{"id":776,"date":"2006-05-12T20:28:15","date_gmt":"2006-05-12T12:28:15","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.jonathanstrahan.com.au\/wp\/2006\/05\/12\/coupe-de-grace-reviewed\/"},"modified":"2006-05-12T20:28:15","modified_gmt":"2006-05-12T12:28:15","slug":"coupe-de-grace-reviewed","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.jonathanstrahan.com.au\/wp\/2006\/05\/12\/coupe-de-grace-reviewed\/","title":{"rendered":"Coupe de Grace reviewed"},"content":{"rendered":"

Just to give some idea of my own taste where Vance’s work is concerned, I thought I might reprint a review of a Jack Vance sampler published by the VIE back in 2001 that I wrote for Locus<\/em>. While the review is four years old – and was part of the background reading and prep. for the Treasury – my views haven’t changed much since then. I should add that the review lead to the longest response to any review I’ve done, a four page disagreement by Paul Rhodes published in the VIE magazine, Cosmopolis<\/em>.<\/p>\n

<\/em>Coup de Grace and Other Stories<\/em>, Jack Vance (The Vance Integral Edition)<\/span><\/p>\n

When stories first began appearing under the byline \u00e2\u20ac\u02dcJack Vance\u00e2\u20ac\u2122, science fiction was largely a place of transparent prose, plainly spoken characters, and bug-eyed monsters with an inexplicable preference for Earth women. Vance\u00e2\u20ac\u2122s 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\u00e2\u20ac\u2122t about the latest gadget or technological doodad \u00e2\u20ac\u201c 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.<\/span><\/p>\n

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\nDespite the undoubted importance of his contribution to the field \u00e2\u20ac\u201d his first and most famous book, The Dying Earth, transformed the field, laying the groundwork for works like Gene Wolfe\u00e2\u20ac\u2122s The Book of the New Sun \u00e2\u20ac\u201d Vance\u00e2\u20ac\u2122s 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 <\/span>Europe<\/span>. It is unsurprising, therefore, that the Vance Integral Edition – an ambitious attempt by a group of readers to bring \u00e2\u20ac\u02dcpreferred\u00e2\u20ac\u2122 versions of his work back into print \u00e2\u20ac\u201c should be headquartered in France. The VIE intends to produce a 44 volume set of Vance\u00e2\u20ac\u2122s 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.<\/span><\/p>\n

The collection opens with \u00e2\u20ac\u0153Alfred\u00e2\u20ac\u2122s <\/span>Ark<\/span>\u00e2\u20ac\u009d, 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 <\/span>Ark<\/span> 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\u00e2\u20ac\u2122s tradition of conservative social commentary \u00e2\u20ac\u201c in many of his stories he seems far from impressed with his fellow man \u00e2\u20ac\u201c it lacks the richness that characterizes his best work.<\/span><\/p>\n

\u00e2\u20ac\u0153The Moon Moth\u00e2\u20ac\u009d, 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\u00e2\u20ac\u2122s 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\u00e2\u20ac\u2122s 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.<\/span><\/p>\n

The editors have chosen to follow \u00e2\u20ac\u0153The Moon Moth\u00e2\u20ac\u009d with \u00e2\u20ac\u0153Coup de Grace\u00e2\u20ac\u009d, another locked-room mystery, this time featuring Vance\u00e2\u20ac\u2122s aristocratic private investigator, Magnus Ridolph. A man is murdered on a distant space station and Ridolph, who is vacationing there, reluctantly assists the station\u00e2\u20ac\u2122s management with uncovering the murder. While the difference between an Agatha Christie story and \u00e2\u20ac\u0153Coup de Grace\u00e2\u20ac\u009d is little more than set dressing, it is nonetheless an entertaining distraction.<\/span><\/p>\n

\u00e2\u20ac\u0153Flutic\u00e2\u20ac\u009d, the opening section from 1983\u00e2\u20ac\u2122s picaresque Cugel\u00e2\u20ac\u2122s Saga, is the first of two selections from the \u00e2\u20ac\u02dcDying Earth\u00e2\u20ac\u2122 sequence to be included here. It details the arrival of Cugel the Clever, one of Vance\u00e2\u20ac\u2122s 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. \u00e2\u20ac\u0153Flutic\u00e2\u20ac\u009d is a vicious piece of satire on the nature of labor that, along with the next selection in Coup de Grace, \u00e2\u20ac\u0153Dodkin\u00e2\u20ac\u2122s Job\u00e2\u20ac\u009d, stands as engaging counterpart to the ruminations on work in Paul Di Filippo\u00e2\u20ac\u2122s recent collection, Strange Trades. That said, \u00e2\u20ac\u0153Flutic\u00e2\u20ac\u009d doesn\u00e2\u20ac\u2122t stand alone particularly well, and probably is best read as part of Cugel\u00e2\u20ac\u2122s Saga as originally intended.<\/span><\/p>\n

\u00e2\u20ac\u0153Dodkin\u00e2\u20ac\u2122s Job\u00e2\u20ac\u009d 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\u00e2\u20ac\u2122s 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. \u00e2\u20ac\u0153Green Magic\u00e2\u20ac\u009d, 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 \u00e2\u20ac\u02dcgreen magic\u00e2\u20ac\u2122 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.<\/span><\/p>\n

Coup de Grace closes with \u00e2\u20ac\u0153The Murthe\u00e2\u20ac\u009d, the second story from the \u00e2\u20ac\u02dcDying Earth\u00e2\u20ac\u2122 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 \u00e2\u20ac\u0153The Murthe\u00e2\u20ac\u009d are, like the politics underlying most of the stories collected here, disturbingly conservative and even reactionary.<\/span><\/p>\n

The seven stories collected in Coup de Grace paint an interesting picture of Jack Vance\u00e2\u20ac\u2122s oeuvre that is at once richly detailed, satirical, playful, witty, and deeply conservative. While it may fail as a \u00e2\u20ac\u02dcBest of Vance\u00e2\u20ac\u2122, omitting classics like \u00e2\u20ac\u0153Abercrombie Station\u00e2\u20ac\u009d and \u00e2\u20ac\u0153The Last Castle\u00e2\u20ac\u009d in favor of several minor stories, Coup de Grace succeeds admirably as a warts-and-all portrait of a major writer \u00e2\u20ac\u201c a sort of \u00e2\u20ac\u02dcpocket\u00e2\u20ac\u2122 version of The Essential Ellison. It is also the only English-language collection of Vance\u00e2\u20ac\u2122s fiction currently in print and, if for no other reason, is worthy of recommendation.<\/span><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Just to give some idea of my own taste where Vance’s work is concerned, I thought I might reprint a review of a Jack Vance sampler published by the VIE back in 2001 that I wrote for Locus. While the review is four years old – and was part of the background reading and prep. … Continue reading Coupe de Grace reviewed<\/span> →<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":17,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[3],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-776","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-the-jack-vance-treasury"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.jonathanstrahan.com.au\/wp\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/776","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.jonathanstrahan.com.au\/wp\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.jonathanstrahan.com.au\/wp\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.jonathanstrahan.com.au\/wp\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/17"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.jonathanstrahan.com.au\/wp\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=776"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.jonathanstrahan.com.au\/wp\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/776\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.jonathanstrahan.com.au\/wp\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=776"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.jonathanstrahan.com.au\/wp\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=776"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.jonathanstrahan.com.au\/wp\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=776"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}