This is Me, Jack Vance! | ||||||||
Jack Vance | ||||||||
Subterranean Press, 208 pages | ||||||||
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A review by Rich Horton
This memoir is a very engaging piece of writing. Vance tells his life story in a fairly linear fashion,
taking us more or less to the present. Vance calls it "more of a landscape than a
self-portrait -- or at least a ramble across the landscape that has been my life." Perhaps this refers to
the impressive amount of travelling Vance has done in his life, which is quite interestingly recorded in this volume.
Vance was born in San Francisco, the middle child of 5 -- he had three brothers and a sister. After a few years
there, he moved with his mother and siblings to his maternal grandfather's ranch in the delta region of
central California, near Sacramento. His father stayed in San Francisco -- Vance blames his paternal aunt,
who also apparently connived to keep money due Vance's mother.
Vance's parents only divorced years later, but were apparently de facto separated from about when Vance
turned five. Despite this -- it seems clearly to have bothered young Jack -- he portrays a mostly happy
childhood. Nonetheless, by his teens his family was quite poor. Then came the depression, which made
things worse. So Vance looked for work and some of the most entertaining bits concern his various jobs.
After a brief stint as a bellhop in San Francisco, Vance spent some time as a surveyor and a common laborer
in the Sierra Nevadas, mostly working in copper and silver mines. In the late 30s, Vance also went to the
University of California at Berkeley, as both a Physics and English major. Perhaps more importantly, he
worked at the university newspaper, and took a creative writing class. Vance here mentions some early
forays into writing like a P.G. Wodehouse pastiche, some poetry and science fiction which he showed to
Stanton Coblentz, the old pulp SF writer (and also a poet), who was an acquaintance of Vance's aunt.
(Coblentz was not impressed.) Vance also wrote an SF story for his creative writing class -- again, the
Professor was not impressed, calling it "an almost incomprehensible example of what I believe is known
as science fiction."
Vance dropped out of the University and, on what seems almost a whim, headed down to Pearl Harbor to work
for the Navy as an electrician. An auspicious time for such a move! Given a miserable job there, he
quit -- about a week before the Japanese attack. Back in the San Francisco area, he went to work building
ships for the war effort.
One critical offshoot of this adventure was a class taken in Japanese. Later on during
the war, his experience with boats proved sufficient that he became a seaman, and spent the rest of the
war on merchant ships -- though the cargo included, for example, soldiers bound for Australia, hence
this too was part of the war effort. This phase of Vance's life is fairly well-known, as it was during
the idle periods onboard (of which there are many, apparently) that he wrote his first successful
stories, including those that became The Dying Earth.
Tired of the ocean, Vance took a job as a carpenter -- apparently as he was also starting to sell his
stories. Having little to do on one job, he noticed a pretty girl in the neighboring
house -- this was Norma, who was to become his wife. And before long -- partly
with Norma's help, as Vance makes clear throughout
the book how enthusiastically she supported his career, and how hard she worked -- he was selling stories
regularly. From then on, writing was his only job.
He says little about his writing in the book, though occasionally he mentions the genesis or
writing circumstances of one story or another. For example, he wrote "The Last Castle" for Fred Pohl
at Galaxy because his agent had fouled up and sold a story twice, once to Pohl and then to another
market. Vance remarks laconically "["The Last Castle"] turned out to be a pretty good story." He had a
couple of ventures into other media -- he was paid fairly lavishly for a treatment and screenplay based
on his early story "Hard Luck Diggings," which quickly came to naught when the producer involved was
fired. And he spent some time working on the television series Captain Video.
After a time the Vances's life became peripatetic. They traveled widely, for long stretches of
time, in Europe, in the Pacific, and elsewhere. Vance did plenty of writing on these trips. Then they
would return to their home base in Northern California -- spending some time on a homebuilt
houseboat. The wanderlust would strike again (or sufficient money would accumulate), and off
they'd go. It seems a very fruitful sort of life for a writer, and explains much about the varieties
of landscape and culture so central to Vance's fiction.
This is an easy-going narrative, generous throughout in its depiction of the people and places Vance
encounters. Vance's life seems to have been mostly a good one, and he seems to take the hard
times -- the early poverty, for example, or the more recent deafness
-- quite in stride. Thus the book is pleasant throughout. A selection of photographs is included, and
even finally a very brief chapter devoted to what little Vance cares to say about his writing career.
It's a story that, as a fan of Jack Vance's writing, I am delighted to have finally been given the chance to read.
Rich Horton is an eclectic reader in and out of the SF and fantasy genres. He's been reading SF since before the Golden Age (that is, since before he was 13). Born in Naperville, IL, he lives and works (as a Software Engineer for the proverbial Major Aerospace Company) in St. Louis area and is a regular contributor to Tangent. Stop by his website at http://www.sff.net/people/richard.horton. |
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