I’ve also seen a near-final copy of the cover by Tom Kidd, which is just lovely (the b&w sketch on the SubPress page doesn’t do it justice), and George Martin has written a wonderful appreciation for the book. The other thing that is a real highlight is the interstitial material. Jack has written a brief preface for the book, and we’ve managed to source comments from him on almost all of the stories which will run as afterwords (the main source of these, for VancePhiles, was the 1976 The Best of Jack Vance). We’ve also managed to include a biographical sketch written by Jack which hasn’t been widely seen. Given that Jack’s always preferred to let his work speak for itself, this additional material provides some interesting context on this major writer.

As to when you’ll be able to get the Treasury, actually buy one – I think probably in the first quarter of 2007 (Jan/Feb most likely). When I’ve got solid information on that I’ll post it here. In the meantime, you can pre-order the book.

In spite of many years of buying every Jack Vance book I can afford used or new, I haven’t had the opportunity to read much of his short fiction yet, except the pieces collected in the Pocket Books Best of Jack Vance. I would suggest, though, that you mostly avoid the longer works and those that have been reprinted most frequently over the years, giving preference to those that have never been reprinted or haven’t been reprinted in many decades. For instance, “The Last Castle” and “The Dragon Masters” have been reprinted in paperback several times, and both appeared in the massive The Hugo Winners anthology that SFBC kept in print for so long that used copies are easy to find.

I would also suggest you avoid the short works that were incorporated into fix-up novels (e.g. most of the Dying Earth material) except for one or two representative pieces, perhaps notable for the degree of difference between the magazine and book versions.

What do you put into a collection of work and what do you leave out? There is a view, neatly stated in Jim’s comment, that you should not reprint the most famous, the most readily available work by an artist in an anthology, collection, or whatever. The underpinning argument, from a publishers perspective often goes like this: if you reprint “xxx”, which has been reprinted twenty-five galumpty times, then the dedicated fans who’ve bought everything else won’t buy it. If, however, you include this never before seen item from said creator’s garden shed, then all of the fans will buy it. The problem with this is it leads directly to buying Led Zeppelin’s Greatest Hits without “Stairway to Heaven”, Queen’s Greatest Hits without “Bohemian Rhapsody”, and The Best of the Beatles without “Hey Jude”. This doesn’t strike me as entirely reasonable. It also doesn’t strike me as entirely honest. If I buy Led Zeppelin’s Greatest Hits it better have “Stairway” on it. Similarly, if I buy a best of Harlan Ellison it better have “Jeffty is Five” in it, no matter how often it’s been anthologised. And, for Jack Vance, that really does mean you pretty much have to include “The Last Castle”, “The Dragon Masters”, and “The Moon Moth”. Yes, they’ve been widely available. Yes, they’ve been often reprinted. But, without them, this wouldn’t be the best of Jack Vance, a real treasury.

Now, while the important details are known – it’s a 175-200,000 word book with a cover by Tom Kidd, an intro by George Martin and a foreword by Jack Vance – there are other details that I have been chatting with my co-editor about. The major one today is the illustration of Vance’s stories by Jack Gaughan.

As many of you will know, the late Jack Gaughan was a well-known and well-respected artist who did a lot of science fiction illustration in the ’50s and ’60s for the magazines, pulps etc etc. He illustrated a number of Jack Vance stories and novels, perhaps most famously both “The Dragon Masters” and “The Last Castle” for Galaxy in the 1960s. My question for Coode Streets with a Vancean bent is what are your thoughts on the appeal of the Gaughan Vance illustrations? Are they spot on, or do they miss the mark today? I’m curious to hear as many opinions as possible, so let me know and feel free to fire up the Vance telegraph and have the Vancephiles post to the comments thread.

Now, using figures from the Vance Integral Edition website, I estimate that there were a total of 123 works published between 1944 and 1984 that might be considered to be “short works”. For the purposes of this discussion, short works means anything under 50,000 words. Now, we are almost definitely not going to consider anything beyond the 31,300 words of “The Dragon Masters”, but that still leaves 109 possible titles.

From there, our original list of 25 stories already amounted to 303,300 words, nearly 97,000 words longer than we need. We’ve also had a further 165,500 words of stories recommended to us. Those stories are:

Abercrombie Station (20700)
Chateau d’If (22100)
Dodkin’s Job (13100)
Fader’s Waft (36400)
Flutic (14000)
Sulwen’s Planet (5200)
The Houses of Iszm (30100)
The Murthe (9500)
The Potters of Firsk (6600)
Ullward’s Retreat (7800)

That gives us a full long, long, long list of:

A Practical Man’s Guide (2.7)
Abercrombie Station (20.7)
Aboard the Galante (7)
Alfred’s Ark (2)
Assault on a City (17.4)
At the Inn (2.1)
Bird Island (41.6)
Cat Island (1.4)
Chateau d’If (22.1)
Cholwell’s Chickens (16.7)
Cil (9)
Clang (2.1)
Coup de Grace (7.4)
Crusade to Maxus (21)
D P (6.9)
Dead Ahead (6.5)
Dodkin’s Job (13.1)
Dover Spargill’s Ghastly Floater (5.4)
Dream Castle (5.8)
Erze Damath (3.4)
Fader’s Waft (36.4)
Faucelme (7)
Flutic (14)
Four Hundred Blackbirds (7.6)
Freitzke’s Turn (18.2)
Gold and Iron (44.6)
Golden Girl (4.6)
Green Magic (4.6)
Guyal of Sfere (17.5)
Hard Luck Diggings (4.6)
I’ll Build Your Dream Castle (5.8)
Lausicaa (7.1)
Liane the Wayfarer (4.1)
Masquerade on Dicantropus (5.6)
Mazirian the Magician (6.1)
Meet Miss Universe (7)
Milton Hack from Zodiac (17.5)
Morreion (15.9)
Noise (4.6)
Nopalgarth (35.5)
On the Docks (4.3)
Parapsyche (35.3)
Phalid’s Fate (10.9)
Planet of the Black Dust (5.6)
Rumfuddle (20.2)
Sabotage on Sulfur Planet (12.7)
Sail 25 (10.7)
Sanatoris Short-cut (5.8)
Seven Exits from Bocz (3.5)
Shape-Up (4.9)
Sjambak (9.3)
Son of the Tree (30)
Spa of the Stars (7)
Space Opera (50)
Spatterlight (5.5)
Sulwen’s Planet (5.2)
Telek (21.8)
The Absent Minded Professor (5.8)
The Augmented Agent (14.9)
The Bagful of Dreams (10.3)
The Caravan (15.6)
The Cave in the Forest (4.5)
The Columns (7.8)
The Deadly Isles (45.1)
The Devil On Salvation Bluff (7.2)
The Dirdir (46.3)
The Dogtown Tourist Agency (40.2)
The Dragon Masters (31.3)
The Enchanted Princess (7.8)
The Flesh Mask (40)
The Four Wizards (3.9)
The Gift of Gab (17.9)
The God and the Temple Robber (5.5)
The House Lords (4.5)
The Houses of Iszm (30.1)
The Howling Bounders (6.5)
The Inn of Blue Lamps (7.2)
The King of Thieves (6.2)
The Kokod Warriors (11.7)
The Kragen (25.6)
The Languages of Pao (45.2)
The Last Castle (21.4)
The Magnificent Red-hot Jazzing Seven (3.8)
The Manse of Iucounu (6.5)
The Men Return (3.3)
The Miracle Workers (25)
The Mitr (2.2)
The Moon Moth (12.4)
The Mountains of Magnatz (10.7)
The Murthe (9.5)
The Narrow Land (9.1)
The New Prime (8.8)
The Ocean of Sighs (6.4)
The Overworld (10.6)
The Phantom Milkman (4.1)
The Pilgrims (13.5)
The Pnume (47)
The Potters of Firsk (6.6)
The Raft on the River (2.6)
The Rapparee (40.2)
The Secret (3.2)
The Seventeen Virgins (9.1)
The Silver Desert and the Songan Sea (5.4)
The Sorcerer Pharesm (9.2)
The Stark (12.7)
The Sub-standard Sardines (8.3)
The Telephone was Ringing in the Dark (An Unfinished Manuscript) (25.6)
The Ten Books (7.3)
The Uninhibited Robot (12.2)
The Unspeakable McInch (6.3)
The Visitors (5)
The Wannek (49)
The World Between (9.1)
The World-Thinker (9)
Three Legged Joe (6.5)
To B or Not to C or to D (7.5)
T’sais (9.8)
Turjan of Miir (5.6)
Ulan Dhor (Ulan Dhor Ends a Dream) (9.4)
Ullward’s Retreat (7.8)
When the Five Moons Rise (4.8)
Where Hesperus Falls (3.4)
Wild Thyme and Violets (4.8)

Now, from there, you can make your own. Remember, though: 210,000 words of fiction is pretty much the limit.

1. in the comments threads on this blog;
2. on the Asimov’s discussion groups; and
3. at the Jack Vance Message Board.

I’m monitoring all of it, and listening to everyone’s suggestions.  If you have any interest in the conversation, join in! We’re working towards the best book we can,  but we also want to raise Jack’s profile as much as we can. So, please, join the conversation, blog, post, write articles, do stuff about Jack. And remember, we’re approaching his 90th Birthday in August. It’d be cool to do something to celebrate.

1. A Bagful of Dreams
2. Assault on a City
3. Coup de Grace
4. Gift of Gab
5. Green Magic
6. Guyal of Sfere
7. Liane the Wayfarer
8. Morreion
9. Noise
10. Rumfuddle
11. Sail
12. Shape-Up
13. The Dragon Masters
14. The Kokod Warriors
15. The Last Castle
16. The Man from Zodiac
17. The Men Return
18. The Miracle Workers
19. The Mitr
20. The Moon Moth
21. The Narrow Land
22. The New Prime
23. The Seventeen Virgins
24. The Sorcerer Pharesm
25. When the Five Moons Rise

Just to give you an idea of how length is running on this book, when we started we roughed a possible list of important stories to include. It ran to eleven stories (Coup de Grace, The Gift of Gab, Liane the Wayfarer , Noise, Rumfuddle, Sail 25, The Dragon Masters, The Last Castle, The Men Return, The Miracle Workers, The Moon Moth) which took up a total of 158,000 words of a book.  While we have freedom to run somewhat longer than that, it should give you an idea of the struggle to get all of the essential stories into the Treasury.

Coup de Grace and Other Stories, Jack Vance (The Vance Integral Edition)

When stories first began appearing under the byline ‘Jack Vance’, science fiction was largely a place of transparent prose, plainly spoken characters, and bug-eyed monsters with an inexplicable preference for Earth women. Vance’s early stories, characterized as they were by rich, stylized prose, mannered characters, and drawing-room plots must have seemed both refreshing and unusual to the readers of Thrilling Wonder Stories and Super Science Fiction. His stories weren’t about the latest gadget or technological doodad – instead they focussed on strange, alien cultures that allowed him to indulge in the often satirical social commentary that would prove characteristic of his entire body of work.

Despite the undoubted importance of his contribution to the field — his first and most famous book, The Dying Earth, transformed the field, laying the groundwork for works like Gene Wolfe’s The Book of the New Sun — Vance’s popularity in his native United States has waned in recent years and much of his work is now out of print. However, like many of the jazz musicians he admires, this decline has been accompanied by an increasing popularity in Europe. It is unsurprising, therefore, that the Vance Integral Edition – an ambitious attempt by a group of readers to bring ‘preferred’ versions of his work back into print – should be headquartered in France. The VIE intends to produce a 44 volume set of Vance’s collected works. In advance of that, however, they have released Coup de Grace and Other Stories, a seven story sampler intended to act both as an introduction to Vance and as a design test for the full set of books.

The collection opens with “Alfred’s Ark”, a minor piece from the mid-60s that originally appeared in New Worlds. Convinced that another great Flood is coming, Alfred Johnson, a local grain-and-feed merchant, decides to build his own Ark to protect his loved ones. Initially treated with derision by his neighbours, their attitudes change markedly when the rain begins to fall. While firmly in Vance’s tradition of conservative social commentary – in many of his stories he seems far from impressed with his fellow man – it lacks the richness that characterizes his best work.

“The Moon Moth”, on the other hand, is not only classic Vance, it is one of the finest stories in the history of the genre. It details the efforts of Edwer Thissell, a planetary consul on the distant world of Sirene, to capture an assassin who is on the run from authorities. Thissell’s task is made immeasurably more difficult by the complex and complicated social strictures of Sirenese society. Every person, no matter their social stature, goes masked in public and accompanies any speech with one of many carefully selected musical instruments. While the story circles around a locked-room plot that Agatha Christie would have recognized, its heart lies in the strangeness of Sirenese society and Thissell’s attempts to navigate it. Any modern reader of science fiction encountering Vance for the first time through this story, as I did, will be struck by how successfully Vance walks the edge between mannered farce and incisive commentary.

The editors have chosen to follow “The Moon Moth” with “Coup de Grace”, another locked-room mystery, this time featuring Vance’s aristocratic private investigator, Magnus Ridolph. A man is murdered on a distant space station and Ridolph, who is vacationing there, reluctantly assists the station’s management with uncovering the murder. While the difference between an Agatha Christie story and “Coup de Grace” is little more than set dressing, it is nonetheless an entertaining distraction.

“Flutic”, the opening section from 1983’s picaresque Cugel’s Saga, is the first of two selections from the ‘Dying Earth’ sequence to be included here. It details the arrival of Cugel the Clever, one of Vance’s most enduring characters, at Flutic, where he is employed by Master Twango to help recover the scales of a fallen demon from a muddy pit, which are then sold for enormous profit. Cugel quickly realizes the hopeless inequity of his employment and seeks to escape. “Flutic” is a vicious piece of satire on the nature of labor that, along with the next selection in Coup de Grace, “Dodkin’s Job”, stands as engaging counterpart to the ruminations on work in Paul Di Filippo’s recent collection, Strange Trades. That said, “Flutic” doesn’t stand alone particularly well, and probably is best read as part of Cugel’s Saga as originally intended.

“Dodkin’s Job” originally appeared in Astounding in 1959 and, more so than most of the stories here, seems rooted firmly in the time and place of its publication. The story details the travails of Luke Grogatch, a disgruntled man working in a distant future City organized around the principles of the Theory of the Organised Society. Grogratch, who is a determined individualist, has fallen almost to the bottom of the stratified, class conscious City, when a seemingly ridiculous labor order drives him to challenge the faceless bureaucracy he lives within. His determination to overcome this order leads him to a situation that seems far from surprising to the modern reader. The 1950s, as can be seen equally clearly in Billy Wilder’s The Apartment, was the era of the Company Man, and Vance satirizes that era mercilessly. However, much of the satire seems obvious and heavy-handed today, and the story seems much less convincing than it probably did in 1959. “Green Magic”, on the other hand, is a fantasy originally published in The Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction in 1963, which details the desire of Howard Fair to gain knowledge of so-called ‘green magic’ and the price he pays for gaining that knowledge. As editor Paul Rhoads states in his introduction, the story deals with the intertwined themes of the power of language and art, and the limitations of mortality.

Coup de Grace closes with “The Murthe”, the second story from the ‘Dying Earth’ sequence, this time featuring Rhialto the Marvelous. The story details an attack on the sorcerers of the 21st Aeon by an immensely powerful witch, the Murthe. The Murthe embodies the feminine principle and it is up to Rhialto to defeat her, thereby defending the masculine principle. The sexual politics underlying “The Murthe” are, like the politics underlying most of the stories collected here, disturbingly conservative and even reactionary.

The seven stories collected in Coup de Grace paint an interesting picture of Jack Vance’s oeuvre that is at once richly detailed, satirical, playful, witty, and deeply conservative. While it may fail as a ‘Best of Vance’, omitting classics like “Abercrombie Station” and “The Last Castle” in favor of several minor stories, Coup de Grace succeeds admirably as a warts-and-all portrait of a major writer – a sort of ‘pocket’ version of The Essential Ellison. It is also the only English-language collection of Vance’s fiction currently in print and, if for no other reason, is worthy of recommendation.

The reason I’m posting now is that you can help. If you’re an interested Vance reader we would welcome your input. Post your thoughts in the comments for this post, list what stories should be included, what we might be overlooking, and what should be dropped.

While we are working on the Jack Vance Treasury, we welcome any comments from Vance’s readers. Our working list is:

1. A Bagful of Dreams
2. Assault on a City
3. Coup de Grace
4. Gift of Gab
5. Green Magic
6. Guyal of Sfere
7. Liane the Wayfarer
8. Morreion
9. Noise
10. Rumfuddle
11. Sail
12. Shape-Up
13. The Dragon Masters
14. The Kokod Warriors
15. The Last Castle
16. The Man from Zodiac
17. The Men Return
18. The Miracle Workers
19. The Mitr
20. The Moon Moth
21. The Narrow Land
22. The New Prime
23. The Seventeen Virgins
24. The Sorcerer Pharesm
25. When the Five Moons Rise

I’d add a quick thanks to all the good folks at the VIE, whose hard work digitising texts are making our job much easier.

Note: I managed to delete this post earlier. This is a quick re-creation of it. I’ll try to re-do it properly late.

To start, we need to go back at least three years. I don’t have the specific details anymore, but it was probably sometime in 2000 or 2001 that I began talking to my friend Terry Dowling about doing a project together. At the time I’d just finished working with Eidolon Publications, was busy with Locus, and had nothing much else on my plate.

The conversation would have taken place at a convention somewhere. Let’s say it was at a Western Australian state SF convention, so it was probably April in Perth, and it was probably warm and humid. After a coffee or two, or if the sun was over the yard arm, a drink or too, one of us would have said, let’s do a book together. At certain times, this sounds like a good idea. If you ever want me to, I’ll fill in my entire history with Jack Dann, which circulates around this same conversation.

Anyhow, after a lot of talk, we decide we’d like to do a tribute anthology to one of Terry’s favorite writers. We sketch out the details, figure out who should be involved. We then go home. Over the following months we get a title, and even write a proposal. Nothing happens at all.

The mists of time then close over events, parting in early 2004. Somewhere in those intervening years there have been more conversations – at conventions, over dinner and so on – and we have begun to discus a different project. While my earliest accessible email on this places things in early 2004, I suspect it was actually a bit later in the year. Anyhow, when events resume the tribute project has changed into a best of volume. Let’s, we agree, co-edit a book that will bring together the very best stories by this one of Terry’s favorite writers.  It will be a single volume argument for why this writer is important and wonderful, the book that you give to someone approaching their work for the first time. It sounds like a good idea, a noble thing. We would get the chance to work together on something, a good book would result, and all would be right with the world.

In July of 2004 Terry sends me a draft table of contents, a rough reading list if you will, for the book we’re discussing. All well and good. Just to give you some additional relevant information: while this is one of Terry’s favorite writers, I’ve not read a lot of their work. The thinking goes something like this: Terry is a fan of this writer’s work to the point where objectivity could be questioned. I have some growing experience with recognising a good story. We think that if Terry makes a broad selection, we can the both re-read everything to winnow the final contents down to something that’ll work well with new readers. Also, to be honest, I have some experience with driving a project, getting it towards completion.

Anyhow, in August of 2004 I fly to the United States to spend some time in Oakland with CHARLES and the Locus gang, before heading off to Boston for the WorldCon. I’d been charged with moving things along, talking to the writer’s agent. Well, in the first week of September I was in Boston for Noreascon IV attending a publisher’s event at an aquarium. There was a wonderful exhibition about squid – it was damn special actually – and I was talking, drinking, and meeting people, when the writer’s agent emerged out of the dimly lit gloom. I’d emailed this person just before leaving Australia, and suddenly we were face to face. It lasted minutes: a smile, a shake of the hand, a promise to talk some more. If nothing else, we seemed to be on track.

I flew back to Perth, called Terry and updated him. We were going to do it. We emailed the agent a draft table of contents, hit a rights problem, and there things sat for another year. Terry visited the writer again during 2005, and we discussed advancing things, but the rights problem seemed insurmountable, for the while at least.

During one conversation I suggested to Terry that we might do a small press limited edition of the book now, and then a trade edition later. This might allow us to progress, as we had pressing reasons for wanting to get on with it. The writer’s agent agreed and went off and solved the rights problem. This was a fantastic thing: the rights were tangled and awkward and the agent did a great job.

Cool. So suddenly it was October 2005 or so, and we were now really ready to go. Nothing happened. Just last Christmas I emailed the agent with a rough table of contents to check if there were any other obstacles to moving ahead.

Skip ahead, now, to Monday of this week. It is thirty months since I wrote the first email regarding this project, and somewhere close to five years since it was first discussed. For the sake of economy (!) I have not gone back to discussions on how wonderful the writer is, encountering and reading a book by this writer in a tiny second-hand bookshop in Denver, Colorado in September 1993, having Terry take me to the writer’s home where we discussed jazz for hours, nor my experiences reviewing a related book for Locus. Time has passed and it’s Monday.

On Monday I email the agent with a polite query just to say should we maybe get on with it. Within 24 hours it was sold! Terry and I would be co-editing a 175,000 word retrospective collection, just as we’d imagined. Yay! The publisher asked is we could deliver it in six weeks. I nearly fainted.

I’ll write more on this soon. The publisher should be making an announcement soon. In the meantime, you now know how long it takes me to get a project up, and that I can’t tell you who the writer is yet. And I will carry you through the fun coming months where stories are selected, introductions written, manuscripts delivered and so on. This one is due in February 2007, so it’s going to be a fast, bumpy ride from here!