Magic Highways: The Early Jack Vance, Volume Three
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4.7 • 3 Ratings
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- $4.99
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- $4.99
Publisher Description
The Ultimate Grandeur...
Fantasy and Science Fiction Grandmaster Jack Vance is very much a writer of the Space Age. His time “traveling” the magic highways of his imagination spans the period bracketed by the final years of World War 2 and the Cassini–Huygens probe reaching Saturn space in late 2004, the year he brought his magnificent career to a close.
In those first thrilling, dangerous, heady days, science did seem to promise all the answers, and it was in a “double” universe of the familiar workaday world and the utterly unlimited one of the imagination that the ever-practical yet romantic, diligently physics-savvy yet as often wildly improvisational Jack Vance worked.
Even as he wrote tales set in the far future of his acclaimed Dying Earth, even as he produced mysteries and suspense stories of a much less fanciful kind, Jack’s determined quest to become a “million words a year” man saw him ranging a universe criss-crossed with busy interstellar highways: a network of flourishing trade and tourist routes leading to new frontiers, far-flung colonies, alien worlds, with ample room for exotic races, travelers, traders and scoundrels, even space pirates, ample opportunity for grand schemes of every kind.
Magic Highways gathers sixteen of those early space adventures from that exciting first decade, spanning the years 1946 to 1956. In these frequently inventive, often surprising space operas, Jack takes us to vivid destinations along the vast interstellar highways of a future where anything is possible.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
Even a Grandmaster needs to begin somewhere. This evolving collection of 16 early SF stories by Vance, an award winner for mystery, fantasy, and science fiction, starts off with space opera in its pulpiest form sprinkled with retrofuturism and casual racism and proceeds to the more sophisticated vocabulary and cultured characters associated with his classic works such as The Dying Earth. The shift is best seen in the final seven stories, which feature Magnus Ridolph, "noted savant and freelance troubleshooter." Ridolph uses wits and witticisms to secure justice for injured parties like a colony of intelligent fish ("The Sub-Standard Sardines"). When working with standards like a trip across the universe ("Ultimate Quest") or humans kept as pets ("The House Lords"), Vance invests his characters and settings with "the ultimate grandeur" of the cosmos, adding a touch of marvel even to two-fisted tales of space pirates ("Sabotage on Sulfur Planet").
