Jack Vance or There are Doors?

Andy Robertson · 21 Dec 2002, 00:04 · from urth-v0212.mbox · original

This is the message as the crawl holds it, before anything here touched it. What the conversation shows has been through ingest: transfer encodings decoded, attachments dropped, quote markers repaired, and the archiver’s ? resolved into quotation marks and dashes. Those repairs are judgements and some of them are wrong, which is what this page is for. Email addresses are obscured here as they are everywhere else on the site, so it is before our repairs rather than byte for byte.

From: "Andy Robertson" <andywrobertson at clara.co.uk>
Subject: Re: (urth) Jack Vance or There are Doors?
Date: Sat, 21 Dec 2002 00:04:11 -0000
Message-ID: <urth-v0212-2501 at digest.urth.net>
X-Urthmirror-Source: http://www.urth.net/urth/archives/v0212/2501.txt.shtml
MIME-Version: 1.0
Content-Type: text/plain; charset="utf-8"
Content-Transfer-Encoding: quoted-printable

Um, I disagree.   The original  picaresque novels did not have the grace of
a fantastic **deus ex machina** every three paragraphs.

Love Vance, hate THE DYING EARTH (except the first novel)


,nitc od
----- Original Message -----
From: "James Jordan" <jbjordan4 at cox.net>
To: <urth at urth.net>
Sent: Friday, December 20, 2002 11:51 PM
Subject: Re: (urth) Jack Vance or There are Doors?


> At 05:29 PM 12/20/2002, Dave R. wrote:
>
>
> >I think you might as well read the Dying Earth stories, since they're a
> >quick, easy read.  Contrary to some other views on the list, I think
Vance
> >is a good but definitely not great author.  I do think he should get some
> >credit for writing such an entertaining set of stories where the main
> >character in most of them (Cugel) is a completely unlikeable bastard ;)
>
>          The Cugel stories are in the tradition of "picaresque tales"
> (tales about rascals) and we've seen very few in recent times, though they
> were common in Spain in the 16th c. You're supposed to both like and
> disdain Cugel, and that's the strength of a picaresque tale, which exposes
> the attractiveness of wicked behavior and makes us feel the humanity of
> even wicked people, all the while entertaining us humorously and
indirectly
> showing us that wickedness is .. well .. wicked. It's a kind of realistic
+
> humorous moral tale that is hard to pull off, and Vance does it
brilliantly.
>          Whether on thinks Vance is "great" or not, the Cugel tales are
> deft and exquisite exemplars of a neglected genre of Western literature.
>
> Nutria
>
>
> --
>
>


--=20

An unofficial mirror of a public mailing list · about & removal requests · download the archive · before the list · original archive at urth.net