Kevin Kelly has an interesting article about books, copyright, scanning, google, and all that stuff at the New York Times site. Regardless of the correctness or incorrectness of any of his views, opinions or research, one thing is indisputably correct: technology will take the argument away from us all. Last week I was on a website that offered 1100 science fiction titles by authors with surnames beginning with “V”. Had I wanted them, searchable texts of fifteen or twenty Jack Vance books sat there for me to take. I didn’t, but I could have. It won’t be that long before we won’t be able to stop the digital tide, should we even want to.
A few more details…
A few more details on the upcoming Subterranean Press edition of The Jack Vance Treasury are emerging, as things progress in the background. It seems the cover will be done by award-winning artist Tom Kidd. I’ve loved his work for years, especially his Gnemo stuff, which I first saw back in 1993. Also, while things may change, George R.R. Martin has agreed to provide an introduction. Alongside a preface by Jack himself and a few other things, I think this should be a very cool book.
The Vance Treasury – Make your own!
I’ve been doing a little background research, for those of you interested in following along as we build The Jack Vance Treasury. Now, remember, this book will be between 175,000 and 225,000 words long, including introductions etc. Although it’s very unlikely things will run this long, I’m allowing 10,000 words for main volume introduction, foreword, story notes etc. That’s likely to be very generous, but still…
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.
Continue reading The Vance Treasury – Make your own!
Vance telegraph
For anyone interested in discussing The Jack Vance Treasury, there are discussions going on:
- in the comments threads on this blog;
- on the Asimov’s discussion groups; and
- 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.
Vance Treasury amended
Looks like I posted the early copy of our reading list for the Treasury, that was sent to Subterranean Press. That list ran to 22 stories, but our current list runs to 25. The key addition, as has been pointed as a glaring omission, is “The Gift of the Gab”. The full current list is:
Continue reading Vance Treasury amended