Search Worlds Without End

A legend has to start somewhere...

As so many writers have said, it's in the shorter and mid-length work that the storytelling craft is best learned. Hard-Luck Diggings brings together fourteen such pieces from the first twelve years of Grand Master Jack Vance's genre-defining career, from back when he first worked to pay the mortgage, buy the groceries, travel the world, eventually building his own private "dream castle" and starting a family.

Like any writer serious about staying in the game, we see him targeting the markets of the day, doing what was needed to meet the tastes of editors and their readerships while at the same time perfecting his own special way of doing things so that his name, his distinctive voice, stood a chance (in modern marketing parlance) of becoming a viable "brand."

Hard-Luck Diggings brings that fascinating process to life in fine style. As well as serving up vintage entertainment from one of the field's genuine masters, it provides an illuminating armchair tour of how the Jack Vance enterprise came to be, full of zest and life, the thrill of the upward climb and of so much more to be done. This is a book to be savoured with a twinkle in the eye, a knowing smile, but most of all, with a love of adventure and high romance firmly in place.

Table of Contents:

• Introduction
• Hard-Luck Diggings (1948)
• The Temple of Han (1951)
• The Masquerade on Dicantropus (1951)
• Abercrombie Station (1952)
• Three-Legged Joe (1953)
• DP! (1953)
• Shape-Up (1953)
• Sjambak (1953)
• The Absent-Minded Professor (1954)
• When the Five Moons Rise (1954)
• The Devil on Salvation Bluff (1955)
• Where Hesperus Falls (1956)
• The Phantom Milkman (1956)
• Dodkin's Job (1959)

Jack Vance, Magician

Like the professional wizards and sorcerers he so often writes about, Jack Vance has long been a master magician when it comes to storytelling, turning out marvelous tricks with words, using his wonderful knack for names, detail and dialog, his fine eye for rendering the vagaries of the human condition to deliver high adventure set on fascinating worlds and in fabulous realms that are second to none.

In a career spanning nearly sixty years, this peerless F&SF Grand Master has taken us from the Dying Earth to Lyonesse, from the Oikumene of the Demon Princes to the farthest corners of the Gaean Reach, Alastor Cluster and beyond, bringing alive on the page magical places we can only dream about.

Dream Castles presents a generous serving of this celebrated magician's "performances," ten fascinating tales from his long and influential career, among them his two Miro Hetzel adventures, "The Dogtown Tourist Agency" and "Freitzke's Turn," the intriguing "The Narrow Land," a second outing for Jean Parlier in "Choldwell's Chickens," and the classic space opera of "Son of the Tree."

Dream Castles shows a true magician storyteller perfecting his craft, one moment as journeyman finding a voice all his own, the next as fully-fledged maestro intent on exploring worlds and delivering adventure and wonder in equal parts, the very stuff that dreams are made of.

Table of Contents:

• The Dogtown Tourist Agency
• Freitzke's Turn
• I'll Build Your Dream Castle
• Golden Girl
• Sulwen's Planet
• Cholwell's Chickens
• A Practical Man's Guide
• The Narrow Land
• The Enchanted Princess
• Son of the Tree

The Ultimate Grandeur

Fantasy and Science Fiction Grandmaster Jack Vance is very much a writer of the Space Age. His time "traveling" the magic highways of his imagination spans the period bracketed by the final years of World War 2 and the Cassini-Huygens probe reaching Saturn space in late 2004, the year he brought his magnificent career to a close.

In those first thrilling, dangerous, heady days, science did seem to promise all the answers, and it was in a "double" universe of the familiar workaday world and the utterly unlimited one of the imagination that the ever-practical yet romantic, diligently physics-savvy yet as often wildly improvisational Jack Vance worked.

Even as he wrote tales set in the far future of his acclaimed Dying Earth, even as he produced mysteries and suspense stories of a much less fanciful kind, Jack's determined quest to become a "million words a year" man saw him ranging a universe criss-crossed with busy interstellar highways: a network of flourishing trade and tourist routes leading to new frontiers, far-flung colonies, alien worlds, with ample room for exotic races, travelers, traders and scoundrels, even space pirates, ample opportunity for grand schemes of every kind.

Magic Highways gathers sixteen of those early space adventures from that exciting first decade, spanning the years 1946 to 1956. In these frequently inventive, often surprising space operas, Jack takes us to vivid destinations along the vast interstellar highways of a future where anything is possible.

Table of Contents

• Phalid's Fate
• Planet of the Black Dust
• Ultimate Quest
• Men of the Ten Books
• The Planet Machine
• Dover Spargill's Ghastly Floater
• Winner Lose All
• Sabotage on Sulfur Planet
• The House Lords
• Sanatoris Short-cut
• The Unspeakable McInch
• The Sub-Standard Sardines
• The Howling Bounders
• The King of Thieves
• The Spa of the Stars
• To B or Not to C or to D

Strange things happen...

Throughout his long and impressive career as a celebrated professional storyteller, Jack Vance showed a fascination not only with having characters solve mysteries in all sorts of dramatic and wondrous situations using their powers of observation, deduction and common sense, but also with the possibility of higher states of mind in play, other realms of existence, even spirit worlds.

Vance approached such things with a healthy, properly wary, scientific curiosity, even while embracing the liberties allowed any popular entertainer, and so made the exploration of such higher states part of his stock in trade.

Whether richly displayed in his Dying Earth stories with their wizardly spellcasting, eldritch beings and strange dimensions, or in his science fiction tales with the incredible mental powers afforded races like the Green Chasch, the Fwai-chi, the Meks of Etamin 9 besieging the final human strongholds in "The Last Castle," even given to divergent human peoples on Koryphon, Maske and countless other worlds, or to the likes of his most extraordinary Demon Prince, Howard Alan Treesong, Vance was forever drawn to what else might comprise human (and other) natures in all their myriad forms.

Minding the Stars: The Early Jack Vance Volume 4 reflects this beguiling blend of the practical and the otherworldly, combining tales that explore the workings of such mental powers with other stories selected from the earlier days of the Grandmaster's illustrious career.

Table of Contents:

• Introduction
• Nogpalgarth
• Telek
• Four Hundred Blackbirds
• Alfred's Ark
• Meet Miss Universe
• The World Between
• Milton Hack from Zodiac
• Parapsyche

Avenues into the Future...

"Truth to tell, we're tourists, out to see the wonders of the universe."

--Paddy Blackthorn, The Rapparee

Grand journeys among the stars--pursuits, quests, explorations and encounters. These were very much science fiction and fantasy Grandmaster Jack Vance's stock in trade, whether to have Kirth Gersen roam the Oikumene and Beyond tracking down his five Demon Princes or to strand Adam Reith on far-off Tschai. Or, as in this present volume, to take Earth-style opera to the non-human folk of distant Rlaru, to study the much coveted tree-pod dwellings on Iszm, to follow the clues in five gold bands to the knowledge that lets a handful of races control all space travel in the universe, or to endure servitude at the hands of ruthless alien overlords.

Just as Vance sought adventure and the joys of a fulfilled life by travelling the highways and byways of his own beloved Earth, so he had his heroes and heroines do the same on other worlds. The five early tales featured in Grand Crusades: The Early Jack Vance, Volume Five take us on a fascinating selection of such journeys, showing us how the future was in the earlier years of his writing career.

And inevitably, as with storytellers from Homer to Shakespeare, Dickens to Austen, Tolstoy to Twain, our Grandmaster also used his craft as something on which to hang personal preoccupations, fascinations and longings. For as with any good writer, the completions and pay-offs of these otherworldly travels often deliver more than just a satisfactory conclusion to the affairs on hand and a few hours' pleasant diversion for the reader. Vance also put us in touch with things beyond the page, delivering an awareness of a universe and a future for humanity filled with possibility, leaving us--as the best writers, artists and makers always do--with feelings of connection with something larger.

Table of Contents:

• Introduction
• The Rapparee
• Crusade to Maxus
• Gold and Iron
• The Houses of Iszm
• Space Opera