growing up, I was a Larry Niven +Jerry Pournelle man, in part because my dad amassed a huge collection of their books - then gave 90% of them away before i was old enough to read them. So one of my teenage missions was rebuilding that library, trash and all!

Stuff like Footfall, Ringworld, Gil "The Arm" Hamilton, Protector (yes i attempted to name a comic series similarly, and paid for it) "The Mote in God's Eye"... you name it, I read fuckloads of these books. And while they tend to land on a sort of human chauvinist "mankind will win based on his inherent adaptive human-ness, and the aliens will fail because of their rigid alien-ness", this shit was very foundational to me.

Their more collaborative series, The Man-Kzin Wars and War World, also loom large in my teenage mind. The Man-Kzin wars are super fun - humans meet a race of tiger-men, and go from being NWO peaceniks to roughneck cat-skinners in a generation! PEACE AND LOVE WONT DEFEAT TIGER MEN!

Similarly, war world (like lots of that 70s/80s military sci fi) was a sort of catch-all for western military nerds to play with their favorite factions - it was a planet where all the un-ruleable ethnic groups and nationalities had been deported by the authoritarian earth government, and left to rot... until a race of genetically engineered fascist super men land on the world, and start trying to rule the place. Pretty fun shit.

As I got older, I turned hard into William Gibson, and read the absolute shit out of both the Neuromancer trilogy and the Bridge trilogy, as well as his short stories. Bruce Sterling was part of that wave for me, too, and I religiously sought his old paperbacks out too. In terms of novels, "Distraction" is my favorite coherent Sterling Novel - though the short stories in the "Schismatrix" novel/collection of his remain my absolute favorite space opera pieces.

At this age, too, I found my top-top fave Sterling Stories - "Taklaman" and "Bicycle Repairman", both gritty pseudo-cyberpunk stories of the highest degree, in this collection:

This thousand-plus page collection of short stories and novellas was basically my bible for a few years - i put sticky notes on each story i loved and meant to return to, until the book was so festooned with sticky note bookmarks i abandoned the practice altogether. If you have the chance, just buy this book and chew on it for a few years.

As i got into my 20s, Charles Stross became my lode star - his books like Accelerando and Glasshouse were total game changers for me. They come with their own peculiarities, but I loved his transhuman/posthuman musings (or at least i was obsessed with his stuff for a good few years - the venn diagram of his obvious interests and my own overlapped enough that his books were great fodder for a growing sci-fi loving brain).

But since then, my main literary squeeze has been the great man, JACK VANCE. Working on Prophet, my friend @cmkosemen made a remark about how much the early issues of the series reminded him of a book series called "Planet of Adventure" or "the Tschai Cycle", by Jack Vance. The book has a beautifully simple setup - a man from an entirely undescribed spacefaring human civilization crash-lands onto a weird planet. But on that planet, he finds four separate civilizations, each who possess a population of enslaved humans, culturally and physically molded to the needs of their masters. And each book of this series covers our generic hero's interactions with each bizarre expoitative culture. I was extremely intrigued.

Soon thereafter, I found my current absolute favorite book - "THE DRAGON MASTERS". A book about an isolated medieval world... which gets visited, once every few generations, by a black pyramid starship, flown by a reptilian race known as the Greph. The greph capture humans to (surprise surprise) breed them into hyper specific slaves... who in turn become Greph-like in their thinking and demeanours. But the last time the BLACK PYRAMID landed, a bunch of angry medieval dudes stormed the thing, blew it up, and captured a bunch of greph... who became the breeding stock for a whole new human world of slave labour. By the time we meet this planet, the two rival lords of the human-populated regions have been breeding greph slave warriors, or "dragons", for generations, for combat against one another. But soon, the black pyramid will return...

I love this book I even spent a good few months during covid talking with the Vance Estate and several publishers about developing it into a graphic novel, but nobody could quite agree on how it could get made with old Simon getting a paycheque... so sadly it fell apart. There are concept drawings floating around my patreon and other corners of the internet. But one day I'll use 'em...

My other favorite books of his, to name a couple of the MANY books of his I love:

THE BLUE WORLD: A caste system of humans, descended from a crashed prison ship, live on floating settlements on an ocean planet, paying protection to a giant long-lived intelligent crustacean. But one man is tired of giving up all his crops to this tyrannical megafauna...

THE MIRACLE WORKERS: Rival lords on a planet descended to medieval tech (surprise surprise) fight using armies... and rival SORCERORS who employ the powers of suggestion to voodoo each others' warriors... but when facing non-human intelligences, these sorceror's skills fall short.

But there are heaps more, and I love most (thought not all) of the ones i've read. They're generally short, concise, and full of all sorts of bizarre bullshit.

THere are more books i've read and enjoyed in my life, of course, but these are the core ones that I think of when I think of my career as a sci-fi reader... let me know what your top recs are!

#sciencefiction #science fiction #book recommendations #jack vance #larry niven #jerry pournelle #simon roy #griz grobus #charles stross #dragon masters #william gibson #bruce sterling

[70sscifiart]

Jean-Claude Hadi's interior illustrations for a 1976 French translation of Jack Vance's Trullion novels.

#Jean-Claude Hadi #Jack Vance #french sci-fi #photo set #pink sci-fi

[retroscifiart]

Jack Gaughan - Eyes of the Overworld (Jack Vance, 1966)

#jack gaughan #Jack Vance #mushrooms

[swornsword]

#dying earth #sword & sorcery #jack vance #science fantasy

[misforgotten2]

A book you very likely don’t have on your shelf #480

1974

Written by Jack Vance

#1974 #1970s #1970's #cover art #book cover #paperback #vintage paperback #ellery queen #jack vance #ephemera #mystery

[geekynerfherder]

Showcasing art from some of my favourite artists, and those that have attracted my attention, in the field of visual arts, including vintage; pulp; pop culture; books and comics; concert posters; fantastical and imaginative realism; classical; contemporary; new contemporary; pop surrealism; conceptual and illustration.

The art of Nicolas Bouvier (aka Sparth).

#Art #Nicolas Bouvier #Sparth #Concept Art #Fantastical Art #Imaginative Realism #Dune #The Protectorate #Halo #Jack Vance #Books #Book Cover Art #Cover Art #No AI #No NFT

[bookmaven]

THE DYING EARTH by Jack Vance (New York: Hillman, 1950)

(San Francisco: Underwood-Miller, 1976) Cover art and interior illustrations by George Barr.

Contains

“The Dying Earth”

“Turjan of Miir”

“Mazirian the Magician”

“T’sais”

“Liane the Wayfarer”

“Ulan Dhor Ends a Dream”

“Guyal of Sfere”

#book blog #books #books books books #book cover #pulp art #science fiction #pulp fantasy #science fantasy #beautiful books #jack vance #george barr #dying earth #book design #book publishing #book binding #bookbinding

[juddgeeksout]

Welcome to Ioun City

Tonight’s Band of Blades game wasn’t going to happen and so I sent something about rival thieves’ guilds at war. I posted three Dyson Logos maps and we chose this one: We decided the city’s big money-maker is the polishing, charging and activation of Ioun Stones in the 3 arcane-industrial castles. Each castle is held by a different faction who, all together, sell the Ioun Stones through a…

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#D&D #Dungeons and Dragons #Dying Earth #Dyson Logos #Fighter #Ioun City #Ioun Stone #Jack Vance #Mage #Morreion #Rhialto the Marvelous #Thief #ttrpg

[darklongbox]

My Undying Love for 'The Dying Earth'

Hola, fear friends. Today I’d like to regale you with tales of a book that utterly bewitched me when I was a kid, and still does to this day – Jack Vance’s fantasy classic “The Dying Earth.” This tome of science fantasy is a supernova in the literary cosmos, and presents a world so wondrously peculiar that it has long ago permanently embedded itself in my memory. Brace yourselves, for I am about…

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#Jack Vance #Science-Fantasy #Science-fiction #The Dying Earth #Weird Fiction

[ewingstan]

4, Mia hurst

4. If you could put this character in any other media, be it a book, a movie, anything, what would it be?

Mia's basically a Vince Gilligan character already so while "put her in Breaking Bad/BCS" makes sense it also wouldn't change much. What she needs is a setting that's in a wholly different context, but that still allows her to track large swaths of information in a short period so her skills are on full display.

Cyberpunk settings are the obvious way to go, but since Claw is already "just far enough in the future to dip into cyberpunk tropes," that feels like cheating. The solution is to overcorrect and go too far into the future. Lets get her into a Dying Earth book. The sun is cooling and we've gotten good enough at math to summon demons. Have her be a character in a Jack Vance story who is introduced in the last page and somehow ties up all the loose plot threads by telling the heroes what her scrying orb has revealed to her.

Better yet, have her be a Book of the New Sun character for Severian to bounce off of. She'd fit right in with all the weirdos he runs into. Make her an Ascian quadruple agent, or an information-collector for the autarch. All you need to do is make her 50% more verbose and 70% more self-aware about her own deal and she'd be ready to go with a weird monologue that Severian spends ten pages ruminating on.

"You claim that I am a criminal for raising a child that was not mine to raise. But does the mother's blood make the child hers? You yourself were raised by your order, taken from the family that by blood would claim ownership of you."

I wondered, not for the first time, how the large woman knew so much of what went on in the Citadel. "Yet the circumstances of my birth were such that my mother could not have raised me. The Order, having a responsibility to take her life, necessarily had a duty to the child she bore."

"Just so. But was it mere chance that you be put in such circumstances? The Increate arranges all, as you well know. Just as your mother was delivered as, hm, a client to your brothers," she plastered on a smile that I did not understand, "the girl was delivered as a daughter to me. Do the seekers of information not require their own rituals of initiation, as do the seekers of pentience?"

"You are not of any order."

"I wear no colored cloak, it is true. Yet I play my role as you play yours. And when I die I will not be remembered for any of my names. But the role will live on."

You'd need to figure out how to translate that into anything resembling her voice. But Do you see my vision.

#clawblr #mia hurst #wildbow #ask game #dying earth #book of the new sun #jack vance #mals says #gene wolfe

[70sscifiart]

Uncredited 1980 cover to Jack Vance’s The Palace of Love

#The Palace of Love #Jack Vance #uncredited #1980 #trippy

[haveyoureadthisfantasybook]

vote es if you have finished the entire book.

vote no if you have not finished the entire book.

(faq · submit a book)

#fantasy #books #Lyonesse #Suldrun's Garden #Jack Vance #poll #result: no #l: English

[lil-tachyon]

Ever read Jack Vance?

Still haven't lol. It's on the list but low priority right now. Too much John Crowley, Ursula Leguin, stupid commie texts, and sci-fi comics I want to read first.

I'll try to read Dragon Masters before 2025.

#send me an ask! #jack vance #ask me about what books i read this year #or what books i want to read

[misforgotten2]

Joe Pesci on a rampage.

A book you very likely don’t have on your shelf #356

1969

#cover art #paperback #vintage paperbacks #1969 #mystery #jack vance #1960s #1960's #vintage illustration #ephemera #funny #humor #humour

[oldschoolfrp]

“Shadowjacks.  Based on a character created by Roger Zelazny, these beings can melt into any shadow - and reappear from any connected shadow.”  (Liz Danforth illus from Monsters! Monsters! 1st edition by Ken St Andre, Metagaming, 1976)  Zelazny’s original Shadowjack was the protagonist of his 1971 novel Jack of Shadows, which was named after author Jack Vance, who also inspired the name of D&D’s Vecna.

#Monsters! Monsters! #Liz Danforth #shadowjack #Metagaming #Flying Buffalo #Ken St Andre #Roger Zelazny #Jack of Shadows #Jack Vance #negative space #shadow #brazier

[domjordanillustration]

unfortunately, your presence has been noted by a Phung

#planet of adventure #city of the chasch #jack vance #phung #pnume #fan art #dark fantasy #sci fantasy #sci fi #horror #digital art