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A review by jcovey
The Jack Vance Treasury by Jack Vance
5.0
Everything Jack Vance creates seems to pulse with life.
The true gems of this Treasury, such as The Dragon Masters, The Miracle Workers, and The Last Castle perfectly display Vance's genius for effortlessly assembling an expansive cast of three dimensional, memorable characters and creating a setting both fascinatingly alien and utterly believable. Theses stories also display Vance's virtuoso talent for melding familiar tropes from fantasy and science fiction genres into a seamless whole far better and more wondrous than either were apart. A talent also on full display in the Dying Earth tales, some of which are contained in this collection including highlights from the saga of Cugel the Clever, a ceaselessly entertaining, amoral gem of a character.
Even the singular clunker in this collection, The Gift of Gab, an early story where Vance's usual character and verve are swapped for technical problems of the hard sci-fi variety and journalistic description, is a better than average story by virtue of it's fully fleshed out world. A world where Vance manages to paint a believable ecosystem including an alien society working of an inhuman system of intelligence and an interstellar bureaucracy capable of exploiting that ecosystem. All that is set up effortlessly with almost no exposition inside a rather short and for the most part engaging story.
Finishing the collection is an autobiographical sketch which reveals Vance's life to be as remarkable a story as anything he wrote. A life that included traveling the country performing odd jobs before studying physics at Berkeley, getting into the merchant marines despite poor eyesight by memorizing the eye chart, and building a houseboat with Frank Herbert. Perhaps it is a small wonder that his stories so crackle with life, given that he lived his so fully.
The true gems of this Treasury, such as The Dragon Masters, The Miracle Workers, and The Last Castle perfectly display Vance's genius for effortlessly assembling an expansive cast of three dimensional, memorable characters and creating a setting both fascinatingly alien and utterly believable. Theses stories also display Vance's virtuoso talent for melding familiar tropes from fantasy and science fiction genres into a seamless whole far better and more wondrous than either were apart. A talent also on full display in the Dying Earth tales, some of which are contained in this collection including highlights from the saga of Cugel the Clever, a ceaselessly entertaining, amoral gem of a character.
Even the singular clunker in this collection, The Gift of Gab, an early story where Vance's usual character and verve are swapped for technical problems of the hard sci-fi variety and journalistic description, is a better than average story by virtue of it's fully fleshed out world. A world where Vance manages to paint a believable ecosystem including an alien society working of an inhuman system of intelligence and an interstellar bureaucracy capable of exploiting that ecosystem. All that is set up effortlessly with almost no exposition inside a rather short and for the most part engaging story.
Finishing the collection is an autobiographical sketch which reveals Vance's life to be as remarkable a story as anything he wrote. A life that included traveling the country performing odd jobs before studying physics at Berkeley, getting into the merchant marines despite poor eyesight by memorizing the eye chart, and building a houseboat with Frank Herbert. Perhaps it is a small wonder that his stories so crackle with life, given that he lived his so fully.