Posted on 04/14/2016 11:57:53 AM PDT by EveningStar
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Interesting read. I seem to recall that although I have read a lot by the two authors, “The Mote in...” was one I could not get enthused to finish. Having read the critique, I can’t remember the book’s start well enough to determine if the items commented on caused my lack of enthusiasm.
His concept of the armored suit in Starship Troopers is the basis of the Iron Man suit and modern exo-suits.
The “There Will Be War” series regularly featured stories of Barley Cross, Ireland, starring a British soldier and his tank who turns out to be fertile in a world where everyone else is sterile.
There was a later compilation of JUST those stories plus a few original ones.
“As soon as I found Jack Vance, though....Really good stuff even if I did need to cheat with an occasional dictionary lookup. I call any man a liar who didn’t!”
The concept is nuncupatory.
Jack Vance and Gene Wolfe are my top picks if I had to choose. Although Vance was good friends with Poul Anderson, Frank Herbert and later Robert Silverburg, he was pretty much a sci-fi outsider. He claimed to have never read any sci-fi of his friends and contemporaries, even things like Dune.
Freegards
The sequel is not quite as good, in sense of wonder and curiosity, suspense and surprise, etc, but makes up for it with action and a good resolution.
If you’ve just discovered Jack Vance, I’d recommend the Demon Princes, and Cadwal Chronicles as two of his best series. That and a good dictionary.
One of my faves! (Both)
Vance has number of simply awesome series. Demon Princes, Planet of Adventure, Lyonesse, Dying Earth. Even the ones not quite up to those in my opinion like Cadwal, Durdane, and Alastor Clucter are tremendous. No one writes prose like Vance. His career might have suffered because there was really no one great popular large stand alone novel. The Dragonmasters and the Last Castle are pretty short, and not even the greatest Vance in my opinion even though those won the awards.
Freegards
http://www.nytimes.com/2009/07/19/magazine/19Vance-t.html?_r=2
Yes that’s a really good article. I actually have read it before. The great thing here is that the literary snob types have no idea how great of a prose dispenser Vance was, simply because he wrote of the fantastic.
I like Theodore Sturgeon. A great writer. He said “90% of everything is crap” when asked why most sci-fi was bad. Vance is way way up in the 10% zone of everything that isn’t crap, and probably better than 90% of that.
Freegards
Awesome quote:
"...Politics is the Art of the Possible, [and] no monarch is so absolute that he can resort to a solution his subjects won’t accept, that there is no such thing as a 'final answer,' that we humans live through finding make-do solutions to buy time— and that we can console ourselves with the hope that, just possibly, the horse might learn to sing."
Same here.. "The Moon is a Harsh Mistress" is still one of my favorite books of all time. Also, "Farnam's Freehold" has a lot of good libertarian themes in it, but I hate the middle part where the protagonist's family is enslaved by the future tyrant.
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