Voros
Doomed Investigator
- Joined
- Sep 23, 2017
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That's a good point. It was actually a reused cover from the Orbit collection of best SF of the year for 1987:That 1989 cover clearly takes some inspiration from the shape of Jabba's palace in Return of the Jedi.
My first Vance was The Dragon Masters, which still remains one of my favourites by him. The chilly, amoral tone in his sf (as opposed to the generally greater humour in his fantasy) is almost unique among the pulp generation, it reminds me more of Ballard than anything else.
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Toward the end of a stormy summer afternoon, with the sun finally breaking out under ragged black rain clouds, Castle Janeil was overwhelmed and its population destroyed. Until almost the last moment the factions among the castle clans were squabbling as to how Destiny properly should be met. The gentlemen of most prestige and account elected to ignore the entire undignified circumstance and went about their normal pursuits, with neither more nor less punctilio than usual. A few cadets, desperate to the point of hysteria, took up weapons and prepared to resist the final assault. Others still, perhaps a quarter of the total population, waited passively, ready—almost happy—to expiate the sins of the human race. In the end death came uniformly to all; and all extracted as much satisfaction in their dying as this essentially graceless process could afford. The proud sat turning the pages of their beautiful books, or discussing the qualities of a century-old essence, or fondling a favorite Phane. They died without deigning to heed the fact. The hot-heads raced up the muddy slope which, outraging all normal rationality, loomed above the parapets of Janeil. Most were buried under sliding rubble, but a few gained the ridge to gun, hack, stab, until they themselves were shot, crushed by the half-alive power-wagons, hacked or stabbed. The contrite waited in the classic posture of expiation, on their knees, heads bowed, and perished, so they believed, by a process in which the Meks were symbols and human sin the reality. In the end all were dead: gentlemen, ladies, Phanes in the pavilions; Peasants in the stables. Of all those who had inhabited Janeil, only the Birds survived, creatures awkward, gauche and raucous, oblivious to pride and faith, more concerned with the wholeness of their hides than the dignity of their castle. As the Meks swarmed over the parapets, the Birds departed their cotes. They screamed strident insults as they flapped east toward Hagedorn, now the last castle of Earth.
That's a good point. It was actually a reused cover from the Orbit collection of best SF of the year for 1987:
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I encountered both stories at the same time, I think, since "The Dragon Masters" (in the cover above) was the flipside of Ace Double from 1973 that featured "The Last Castle" as well. The amorality you mention seems to have been with Vance from the beginning or his writing, or nearly--it was marked in a short story "Temple of Han" I just read from Planet Stories in 1951, though Vance's stylistic trademarks had not yet developed in it.
I can't stop myself from quoting the opening of "The Last Castle" since it such a perfect example of mature Vance:
Vance at one point wrote that the root idea for the society of the Earth castles came from some reading he did about premodern Japan. It seems to me that it is just one example of a pattern he returns to again and again in his fiction: the baroque aristocratic society, with its elaborate codes of behavior and courtesy, its highly developed aesthetics, and its distance from reality. It's about as far from the can-do pragmatic outlook common in some American SF at the time, or the 'noble savage' ideas of Howard and some fantasy. Actually, "The Last Castle," takes more of a stance against such an aristocratic culture than Vance sometimes does; I've wondered if that, along with the quality of the prose, is one reason it was so successful.
I'm also a big fan of Budrys' Rogue Moon, which despite its slightly dated melodrama is so rich in sf concept and execution.
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I like the Gene Szafran covers for Syzygy and Trullion; it's interesting that he used such a different style for his Heinlein covers upthread.Van Scyoc's entry in the sf encyclopdedia is intriguing. Need to track one of her books down.
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Love the Dumarest books, started reading them in the late 1970's. Soon after started playing Traveller and loved that the books influenced Marc Miller in his design of the Traveller rpg.E.C. Tubb is a British space opera writer who I discovered from the praise he received from his fellow British sf writers like Moorcock, Stableford, etc.
Unlike a number of other space opera writers who grew out of the pulps and magazine tradition one of the great things about Tubb is you don't have to suffer through substandard, rushed writing. His style isn't remarkable per se but it is clear, literate and well written. His characterization isn't embarrassing or clumsy, his plots are pacey and well structured, he handles sex unusually well for a sf writer of his generation and is not bereft of real humour.
The covers for his compulsively readable Dumarest series for DAW and Ace are surprisingly first rate.
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Here are some covers of his collection Tiger by the Tail/Beyond Infinity, which includes "Brightside Crossing". The first is Mel Hunter's for the David McKay original edition (1961), the second is Josh Kirby's for the Corgi (1964, which used the variant title:It may be that a rediscovery of Nourse's sharp and shapely virtues as a storyteller may proceed through an encounter with his shorter work, some of it genuinely funny, most of it mixing adventure tropes with strong speculative elements. He initially assembled shorter in Tiger by the Tail (coll 1961; vt Beyond Infinity 1964), The Counterfeit Man and Others (coll 1963) Psi High and Others (coll, 1967), and Rx for Tomorrow (coll 1971), the latter focusing on stories about medicine in general. 12 Worlds of Alan E Nourse (coll 2010) represents some of this work. A sense of fundamental decency permeates Nourse's fiction; and, though sometimes too easily achieved, the victories of decency over bigotry cannot, either for the market upon which Nourse concentrated or the adult market in general, be seriously faulted.