Through a career now spanning 60 years, Jack Vance has rarely been well-served by his publishers. Covers are hideous, production standards non-existent, the will to keep the books in print sadly lacking. Now comes Subterranean and their Jack Vance Reader, containing two excellent novels, Emphyrio and The Domains of Koryphon, and the lesser Languages of Pao. Physically it's a reasonable package, solidly made and with a good but not great cover (the usual rocketships and ruins) by Gnemo. But the general introduction by the editors is blather, while Mike Resnick introduces Koryphon (originally known as The Gray Prince -- not the Grey Prince, which is how it's consistently identified here) by rambling about his own work, and then says the charges of racism against the novel aren't true. Who made these charges, anyway? No clue. Robert Silverberg phones in his introduction to Emphyrio. Ursula Le Guin makes a good point about Pao and Vance's work generally: "They aren't alien worlds, or future worlds. They are our own lost world. They are Earth before the airplane, Earth in all the centuries when it was boundless, endlessly rich in mystery and strangeness." She also refers to Vance in the past tense as if he were dead, admits she hadn't read any of his books for many years, and devotes much of her space to complaining his women are stick figures. Sigh. Next time, folks, can we spend more than 10 minutes on writing this stuff? Vance deserves better and so, for $38, do I.
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