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Well, apart from Appendix N, and being "mentioned" in the AD&D DMG Credits and Acknowledgements, Jack Vance is "mentioned" by name on p.40 of the rulebook as the inspiration of the magic system and on p.112 under ongoing campaigns. Eyes of the Overlord and Planet of Adventure are "mentioned." I suppose technically you can claim AD&D is not D&D.
Yup, buried amonst what 300 ish pages of Gygaxian prose is the name of Jack Vance. In a book that's been out of print for twenty years.
Sure, among D&D players, and a very, very small subset of those who've actually READ the 1e DMG, Vance might be known. But a common name that's recognized outside of that subset? Let's be realistic here.
Why is it so hard to believe that an author that has been out of print for longer than most players have been alive is obscure.
Next you're going to tell me that Leigh Brackett is a household name as well. Can you tell me what she wrote without looking it up?
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I double-dog-dare you to make your game sound super cool without comparing it to other editions. - paraphrased from Umbran.
More than 10 of Jack Vances books are in print. If you count the omnibuses, more than that. And that's off the top of my head and not from an Amazon search or something. It's your point, so you can do the basic research yourself.
I wouldn't argue Leigh Brackett is a household name, but she wrote the first draft of The Empire Strikes Back and co-wrote the screenplay to The Big Sleep with William Faulkner.
Whom, I trust, is a big enough in print writer for your tastes.
More than 10 of Jack Vances books are in print. If you count the omnibuses, more than that. And that's off the top of my head and not from an Amazon search or something. It's your point, so you can do the basic research yourself.
I wouldn't argue Leigh Brackett is a household name, but she wrote the first draft of The Empire Strikes Back and co-wrote the screenplay to The Big Sleep with William Faulkner.
Whom, I trust, is a big enough in print writer for your tastes.
--Erik
Kudos to you Erik. Now, how many people do you think could name who Leigh Brackett was? I did actually know the answer.
Out of curiousity, when did those 10 Jack Vance books come back into print?
__________________ Currently running: Sufficiently Advanced over Maptool. Soon to change. If you'd like to join in a short 3-8 session campaign for various systems, drop by our forums.
I double-dog-dare you to make your game sound super cool without comparing it to other editions. - paraphrased from Umbran.
Wow, holy crap. I had no idea that Vance was still producing in the 90's. Damn.
I gotta go to some better bookstores. But, to be fair, the print runs, doing some homework here, were extremely small. It's not a big surprise that they would not be widely found.
__________________ Currently running: Sufficiently Advanced over Maptool. Soon to change. If you'd like to join in a short 3-8 session campaign for various systems, drop by our forums.
I double-dog-dare you to make your game sound super cool without comparing it to other editions. - paraphrased from Umbran.
Last edited by Hussar; 21st July 2009 at 06:20 AM..
Out of curiousity, when did those 10 Jack Vance books come back into print?
I started looking for Vance books in used book stores in about 2005, at the same time I started looking for Ted Sturgeon books. I found over 20 Sturgeon books and only 1 Vance book (Dragon Masters, which was very good). The two actually compare reasonably well, as they both use language in a similar way (where the construction of a sentence says almost as much as the words it contains) and did similar things for the early days of their genres.
I finally found Dying Earth as an omnibus in the UK this spring (a brand new omnibus in a new bookstore). Got about 2/3 of the way through it, didn't like it, and hastily moved back to SF without finishing it (Joe Haldeman FTW).
I greatly prefer Sturgeon to Vance, but I consider them both to be of about equal fame - in other words, completely and utterly unknown outside their respective genres (edgy golden age SF and old-school fantasy respectively).
I'm not a member of the NYT online so I can't reread it right now, but I did read the article earlier this week linked to another site. Isn't the title of that one "The Genre Artist"? And isn't it basically about how unknown/unappreciated he is? I remember a quote about how if he was from another country he'd have won a Nobel Prize for Literature (do they really give out one for this?), but since he was American nobody cared (very vague paraphrase of course, since I only barely remember the quote).
Kudos to you Erik. Now, how many people do you think could name who Leigh Brackett was? I did actually know the answer.
Out of curiousity, when did those 10 Jack Vance books come back into print?
Mostly over the last 10 years or so. When I moved out to join the Wizards staff in 1999, almost all of his work had fallen out of print for one reason or another, a fact that many of his fans found maddening. The Demon Princes omnibus came out and stayed in print (it is _still_ in print, in fact) and the Dying Earth Omnibus followed, I believe both from Orb. A lot of other stuff followed, including a new Best Of from the Science Fiction Book Club that re-exposed some of his best short works to the modern audience.
A lot of us chipped in and picked up the Vance Integral Edition a while back, which came just in time for my mostly un-earned WotC Pokemon bonus. A lot of my friends who had worked there longer than me got cars and houses and stuff. My bonus was much smaller, so I got a complete set of Jack Vance's creative work, in hardcover.
I know a lot about Leigh Brackett, and the Planet Stories fiction imprint I manage at Paizo has brought five of her books back into print in the last two years.
I have looked, and have yet to ever see a book by Vance in my local bookstores. Even the used books stores, including the one that is essentially a pile of hundreds of obscure, ancient books (including tons of old Science Fiction, fantasy and various pulps), don't have it.
They don't carry any Lord Dunsany either, which has always been a pretty big letdown. I guess I'll just have to order them off Amazon or something.
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Short of getting his own sitcom on the Disney Channel, what could he do to be less obscure?
Be as well known as Tolkien or Terry Pratchett or JK Rowling or RA Salvatore or L Frank Baum or Robert Jordan or etc, etc, etc. I'll give him this, he's less obscure than G. G. Pendarves. But that ain't a high bar.
Not only is Vance unknown outside the sci-fi/fantasy ghetto, I'd wager the vast majority of D&D players haven't heard of him.
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I'm not a member of the NYT online so I can't reread it right now, but I did read the article earlier this week linked to another site. Isn't the title of that one "The Genre Artist"? And isn't it basically about how unknown/unappreciated he is? I remember a quote about how if he was from another country he'd have won a Nobel Prize for Literature (do they really give out one for this?), but since he was American nobody cared (very vague paraphrase of course, since I only barely remember the quote).
Yes, that's the one. My point wasn't to refute that he was more obscure than someone like Tolkien or Salvatore, only to refute the idea that he is only discussed among Dungeons & Dragons nerds on messageboards.
Some of Vance's in-print material is from small houses running sub-5000 print runs (which in today's market is hardly "small"), but Orb has kept those Demon Princes and Dying Earth Ombinuses in print for most of the decade, and I've seen both of them, numerous times, in places like Barnes & Noble. Both are respectable evergreens for their publisher.
I greatly prefer Sturgeon to Vance, but I consider them both to be of about equal fame - in other words, completely and utterly unknown outside their respective genres (edgy golden age SF and old-school fantasy respectively).
The Dying Earth cycle is one of only a handful of books by Vance that can be categorized as fantasy. Some deep-geek science fiction fans will balk at calling The Dying Earth stories sword and sorcery, instead inventing a "Dying Earth" genre for them to inhabit (perhaps because S&S is too much of a literary ghetto, and perhaps because many of the stories do contain genuine science fictional elements).
The huge majority of Vance material would likely be classified as science fiction by most readers rather than fantasy. The justly famous Demon Princes series, for example, involves space ships and high-tech weaponry and stuff.
Yes, that's the one. My point wasn't to refute that he was more obscure than someone like Tolkien or Salvatore, only to refute the idea that he is only discussed among Dungeons & Dragons nerds on messageboards.
That is simply not the case.
The whole point of the article is - this guy is only discussed by D&D nerds on messageboards and that's a bad thing, he deserves to be better known.
__________________ The female tiefling's horns are not 'handlebars'.
Yes, that's the one. My point wasn't to refute that he was more obscure than someone like Tolkien or Salvatore, only to refute the idea that he is only discussed among Dungeons & Dragons nerds on messageboards.
That is simply not the case.
--Erik
Fair enough. Maybe I'm guilty of some hyperbole, but, not by a whole lot I don't think.
Vance is seeing a major resurgence of late though. Probably why he's in the NYT. Subterrainean Press has just done a tribute book this month (IIRC) that looks amazingly scrumptious.
My whole point was that Vance is a pretty obscure SF and Fantasy author outside of some pretty narrow niche's.
So, Erik, you'd know far better than I, how well known would you say Jack Vance is outside of D&D players?
__________________ Currently running: Sufficiently Advanced over Maptool. Soon to change. If you'd like to join in a short 3-8 session campaign for various systems, drop by our forums.
I double-dog-dare you to make your game sound super cool without comparing it to other editions. - paraphrased from Umbran.
A profile which spends the first two paras talking about how obscure he is.
Again, yes, I'm not arguing that his renown does not match his genius or talent. Just pointing out that a guy who has enough fame to get covered like that in the times is not truly obscure in the way that, say, most of the FR novelists are or most publishers of independent RPG companies are.
Someone posted a few pages back that Vance was obscure and getting more obscure every day. The latter contention is demonstrably false, as his profile has risen in recent years and an increasing amount of his output is coming back into print.
Since the topic genuinely _is_ obscure to a lot of readers of this thread, I wanted to add a little perspective from someone who has been paying a LOT of attention to Vance over the last decade or so.
The whole point of the article is - this guy is only discussed by D&D nerds on messageboards and that's a bad thing, he deserves to be better known.
Except the part where it talks about his influence among professional science fiction authors and the science fiction reading community in general without regard to Dungeons & Dragons, sure.
So, Erik, you'd know far better than I, how well known would you say Jack Vance is outside of D&D players?
I'd say he's probably best known by general science fiction fans in their 40s and older, fans of D&D, and general readers of science fiction, in that order.
I don't suspect most general readers have ever heard of him, but then they've probably never heard of a lot of the authors discussed on this thread, including R. A. Salvatore and certainly including Fritz Leiber and Robert E. Howard.
If you say "the Conan guy," you'll probably get a nod of recognition from most fantasy fans or people familiar with the Arnold Schwartzenegger movie (which is everyone), but if you asked people at random to point out Conan's creator on a list of names, I'll bet most of them wouldn't know.
But I'll bet most D&D players couldn't do it either.
Really? You'd say that R. A . Salvatore is that obscure? I'll admit he's not my cup of tea (I think I read one of his Ravenloft books way back when) but, I do see his name hit the best seller lists fairly often (although not as much of late).
Again, not arguing with you, just surprised.
And, really, you think Howard is that obscure too. Heh. Guess I'm letting my own preferences color my perspective to much. Was a HUGE fan of Savage Sword of Conan way back when, so, I knew who Howard was from an early age.
Does go to show why I'd think Vance was so obcure. I'm just smidgeon too young for your criteria.
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I double-dog-dare you to make your game sound super cool without comparing it to other editions. - paraphrased from Umbran.
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