For Mantis on Vance - was RE: (urth) OT: further possible

Dan'l Danehy-Oakes · 20 May 2002, 16:34 · from urth-v0205.mbox · original

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From: "Dan'l Danehy-Oakes" <ddanehy at siebel.com>
Subject: For Mantis on Vance - was RE: (urth) OT: further possible
Date: Mon, 20 May 2002 09:34:33 -0700
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Apologies for the OT thread I am doubtless about to start.

Mantis wrote:

> OTOH, while I'm not certain about the publication history of=20
> CANNERY ROW (did sections appear in magazines, etc.), my
> understanding of THE DYING EARTH is that it is 6 stories, and
> only one of them was published in magazine form--that was the
> same year (1950) that the book came out, and as such amounts
> to a publicity release (just as "The Tale of the Student and
> His Son" and "The Armiger's Daughter," two tales from TBOTNS,=20
> appeared in magazines).  Or so it seems to me.

Hoom. Obviously, those are cases of taking chapters from a novel
and printing them separately as short stories. If THE DYING EARTH
was indeed written as a novel (about which more below), then that=20
would be more or less the case here, except that -- really, the
Wolfe excisions are hardly even chapters, given that they are=20
separate stories read or told by persons in the novel, which would
not be the case with a bit from TDE printed as a story.

> So fix-up "in the classic sense of van Vogt," well hmmm. =20
> Divining Vance's (probable) intentions rather than the
> publishing record (making TDE a "failed" van Vogt fix-up?).
> Ah well, such quibbles!  Look, blattid said "more of a
> fix-up," not "exactly a fix-up," so there's no quibble, even.

Indeed.

And while I would not venture to divine Vance's intentions (I'm=20
somewhat of an intentionalist, but only where the author has=20
marked a clear intentional trail, and, for that matter, only=20
when the printed text doesn't clearly shout defiance to the=20
intention so marked), this discussion caused TDE to drift rather
precipitately to the top of my to-reread pile, and so I reread
it over the weekend and ...

H'mmm. My first response was to wonder where the marvellously
stylized Vancean dialogue was. I suppose that developed over=20
time; and indeed, it appears somewhat more as the book goes
along.

And my second response was to question how much of an influence
on tBotNS this could really be; there's almost nothing of the=20
flavor of the latter here, to my admittedly somewhat jaded=20
lectoral palate ... none of the complexity of language, of
incident, of character, even, really, of background. Granted
I'm comparing a book I've just read almost as a newcomer to=20
one I've pondered over for years, the background of TDE does
not _feel_ deep or complex to me -- no deeper than required
by the necessities of the individual stories.

And that, really, is the See Below. For me, at least, the=20
stories in TDE are very much individual stories. There are
links, characters from one appear in another, but they are,
I think, less unified than (say) Leiber's yarns of Fafhrd=20
and the Gray Mouser. Episodes from a single and singular
future world, but not, to me, producing anything larger as
a group than the sum of the parts.

So for the more dedicated Vanceans on the list, I suppose=20
the obvious question would be whether I, as a rather casual=20
reader, am missing anything here? This book is the one most
often cited when recommending Vance to a Wolfe fan; other
than the gross-scale influence on New Sun, the fundamental=20
idea (which, actually, wasn't entirely new here either) of=20
this incredibly ancient Earth, is there something deeper?

--Blattid

--=20

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