Remembering Jack Vance

Last night I heard the news about Jack Vance’s death. He died in his sleep, aged 96, in his home in California on Sunday. He was an incredible writer who wrote over 50 novels and 100 short stories in his life, and influenced many science fiction and fantasy authors such as Ursula le Guin and George R.R. Martin.

I was introduced to Jack Vance by my dad, who’s a big fan of his work, and his books were some of the first science fiction I read. I was immediately enchanted by Vance’s unique style of writing: vivid and lyrical; his style always had a beauty and a wonderful cadence to it, even when describing the most mundane things. He would introduce a touch of courtly extravagance here, contrasted with plain speaking there, always using language to set the scene and bring his world to life. There was something slightly old fashioned about it, without ever becoming ridiculous or pretentious, and I’ve never read another writer quite like him.

It’s Jack Vance’s writing and language that I remember best about his work, but he is also an incredible character writer and ideas author. He came up with amazing concepts and worlds, and populated them with the most interesting people – perverse, strange, vain, selfish people as well as the heroic and good-intentioned. One of my favourite characters is the despicable Cugel (self-titled ‘the Clever’), possibly the best anti-hero ever written. He’s a man driven by pure selfishness, a bit useless at everything but possessing sharp survival instincts, who is never likeable yet always fascinating and very funny to read about. He somehow slimes and cheats his way through each adventure, only to end up, quite satisfyingly for the reader, in a worse place than where he started.

Jack Vance will probably be remembered best for his Dying Earth books, all set in the far future where the Sun is dying, the population of the Earth has shrunk, “the continents have sunk and risen. A million cities have lifted towers, have fallen to dust”. The Dying Earth is a fantastic setting that combines science fiction and fantasy elements – magic and adventure and strange artefacts in a distant future in which mankind’s days are coming to an end.

I would recommend the Dying Earth books to any science fiction and fantasy fan; you’re sure to find something surprising here. The world combines elements of old adventure stories, knightly romances, classic sci-fi, and an almost mythical feel. Jack Vance had an amazing imagination and was highly skilled at creating both a fantastic atmosphere and larger-than-life characters who burst from the page. Another weird and wonderful setting is Lyonesse, where more traditionally fantasy (though still with weird and sci-fi elements thrown in now and again) stories take place.

Vance’s stories themselves are often very simple, and his plots are not as strong as other elements. Some of his characterisation and the ways people interact will also seem very old fashioned now, like reading old Ray Bradbury stories. However, the writing, characters and worlds are enough to lift the plots, and I guarantee that you will have never read anything quite like it.

He has written so many books it would be impossible to talk about them all here, but if you are a fan of classic but strange science fiction, there are plenty of marvellous works to choose from. I would recommend the Dying Earth, Lyonesse, and the Demon Princes series, which takes the age-old revenge story and places it in space. Kirth Gersen is on a mission to kill those responsible for his family’s deaths, and his adventures, his methods for finding his targets, and his solutions to sticky situations, are all fascinating and exciting.

I would also recommend Jack Vance’s short stories, which can be overlooked but in many cases are just as good or even better than his novels. Short stories showcase Vance’s incredible imagination and his ability to evoke atmosphere and emotion, without needing long and complicated plots. They therefore play to his strengths, and it is some of his short stories that have, in fact, stayed with me the longest. Try Fantasms & Magics, a collection that contains some of my favourites.

Jack Vance, deservedly so, will always be remembered as one of science fiction and fantasy’s greats, and if you’ve never tried his books, I urge you to give one a read.

Bout of Books Mini-Challenges

I find it easier to put the mini-challenge responses in a separate post from my updates, so here we go. I LOVE mini-challenges, so I'm pretty excited...


Sunday:

Last day of the read-a-thon! Today's mini-challenge is hosted by Snarky Bird, Uber Nerd, and it's all about recommending books. The idea is to say that if you liked (...) then you'll love (...)

Okay, here are my suggestions. I wanted to go mad and recommend everything on my shelf, but then realised that I'd have to limit myself. Of course, these work both ways - if you've read the second suggestion, then you should love the first too!

- If you like The Graveyard Book by Neil Gaiman, you'll love Johnny and the Dead by Terry Pratchett. The latter book is older, and I never see it talked about much, but it is very good!

 

- If you like The Immortal Rules by Julie Kagawa, you'll love Bitten by Kelley Armstrong. Strong heroines, and sexy supernatural stories that don't pull punches.

- If you like the Harry Potter series by J. K. Rowling, you'll love the Bartimaeus series by Jonathan Stroud. Not exactly similar, but both are fun and adventurous, both feature magic, both are very British, both feature arrogant magic users (the Bartimaeus series could be seen as what the Harry Potter world could look like if the magic users had ruled over the muggles instead of hiding from them), and both explore prejudice towards magical creatures.

- If you like A Game of Thrones by George R R Martin, but would like a smaller cast of characters and more women in positions of strength, then you'll love The Red Knight by K. T. Davies.

- If you like The Night Circus by Erin Morgenstern, you'll love Howl's Moving Castle by Diana Wynne Jones. In terms of the magical feel. So enchanting and absorbing, though I think Howl's Moving Castle has a much better story, and would recommend it to anyone, even if you hated The Night Circus. ;-)

- If you like the current trend of YA dystopias involving pregnancies, you'll love The Handmaid's Tale by Margaret Atwood.

- If you like A Wizard of Earthsea by Ursula le Guin, you'll love The Magician's Guild by Trudi Canavan. Similar idea of young people being plucked from the most unlikely place in order to learn magic, and then dealing with the consequences.

- If you like the Famous Five series by Enid Blyton, you'll love the Roman Mysteries series by Caroline Lawrence. Same sense of adventure, same fairly simple but very fun puzzles, same brave children and strong friendship, and the added bonus of learning about ancient Rome as you go!

So there you go. Hope there was something there to interest you, or to add to your To Read list! Can't wait to see everyone else's suggestions. :-)


Saturday

Today's challenge is hosted by Smash Attack Reads and it's another book spine poem! But this time we have to stick to one genre of books... of course, I chose fantasy (it's the genre I own the most of, so makes things a bit easier). It's 12 books long and uses 12 extra words, and I ended up having to take the picture in three:

A game of thrones in Fantasyland:

The Iron King on his throne of glass;

The High Lord in his castle in the air.

Each sips poison from enchanted glass,

As the novice, cursed with eyes the colour of magic,

Claims the crown of Dalemark.

I'm not sure if the second title is 'Fantasyland' or 'The Tough Guide to Fantasyland'. If it's the latter, then replace that title with 'City of Ruin', which I own but haven't taken a photo of.


Thursday

Today's challenge is to make an acrostic poem, hosted by Harley Bear Book Blog. The task is to take a book title and use each letter to make a word. Here's mine:

Wednesday

Create a cover! This is being hosted by I Talk Books, and the challenge is simple: re-design a book cover! I picked Wool by Hugh Howey, and created this with the help of my husband. Enjoy! ;-) 

 
Monday

Book spine poem time! This is being hosted at Escape Through the Pages.

The rules are: create a poem using book titles. You get as many extra words as you have books in your poem. I'm already breaking the rules because I actually have two more words than I do books. Technically, I can do it without cheating, as I can replace 'I call' with 'are', and remove 'and', but I think this throws off the rhythmn a bit, so I prefer this version.

This is a little tribute to the poem within the book The Stars My Destination, which is also one of the books in the stack. :-)

I've titled it:

'The Science Fiction and Fantasy Author'

I'm the master puppeteer,
And Neverwhere my nation.
Magic and stone I call my home,
The stars my destination.

Echo - Book Review

Echo
by Alicia Wright Brewster

The countdown clock reads ten days until the end of the world. The citizens are organized. Everyone's been notified and assigned a duty. The problem is . . . no one knows for sure how it will end.

Energy-hungry Mages are the most likely culprit. They travel toward a single location from every corner of the continent. Fueled by the two suns, each Mage holds the power of an element: air, earth, fire, metal, water, or ether. They harness their powers to draw energy from the most readily available resource: humans.

Ashara has been assigned to the Ethereal task force, made up of human ether manipulators and directed by Loken, a young man with whom she has a complicated past. Loken and Ashara bond over a common goal: to stop the Mages from occupying their home and gaining more energy than they can contain. But soon, they begin to suspect that the future of the world may depend on Ashara's death. (Synopsis from Goodreads)

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Echo has a really interesting concept; it mixes the idea of people who can control elements - earth, air, water, metal, fire and ether - with time-related stuff. The Elders have seen a vision that the world will end, and so they have moved everyone and everything back in time to try to prevent the disaster. Each time they fail, and each time they move the world backwards again. But they can only travel back ten days, and each time they do they get a little weaker, as they are only echoes of their former selves. Soon, they won’t have the power to alter time at all. Their chances are running out.

What a fantastic idea! Unfortunately, however, I didn’t feel that the plot and the characters quite lived up to this amazing concept. The story focuses on Asha, a teenage girl who discovers her powers for the first time and is suddenly flung into the council’s desperate attempts to save the world. We see training, a lot of talking, running around and fighting mages (people who have lost both their control of their powers and their humanity), and running from various groups of people who don’t like Asha very much. Naturally, Asha turns out to be very special, and centrally important to the end-of-the-world scenario. It’s a shame that Asha’s story, and in fact, Asha herself, were just a little dull. There were also points in which characters’ actions made no sense. I can’t really elaborate without giving away spoilers, but really... the council is formed of some very stupid people.

Having said that, the book is far from boring; it gives us quite familiar save-the-world superhero type fights, and typical young adult self-discovery and relationship issues. These aren’t the most original, but they are written well, and there’s plenty to keep the reader entertained. I did enjoy the story. I just felt that it could have been so much more. The revelation about why Asha is so powerful and important is very clever, and it ties into the time travel stuff. The fact that the end of the world may not have been inevitable at all, but could itself have been an echo travelling back from future timelines in the form of a vision of the future, is a brilliant idea. Did the council cause its own dilemma? It seems that way. I do love timey wimey paradoxes. I also loved the religious elements and the slight science fiction aspects of what was mainly a fantasy feel. Very intriguing stuff!

I felt that these aspects could have been explored more, and that the ultimate cause of the end of the world could have been something deeper or more interesting. I was actually expecting some kind of twist involving that, as it seemed to me unlikely that a group of mages, no matter how numerous, could destroy the whole world. It didn’t seem to fit, somehow, and the people’s extreme hatred of them was odd. Shouldn’t the mages elicit at least a bit of sympathy, as people who have been lost to their own powers? And how does this happen? And are they really the simple bad guys that they seem to be? I felt that this aspect of the book was too simplistic and under-explored. It made me a little uncomfortable to keep hearing how much various characters, particularly Asha, wanted to kill mages. At least Asha has an excuse for her feelings, but I still thought that she might have to learn that life is not necessarily that clear cut.

This is an interesting book that for the most part I enjoyed, but was also disappointed by. It has some very unique aspects and clever ideas, but unfortunately doesn’t explore them as much as it could, instead following a slightly dry and familiar plot. The characters often act frustratingly, but there is plenty of action and intriguing worldbuilding to keep the story going.

Thank you to Dragonfairy Press for providing a review copy of this book in exchange for an honest review.


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A quick note on the cover, as there currently seems to be an issue with it. A friend pointed this out to me, so I thought it might be important to provide a link to it. It should be noted that authors don’t necessarily have much input into their covers, and it hasn't affected my review of the story.

Zoo City - Book Review

Zoo City also has one of the best covers I've seen

Zoo City is an Arthur C. Clarke Award-winning urban-fantasy book by Lauren Beukes. It tells the story of Zinzi December, an ex-journalist and recovering drug addict who became ‘animalled’ after her actions led to her brother’s murder. Now she carries around a sloth, as well as a nasty drug-money debt and a lot of guilt. The day she gained Sloth she also developed a new, magical talent for finding lost things. When she is hired to locate a missing girl, one half of a famous teen pop duo, the case begins to lead her to darker and more dangerous places than she had expected.

Zoo City was not quite what I was expecting, but then, I’m not entirely sure what I was expecting. Perhaps something in which the fantasy or science fictional element was more prominent, not necessarily the focus of the plot, but at least more central. In this, the animals, the magic, the strangeness, are all just there, while Zinzi gets on with things. But you know what? This is a large part of what makes Zoo City so brilliant. Not only are the magical elements never fully explained (which I often prefer anyway), they are not even really important. Except that they are, just not in the ways the reader might think. Animals and the consequences of being animalled are vital to the characters and their world, as well as allowing the author to explore ideas of prejudice, guilt and the stigma attached to rehabilitated criminals, amongst other issues, without ever becoming preachy or heavy-handed. Each element that makes the world strange – the animals, the undertow, the mashavi – is revealed almost as a mundane detail in the background while the missing-person mystery takes centre stage. And then, suddenly, all these little details become vital as the plot takes a darker turn, and the existence of the animalled becomes central to the story after all. This seems like a risky approach, but it is a risk that really pays off.