page_title: Jack Vance
section_title: Work
hierarchical_section_title: Jack Vance / Work
caption_attribution_description: Illustration de couverture du roman de la collection Galaxie bis n°45
context_page_description: John Holbrook "Jack" Vance was an American mystery, fantasy, and science fiction writer. Though most of his work has been published under the name Jack Vance, he also wrote several mystery novels under different pen names.
  Vance won the World Fantasy Award for Life Achievement in 1984 and he was a Guest of Honor at the 1992 World Science Fiction Convention in Orlando, Florida. The Science Fiction and Fantasy Writers of America made him its 15th Grand Master in 1997 and the Science Fiction Hall of Fame inducted him in 2001, its sixth class of two deceased and two living writers.
  Among his awards for particular works were: Hugo Awards, in 1963 for The Dragon Masters, in 1967 for The Last Castle, and in 2010 for his memoir This is Me, Jack Vance!; a Nebula Award in 1966, also for The Last Castle; the Jupiter Award in 1975; the World Fantasy Award in 1990 for Lyonesse: Madouc. He also won an Edgar Award for the best first mystery novel in 1961 for The Man in the Cage.
  While his first publications were stories in science fiction magazines, as he became well known, he published novellas and novels, a number of which were translated into Dutch, Spanish, Russian, Italian and German.
context_section_description: Vance made his debut in print with "The World-Thinker", a 16-page story published by Sam Merwin in Thrilling Wonder Stories, Summer 1945. His lifetime output totals more than 60 books—perhaps almost 90. His work has been published in three categories: science fiction, fantasy and mystery. Among Vance's earliest published work was a set of fantasy stories written while he served in the merchant marine during the war. They appeared in 1950, several years after Vance had started publishing science fiction in the pulp magazines, under the title The Dying Earth.
  Vance wrote many science fiction short stories in the late 1940s and through the 1950s, which were published in magazines. Of his novels written during this period, a few were science fiction, but most were mysteries. Few were published at the time, but Vance continued to write mysteries into the early 1970s. In total, he wrote 15 novels outside of science fiction and fantasy, including the extended outline, The Telephone was Ringing in the Dark, published only by the VIE (Vance Integral Edition), and three books published under the Ellery Queen pseudonym.  Some of these are not mysteries, such as Bird Isle, and many fit uneasily in the category. These stories are set in and around his native San Francisco, except for one set in Italy and another in Africa. Two begin in San Francisco but take to the sea.
  Many themes important to his more famous science fiction novels appeared first in the mysteries. The most obvious is the "book of dreams", which appears in Bad Ronald and The View from Chickweed's Window, prior to being featured in The Book of Dreams. The revenge theme is also more prominent in certain mysteries than in the science fiction (The View from Chickweed's Window in particular). Bad Ronald was adapted to a TV film of the same name aired on ABC in 1974, as well as a French production (Méchant garçon) in 1992; this and Man in the Cage are the only works by Vance to be made into film to date.
  Certain of the science fiction stories are also mysteries, penned using his full name John Holbrook Vance, three under the house pseudonym Ellery Queen, and one each using the pseudonyms Alan Wade, Peter Held, John van See, and Jay Kavanse. Some editions of his published works give his year of birth as 1920.In addition to the comic Magnus Ridolph stories, two major stories feature the effectuator Miro Hetzel, a futuristic detective, and Araminta Station is largely concerned with solving various murders. Vance returned to the "dying Earth" setting (a far distant future in which the sun is slowly going out, and magic and technology coexist) to write the picaresque adventures of the ne'er-do-well scoundrel Cugel the Clever, and those of the magician Rhialto the Marvellous. These books were written in 1963, 1978 and 1981. His other major fantasy work, Lyonesse (a trilogy comprising Suldrun's Garden, The Green Pearl, and Madouc), was completed in 1989 and set on a mythological archipelago off the coast of France in the early Middle Ages.
  Vance's stories written for pulps in the 1940s and 1950s covered many science fiction themes, with a tendency to emphasize mysterious and biological themes (ESP, genetics, brain parasites, body switching, other dimensions, cultures) rather than technical ones. Robots, for example, are almost entirely absent, though the short story "The Uninhibited Robot" features a computer gone awry. Many of the early stories are comic. By the 1960s, Vance had developed a futuristic setting that he came to call the Gaean Reach, a fictional region of space settled by humans. Thereafter, all his science fiction was, more or less explicitly, set therein. The Gaean Reach per se is loose and expanding. Each planet has its own history, state of development and culture. Within the Reach conditions tend to be peaceable and commerce tends to dominate. At the edges of the Reach, out in the lawless Beyond, conditions are usually less secure.
  Vance influenced many writers in the genre. Most notably, Michael Shea wrote a sequel to Eyes of the Overworld, featuring Cugel the
caption: French edition of The Many Worlds of Magnus Ridolph, illustrating "The Kokod Warriors"
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