Date: Mon, 20 May 2002 10:57:47 -0700
From: Michael Andre-Driussi 
Subject: (urth) Vancean  influence on Wolfe

Blattid wrote:
>And that, really, is the See Below. For me, at least, the
>stories in TDE are very much individual stories. There are
>links, characters from one appear in another, but they are,
>I think, less unified than (say) Leiber's yarns of Fafhrd
>and the Gray Mouser. Episodes from a single and singular
>future world, but not, to me, producing anything larger as
>a group than the sum of the parts.

I would not argue too strenously with you.  If you want to see Gene Wolfe's
take on TDE, see his essay "The Living Earth" in JACK VANCE: CRITICAL
APPRECIATIONS AND A BIBLIOGRAPHY.

>So for the more dedicated Vanceans on the list, I suppose
>the obvious question would be whether I, as a rather casual
>reader, am missing anything here? This book is the one most
>often cited when recommending Vance to a Wolfe fan; other
>than the gross-scale influence on New Sun, the fundamental
>idea (which, actually, wasn't entirely new here either) of
>this incredibly ancient Earth, is there something deeper?

What Andy Robertson said. In addition, I think it is important to isolate
TDE from the other Vancean "Dying Earth" novels: TDE has an "earnest"
quality, maybe something like sombre-mode Dunsany, that is burlesqued in
the other novels in a way closer to that of joking-mode Clark Ashton Smith
(as opposed to decadent-mode, which is the voice CAS used in most of his
Zothique stories).

The isolation of TDE could be extended further, to separate it from nearly
all of Vance's work--it really is different.  But I've read nearly 100% of
Vance's fiction (I haven't read a few of the mysteries because I cannot
afford them--oh yes, Vance wrote mysteries, too. Even won an award.) and I
may be forgetting more than that.

=mantis=



--