#Jack Vance
Explore tagged Tumblr posts
Text
Jean-Claude Hadi's interior illustrations for a 1976 French translation of Jack Vance's Trullion novels.
707 notes
·
View notes
Text
Karel Thole (1914-2000) - Emphyrio, 1982
source
165 notes
·
View notes
Text
Jack Gaughan - Eyes of the Overworld (Jack Vance, 1966)
305 notes
·
View notes
Note
The idea of logging on a colonized alien planet brings my mind back to the planet Lalonde from Peter F. Hamilton's Night's Dawn books - a world that had very hard wood as its only meaningful export, and was also stuck developing its economy from agriculturalism (due to investment shortages, though).
All this is to say - Hey! What are some foundational inspirations for your sci fi verse? You gotta have some like recommendations of classic or older sci-fi for us, right? What are some of your suggestions of books and authors to read?
OK SO - My sci-fi tastes have sort of ended up in some very specific niches. Growing up, I was a Larry Niven +Jerry Pournelle man, in part because my dad amassed a huge collection of their books - then gave 90% of them away before i was old enough to read them. So one of my teenage missions was rebuilding that library, trash and all!
Stuff like Footfall, Ringworld, Gil "The Arm" Hamilton, Protector (yes i attempted to name a comic series similarly, and paid for it) "The Mote in God's Eye"... you name it, I read fuckloads of these books. And while they tend to land on a sort of human chauvinist "mankind will win based on his inherent adaptive human-ness, and the aliens will fail because of their rigid alien-ness", this shit was very foundational to me.
Their more collaborative series, The Man-Kzin Wars and War World, also loom large in my teenage mind. The Man-Kzin wars are super fun - humans meet a race of tiger-men, and go from being NWO peaceniks to roughneck cat-skinners in a generation! PEACE AND LOVE WONT DEFEAT TIGER MEN!
Similarly, war world (like lots of that 70s/80s military sci fi) was a sort of catch-all for western military nerds to play with their favorite factions - it was a planet where all the un-ruleable ethnic groups and nationalities had been deported by the authoritarian earth government, and left to rot... until a race of genetically engineered fascist super men land on the world, and start trying to rule the place. Pretty fun shit.
As I got older, I turned hard into William Gibson, and read the absolute shit out of both the Neuromancer trilogy and the Bridge trilogy, as well as his short stories. Bruce Sterling was part of that wave for me, too, and I religiously sought his old paperbacks out too. In terms of novels, "Distraction" is my favorite coherent Sterling Novel - though the short stories in the "Schismatrix" novel/collection of his remain my absolute favorite space opera pieces.
At this age, too, I found my top-top fave Sterling Stories - "Taklaman" and "Bicycle Repairman", both gritty pseudo-cyberpunk stories of the highest degree, in this collection:
This thousand-plus page collection of short stories and novellas was basically my bible for a few years - i put sticky notes on each story i loved and meant to return to, until the book was so festooned with sticky note bookmarks i abandoned the practice altogether. If you have the chance, just buy this book and chew on it for a few years.
As i got into my 20s, Charles Stross became my lode star - his books like Accelerando and Glasshouse were total game changers for me. They come with their own peculiarities, but I loved his transhuman/posthuman musings (or at least i was obsessed with his stuff for a good few years - the venn diagram of his obvious interests and my own overlapped enough that his books were great fodder for a growing sci-fi loving brain).
But since then, my main literary squeeze has been the great man, JACK VANCE. Working on Prophet, my friend @cmkosemen made a remark about how much the early issues of the series reminded him of a book series called "Planet of Adventure" or "the Tschai Cycle", by Jack Vance. The book has a beautifully simple setup - a man from an entirely undescribed spacefaring human civilization crash-lands onto a weird planet. But on that planet, he finds four separate civilizations, each who possess a population of enslaved humans, culturally and physically molded to the needs of their masters. And each book of this series covers our generic hero's interactions with each bizarre expoitative culture. I was extremely intrigued.
Soon thereafter, I found my current absolute favorite book - "THE DRAGON MASTERS". A book about an isolated medieval world... which gets visited, once every few generations, by a black pyramid starship, flown by a reptilian race known as the Greph. The greph capture humans to (surprise surprise) breed them into hyper specific slaves... who in turn become Greph-like in their thinking and demeanours. But the last time the BLACK PYRAMID landed, a bunch of angry medieval dudes stormed the thing, blew it up, and captured a bunch of greph... who became the breeding stock for a whole new human world of slave labour. By the time we meet this planet, the two rival lords of the human-populated regions have been breeding greph slave warriors, or "dragons", for generations, for combat against one another. But soon, the black pyramid will return...
I love this book I even spent a good few months during covid talking with the Vance Estate and several publishers about developing it into a graphic novel, but nobody could quite agree on how it could get made with old Simon getting a paycheque... so sadly it fell apart. There are concept drawings floating around my patreon and other corners of the internet. But one day I'll use 'em...
My other favorite books of his, to name a couple of the MANY books of his I love:
THE BLUE WORLD: A caste system of humans, descended from a crashed prison ship, live on floating settlements on an ocean planet, paying protection to a giant long-lived intelligent crustacean. But one man is tired of giving up all his crops to this tyrannical megafauna...
THE MIRACLE WORKERS: Rival lords on a planet descended to medieval tech (surprise surprise) fight using armies... and rival SORCERORS who employ the powers of suggestion to voodoo each others' warriors... but when facing non-human intelligences, these sorceror's skills fall short.
But there are heaps more, and I love most (thought not all) of the ones i've read. They're generally short, concise, and full of all sorts of bizarre bullshit.
THere are more books i've read and enjoyed in my life, of course, but these are the core ones that I think of when I think of my career as a sci-fi reader... let me know what your top recs are!
#sciencefiction#science fiction#book recommendations#jack vance#larry niven#jerry pournelle#simon roy#griz grobus#charles stross#dragon masters#william gibson#bruce sterling
51 notes
·
View notes
Text
Jack Vance - Space Opera, 1965 (John Schoenherr)
23 notes
·
View notes
Text
125 notes
·
View notes
Text
A book you very likely don’t have on your shelf #480
1974
Written by Jack Vance
#1974#1970s#1970's#cover art#book cover#paperback#vintage paperback#ellery queen#jack vance#ephemera#mystery
24 notes
·
View notes
Text
Illustration by Ed Emshwiller for The Kragen by Jack Vance in the July 1964 issue of Fantastic Stories of Imagination. The novella was published in expanded form the following year as The Blue World.
#ed emshwiller#jack vance#the blue world#the kragen#kraken#sea monster#science fiction#seascape#fantastic#fantastic magazine#fantastic stories#fantastic stories of imagination
14 notes
·
View notes
Text
Showcasing art from some of my favourite artists, and those that have attracted my attention, in the field of visual arts, including vintage; pulp; pop culture; books and comics; concert posters; fantastical and imaginative realism; classical; contemporary; new contemporary; pop surrealism; conceptual and illustration.
The art of Nicolas Bouvier (aka Sparth).
#Art#Nicolas Bouvier#Sparth#Concept Art#Fantastical Art#Imaginative Realism#Dune#The Protectorate#Halo#Jack Vance#Books#Book Cover Art#Cover Art#No AI#No NFT
58 notes
·
View notes
Text
#books and reading#fantasy#strange how multiple different sagas habe similar dates like 12th century#if you explain everything the whole fantasy aspect suffers#jack vance#made dnd memorisation magic btw#it's raining all day again#wichie rants
12 notes
·
View notes
Photo
Uncredited 1980 cover to Jack Vance’s The Palace of Love
223 notes
·
View notes
Text
Oh, Jackie boy...
16 notes
·
View notes
Text
THE DYING EARTH by Jack Vance (New York: Hillman, 1950)
(San Francisco: Underwood-Miller, 1976) Cover art and interior illustrations by George Barr.
Contains
“The Dying Earth”
“Turjan of Miir”
“Mazirian the Magician”
“T’sais”
“Liane the Wayfarer”
“Ulan Dhor Ends a Dream”
“Guyal of Sfere”
#book blog#books#books books books#book cover#pulp art#science fiction#pulp fantasy#science fantasy#beautiful books#jack vance#george barr#dying earth#book design#book publishing#book binding#bookbinding
41 notes
·
View notes
Text
Welcome to Ioun City
Tonight’s Band of Blades game wasn’t going to happen and so I sent something about rival thieves’ guilds at war. I posted three Dyson Logos maps and we chose this one: We decided the city’s big money-maker is the polishing, charging and activation of Ioun Stones in the 3 arcane-industrial castles. Each castle is held by a different faction who, all together, sell the Ioun Stones through a…
View On WordPress
#D&D#Dungeons and Dragons#Dying Earth#Dyson Logos#Fighter#Ioun City#Ioun Stone#Jack Vance#Mage#Morreion#Rhialto the Marvelous#Thief#ttrpg
13 notes
·
View notes