The Dragon Masters

Introduction

How can one explain the relative obscurity of a writer whose work has twice won the Hugo Award for best science fiction of the year in its category? A man who has been writing and publishing science fiction for over a quarter of a century. A man whose prose style is so unique that a random paragraph taken out of almost any piece of science fiction or fantasy he has written is sufficient to identify itself as unmistakably the work of Jack Vance:

Yet Jack Vance seems to be an invisible man. Academics have written at great length and Byzantine complexity about science fiction writers with a far less substantial body of work and far less stylistic interest than Jack Vance. About Vance little has been written and even less is known. The science fiction readers, who twice have given Vance their award, seem to look right through him too. Not only will you seldom hear his name mentioned in a discussion of the major writers of the field, but there was a time in the 1950s when many fans were convinced that he did not exist.

In the late 1940s and early 1950s, Henry Kuttner and his wife Catherine Moore wrote under a bewildering number of pseudonyms, singly and together. Henry Kuttner, C. L. Moore, Lewis Padgett, Laurence O’Donnell, and any number of other regular contributors to the science fiction magazines were really Kuttner and/or Moore in one or another of their permutations. And it was thought for a time that “Jack Vance” was but another pseudonym of the Kuttners. This rumor was not scotched until Henry Kuttner died and his wife went into retirement and Jack Vance continued to produce works. Even today, some libraries still erroneously catalogue the books of Jack Vance as pseudonymously written by Kuttner, and there they sit on the shelves with the “Ks.” How’s that for the invisible man?

And far from chafing under this anonymity, Vance seems to cultivate it. He does not contribute to fanzines; he does not go to science fiction conventions; he does not lecture at colleges; he does not give interviews; and even his agent has not been provided with an official biography.

In one of Vance’s stories of the magical twilight of man, collected in The Dying Earth, Liane the Wayfarer finds a magic ring through which he can step into a private universe and thus render himself invisible to passing eyes: “Once more Liane tried his bronze ring, and this time brought it entirely past his feet, stepped out of it, and brought the ring up into the darkness beside him. What a sanctuary! A hole whose opening could be hidden inside the hole itself!” (The Dying Earth, p. 70). It would appear that Vance himself has deliberately done the same thing. A thirty year stream of work has steadily appeared in our own continuum, but the intelligence behind it remains inside its invisible hidey-hole.

Rest assured, however, that Jack Vance does indeed exist, no matter how hard he may try to obscure the fact. Officially, he was born in San Francisco on August 28, 1916, grew up in the San Joachim Valley, and his full moniker is John Holbrook Vance, which form of his name he uses on his mystery fiction (Bad Ronald, The Fox Valley Murders, The Pleasant Grove Murders), which has won him an Edgar Award. Unofficially, I was his anonymous agent for a time when I worked at the Scott Meredith Literary Agency for a time in 1965, and once I met him at Poul Anderson’s house in Orinda, California. Jack Vance is really Jack Vance.

Turning from the man to his work, the invisibility act looks even more the amazing feat of prestidigitation, “Phandaal’s Mantle of Stealth.” As near as can be accurately counted, Jack Vance has published 26 novels and 7 collections of short stories, not counting the mysteries published under “John Holbrook Vance.” Many of these 33 books have gone into multiple printings. One of them, his first, The Dying Earth, has been considered a classic for twenty years. Its sequel, the stories of Cugel the Clever, published as The Eyes of the Overworld a decade later, eclipses it thoroughly as a work of literature. Both The Last Castle and the book before us, The Dragon Masters, won Hugos in their magazine novella versions. We have here one of the longest-working and prolific authors in the science-fiction genre, a multiple award winner, and, moreover, a writer whose production has been more or less consistent for over a quarter of a century, and who has maintained a similarly consistent style, elegance, and craftsmanship. The Dying Earth, The Eyes of the Overworld, The Blue World, and Emphyrio, for example, which did not win awards, are by no means inferior to the works that did. Vance’s fiction is of a piece, a high plain of craftsmanship with few peaks or valleys.

The science fiction genre has produced but a handful of true stylists—that is, writers whose sentence-by-sentence prose is fine enough, idiosyncratic enough, subtle enough, and consistent enough from page to page and book to book to become the major interest in reading their work. Ray Bradbury. R. A. Lafferty. Alfred Bester. Perhaps Harlan Ellison and Cordwainer Smith.

But the list is tiny. It does not include Theodore Sturgeon, Brian W. Aldiss, or Philip Jose Farmer, for instance, who are masters of several styles, who match their prose to their content, work by work. Nor does it include writers like Roger Zelazny or J. R. R. Tolkien or Samuel R. Delany, whose prose styles derive from the consistent iconography of their content. Few science fiction writers indeed have chosen to develop style-as-content, to concentrate on how more than what, to write, in this sense, in a baroque mode.

And no science fiction writer does it with the Roman luxuriousness and razor-edge control of Jack Vance. Vance cavorts in his own words like Scrooge McDuck in his money bin swimming pool. Like a painter, he endlessly describes clothing, architecture, landscape, and qualities of light for the purely aesthetic joy of it:

Whether he is describing an expiring millenial Earth steeped in magic born of rotting history, or a galactic cluster of 30,000 stars, or the planet Aerlith under the baleful eye of the wandering lizard star, Vance creates baroque tapestry. Not content to limit himself to the mere world-creation of traditional science fiction, Vance adds those graceful superfluities that give his times and places baronial richness, late Renaissance grandeur, and the weight of cultural and aesthetic substantiality.

Out of this baroque prose style arises the baroque realities that Vance creates in his science fiction and fantasy. Vance’s oeuvre may superficially be divided between “fantasies” like The Dying Earth and The Eyes of the Overworld in which the texture of reality is interwoven with magic, and works like The Dragon Masters, which justify every conceivable technical definition of “science fiction.” I say superficially divided because the cleavage is technical and not something one experiences as a reader. Vance’s “fantasy” has the same feel as Vance’s “science fiction.” Indeed both have generally been published as “science fiction,” and no one has seriously objected. For Vance’s tone, his outlook on reality, and the flavor of his work, arise from his style and mode, not from whether his material is “science fiction” or “fantasy.”

Vance’s worlds arise out of his own unique tone whether he’s writing “straight” science fiction or “magical” fantasies. It’s obvious in the Dying Earth and Cugel the Clever stories, where sorcery is treated something like a degenerate technology, where making miracles has become a science, where magic is a hand-me-down from a lost golden age of Faustian greatness. His fantasy is too detailed, convoluted, and realized not to be called science fiction, and his science fiction realities have the magical complexity of his fantasies.

The Dragon Masters, Vance’s Hugo-winning short novel, for example, is science fiction by any reasonable criteria. Yet it retains the quality and tone common to all of Jack Vance’s imaginative work.

Just as Vance’s tone arises out of his baroque prose style, so does that tone create story and character—especially when combined with Vance’s characteristic sardonic viewpoint and his relentless sense of irony.

The Dragon Masters has a conventional space-opera plot, if one were to define it by simply capsulizing the story line. Lizardmen have captured all human planets except Aerlith by using genetically-altered humans as specialized brainwashed slave warriors. On Aerlith, humans have captured a party of invading “Basic” sauroids, and bred them into the same sort of specialized slave warriors. The Banbeck and Carcolo clans eventually use these “dragons” to destroy an invading party of Basics and their human warriors and seize their ship.

But such a conventional plot summary is hardly adequate, for it doesn’t really describe what The Dragon Masters is all about. For Vance, plot and even character is a skeleton upon which to hang his overriding concern for place and time, for a sense of history always imbued with a mordant irony reminiscent of the later Mark Twain.

Like many of Vance’s societies, Aerlith has a political structure that is hereditary and feudal. The feuding forces of Joaz Banbeck and Ervis Carcolo battle each other for abstract advantage even as the Basics attack them both for the purpose of enslaving the last free men in the universe. To add another level of irony to the situation, the sacerdotes, a tribe of Aerlith humans who live in huge and eerie cave cities, consider themselves the only true humans and attempt to live out an insanely extreme philosophy of detachment in the face of the Basic assault. Vance’s view of religious mystics is no more sanguine than his opinion of political leaders.

In The Dragon Masters, we can see how Vance’s baroque style and sardonic stance transform what in other hands would be a straightforward science fiction story into a kind of sophisticated Grimm fairy tale entirely of a piece with works like the Cugel stories or the Dying Earth tales.

We can see this most clearly in the “dragons” of the title and the Basic-molded humanoids. Here are creatures out of some wizard’s vat arrived at through the conventions of science fiction. How human and Basic flesh is transformed into Giants and Heavy Troopers, Blue Fiends and Termagants, is never scientifically explained—nor need it be, given the story’s far-future context. If Vance could explain it, he’d get a Nobel Prize in biology. The difference between this kind of “science fiction” and the fantasy that produces Magnatz, Chun the Inevitable, deodands, and leucomorphs is something only an aged mandarin could distinguish.

What counts in both cases is the reality, the verisimilitude, the three-dimensionality, of the fantastic creatures the writer has created, not how they were technically arrived at. And here Jack Vance’s richness of style serves to best advantage, creating gothic creatures that reverberate with the mythic dimensions of the Brothers Grimm, but which have the solidity, believability, and even upon occasion the psychological depth of well-realized science fiction.

A palpable aura was cast up, a weft in space meshed of varying depravities. And the demons swooped like birds alighting and joined the delirium. Foul face after face T’sais saw, and each burnt her brain until she thought she must scream and die—visages of leering eye, bulbed cheek, lunatic body, black faces of spiked nose, expressions outraging thought, writhing, hopping, crawling, the spew of the demon-lands. And one had a nose like a three-fold white worm, a mouth that was a putrefying blotch, a mottled jowl and black malformed forehead; the whole a thing of retch and horror. To this Etarr directed T’sais’ gaze. She saw and her muscles knotted. “There,” said Etarr in a muffled voice, “there is a face twin to the one below this hood.”

The Dying Earth, p. 60.

No cardboard bug-eyed monsters, these. And in The Dragon Masters, we can see that the dragons and humanoids are not merely tour-de-force window dressing, but beings whose existence determines the plot—indeed, grotesques whose existence becomes the plot. A reality which contains such presences is clearly something other than what most of us experience from day to day—in quality not only in content—which is why the work has fascination. This is fundamentally what people read both science fiction and fantasy for and what they seldom get—an altered reality with the cogency and verisimilitude of our own. And a reality, moreover, more convoluted, more ornate, more paradoxical, more slippery—more magical, if you will.

But even as Jack Vance builds his ornate cathedrals around you, his viewpoint on his own creations remains mordant, sardonic, slyly misanthropic, perhaps even ultimately pessimistic. In the work of Vance, some enduring age is forever coming to a close, and men seem meaner and smaller than their ancestors:

And in The Dragon Masters, men have been reduced to something truly less than human by the Basics—not only have they been bred into specialized serving animals like dogs, but their brains can no longer encompass the opposite concept to servitude. But Vance does not even let go of it there—he does not even permit humanity the moral superiority of the victim’s position in such a degrading situation. For when men get the chance, they do exactly the same thing, breeding monstrous brute dragons out of their sapient Basic prisoners. Both men and Basics are guilty of a racial crime that goes genocide one better. And who is to say that the dragons, who snarl and bicker in their servitude, have not retained more dignity than the transformed humanoids who sincerely worship their masters?

Finally, after Banbeck and Carcolo have unwillingly combined forces to destroy the Basics, instead of a conversion to human solidarity, we have Carcolo pursuing his endless and in this instance powerless and therefore insane attempts to one-up Banbeck, and Banbeck—throughout the book the most sympathetic figure—executing Carcolo for expediency’s sake, for “his duty to himself, his people, his ultimate goal.”

A line from The Dying Earth sums up Vance’s oeuvre, his tone, his stance, his perspective on humanity perfectly: “Now, in the last fleeing moments, humanity festers, rich as rotting fruit. . . .”

How then has such a body of work remained in such relative obscurity? Here is a writer who has been around for three decades, and who is perhaps the premier stylist in the science fiction genre in terms of fusing prose, tone, viewpoint, content and mood into a seamless synergetic whole. A writer whose Weltanschauung is unsurpassed in the genre for its maturity and unique for its mordancy. Why has Jack Vance not been recognized as the peer of Bradbury, Heinlein, and Aldiss, let alone of Ellison, Zelazny or Delany?

Having looked at what the work of Jack Vance is, we might find it instructive to look at what it is not. Vance has produced no truly outstanding characters that are remembered long after the stories that contain them are forgotten, nor has he produced tales that live on as epic sagas, as instant myths. He has produced no quintessential single work to point to as a peak achievement—which is to say that he is not famous for any hero, nor for any story, nor for any book. But then, Vance doesn’t seem to set out to do any of these things. He has chosen to write a sort of fiction not calculated to bring him fame and fortune, nor to make him an epic storyteller, nor a creator of magnetic characters, nor to produce sporadic masterworks. It is a kind of fiction that is definitely a minority taste, not a mass-market addiction—nor is it ever likely to become anything else. But that does not make Vance’s work any less valuable, for the taste that it satisfies is subtle and sophisticated. To enjoy Vance, you have to enjoy words as sculpture on paper, reality as a baroque landscape, and sardonicism for its own elegance. You are offered this as the main course, hors d’oeuvres raised to smorgasbord.

And why not? This stream of literature has always been with us and always will be. It includes The Tales of a Thousand and One Nights, the fairy tales of the Brothers Grimm, the Jerry Cornelius and Elric stories of Michael Moorcock, the work of Cordwainer Smith, and perhaps the best of Roger Zelazny. Mervin Peake’s Gorhmangast Trilogy is perhaps the ultimate example of this architectural approach to fiction: in this case the major character quite literally is an aging castle.

In our modern Bauhaus age where form is supposed to follow function, Jack Vance is a man who makes style generate content. In what has been primarily a literature of logical positivism, he insinuates the metaphor of magic and the magic of metaphor into every nook and cranny, into every dark glade and dell of his fictional landscape.

But Vance’s universe is not like the sanitary Fantasy Lands of Walt Disney nor the smarmy heroics of J. R. R. Tolkien nor the romanticized grandeur of the Galactic Roman Empire; his worlds have an existential and moral reality, and are informed by a mordant dubiousness about man and his works.

This is not the sort of fiction with the widest mass appeal, particularly within the science fiction genre, but it is the sort of fiction which in the long run continues to be read by generations of cognoscenti, and thus endures.

Maybe that’s all Jack Vance really cares about, if he even cares about that. My one meeting with the man made me wonder. It was at a post-convention party at Poul Anderson’s house after the 1968 World Science Fiction Convention in the San Francisco Bay Area, where Vance and many other science fiction writers live. When I was introduced to Vance I was jarred by the dissonance between the man and the fiction: was this rotund fellow in glasses, wearing T-shirt and jeans and drinking a beer really Jack Vance? At the time, I dressed in noticeable colors, and Vance was quick to comment on my fancy—one might almost say loud—clothing. He advised me against it, in a philosophical sense, pointing out his own attire as the ideal mode of dress. By dressing in total anonymity, Vance said, you force people to deal with the real you and not with what you advertise as yourself.

Jack Vance himself does not choose to dress in the mode of his own characters. I have heard that he spent considerable time in the islands of the South Pacific, far from the Byzantine complexities of civilization as a Vance character would see and enjoy it. So it may very well be that Vance’s biting sense of irony extends even to the style of his own baroque imaginings, that he has remained invisible not so much by neglect as by choice.

Norman Spinrad

New York

Works Cited

The Dying Earth Lancer Science Fiction Library. New York: Lancer Books, 1972 (third printing, September 1972).

The Dragon Masters New York: Ace Books, 1962 (first printing, reproduced here).

The Eyes of the Overworld New York: Ace Books, 1966 (first printing).

Marune Alastor 933. New York: Ballantine Books, 1975 (first printing).