John Holbrook Vance was an American mystery, fantasy, and science fiction writer.
34 Facts About Jack Vance
2.
Jack Vance won the World Fantasy Award for Life Achievement in 1984, and he was a Guest of Honor at the 1992 World Science Fiction Convention in Orlando, Florida.
3.
Jack Vance died at his home in Oakland, California on May 26,2013, aged 96.
4.
Jack Vance's great-grandfather is believed to have arrived in California from Michigan a decade before the Gold Rush and married a San Francisco woman.
5.
Jack Vance grew up in the family's large house in San Francisco on Filbert Street.
6.
When Jack Vance's father left the family to live on his ranch in Mexico, the family's house in San Francisco was rented out to the father's sister.
7.
When Jack Vance explored the nearby town, he started reading pulp fiction magazines at the local drugstore.
8.
Jack Vance plied many trades for short stretches: as a bellhop, in a cannery, and on a gold dredge.
9.
Jack Vance subsequently entered the University of California, Berkeley, and over the next six years studied mining engineering, physics, journalism, and English.
10.
Jack Vance found a job as a rigger at the Kaiser Shipyard in Richmond, California, and enrolled in an Army Intelligence program to learn Japanese, but washed out.
11.
Jack Vance worked as a seaman, a rigger, a surveyor, a ceramicist, and a carpenter before he established himself fully as a writer, which did not occur until the 1970s.
12.
From his youth, Jack Vance had been fascinated by Dixieland and traditional jazz.
13.
Jack Vance was an amateur of the cornet and ukulele, often accompanying himself with a kazoo, and was a competent harmonica player.
14.
Jack Vance's first published writings were jazz reviews for The Daily Californian, and music is an element in many of his works.
15.
In 1946, Jack Vance met and married Norma Genevieve Ingold, another Cal student.
16.
Jack Vance continued to live in Oakland, in a house he built and extended with his family over the years, including a hand-carved wooden ceiling from Kashmir.
17.
Jack Vance began trying to become a professional writer in the late 1940s, as part of the San Francisco Renaissance, a movement of experimentation in literature and the arts.
18.
Jack Vance's failing eyesight led him to cease his amateur jazz hobby.
19.
Jack Vance died on the morning of May 26,2013, at the age of 96 in his home in the Oakland Hills.
20.
Jack Vance made his debut in print with "The World-Thinker", a 16-page story published by Sam Merwin in Thrilling Wonder Stories, Summer 1945.
21.
Jack Vance's work has been published in three categories: science fiction, fantasy and mystery.
22.
Jack Vance wrote many science fiction short stories in the late 1940s and through the 1950s, which were published in magazines.
23.
Bad Ronald was adapted to a TV film of the same name aired on ABC in 1974, as well as a French production in 1992; this and Man in the Cage are the only works by Jack Vance to be made into film to date.
24.
Jack Vance returned to the "dying Earth" setting to write the picaresque adventures of the ne'er-do-well scoundrel Cugel the Clever, and those of the magician Rhialto the Marvellous.
25.
Jack Vance's stories written for pulps in the 1940s and 1950s covered many science fiction themes, with a tendency to emphasize mysterious and biological themes rather than technical ones.
26.
Jack Vance gave permission, and the book by Shea went into print before Jack Vance's.
27.
Jack Vance's stories are seldom concerned directly with war and the conflicts are rarely direct.
28.
Jack Vance previously refused to acknowledge them for their degree of rewriting.
29.
Jack Vance stopped working in the mystery genre in the early 1970s, except for science-fiction mysteries; see below.
30.
Jack Vance has written mysteries set in his science fiction universes.
31.
For most of his career, Jack Vance's work suffered the vicissitudes common to most writers in his chosen field: ephemeral publication of stories in magazine form, short-lived softcover editions, in which stories sometimes were insensitively edited beyond his control.
32.
Jack Vance was an original member of the Swordsmen and Sorcerers' Guild of America, a loose-knit group of heroic fantasy authors founded in the 1960s and led by Lin Carter.
33.
An Integral Edition of all Jack Vance's works was published in a limited edition of 44 hardback volumes.
34.
In 2012, Spatterlight Press started offering DRM-free e-books editions of many of the works of Jack Vance, based on the source texts collected by the Integral Edition project.