Jack Vance - New books on Audible.com

[Wilbur]

I was pleased to see that Audible.com has five new Jack Vance books available, in addition to the Dying Earth books, the Lyonesse trilogy, and his Ellery Queen work, The Four Johns.

The Dying Earth books read by Arthur Morey are among the best combination of book and reader I have yet to experience, so I looked forward to hearing Elijah Alexander read the Tschai books.  All four of the Tschai books are available (City of the Chasch, Servants of the Wankh, The Didir, and The Pnume), either separately or in one big package, and Alexander does a good job with them.  While he doesn't quite have that ineffable subject matter and effervescing tone of Arthur Morey, I really enjoyed this past month's worth of listening to these classic Space Opera adventures.

http://www.audible.com/pd/Sci-Fi-Fantasy/Planet-of-Adventure-Audiobook/B017BRVOFY/ref=a_search_c4_1_1_srTtl?qid=1448208378&sr=1-1

Of course, if you don't care for the audio books, the Jack Vance site has the plain old e-books for considerably less.  These days finding all four copies of these books in your local booktore would be quite a challenge.

http://www.jackvance.com/ebooks/shop/?q22_category_filter=tschai

 

Audible.com also produced and released To Live Forever this past month, as read by Kevin Kenerly.  TLF is one of those books that is weird in a different direction than Vance's normal weirding.  It has all the great vocabularial excursions and ornaments, but the subject matter has some pretty exceptional looks at dark psychology or even pathology.  TLF isn't one of my favorite Vance stories, but Kenerly does a nice job of adding to my interest in the protagonist and the challenges he faces.

http://www.audible.com/pd/Sci-Fi-Fantasy/To-Live-Forever-Audiobook/B014E3CSZI/ref=a_search_c4_1_3_srTtl?qid=1448208378&sr=1-3

Again, the e-book is also available at Jack's old site as well, where it goes under Vance's preferred title, Clarges.

http://www.jackvance.com/ebooks/shop/?q22_action=view&q22_id=61

 

In summary, if you have enjoyed reading the works of one of GRRM's big influences as much as I have, here are some new media to enjoy.

[Wilbur]

Just a quick update, given that I finished all five audio books with the added time out on the trail provided by Thanksgiving week.

In terms of the Planet of Adventure books, the ending of the fourth book is probably the most satisfied I have ever felt at the end of a science fiction series.  Interestingly, the adventures of Adam Reith probably could have continued into more books, but even so, I felt perfectly happy with the final outcome of the final chapter - just a remarkable sense of pleasure at the final disposition of the characters and how they dealt with the (very weird) challenges of Tschai.  Superb space opera.

As to Clarges, I finished it this afternoon.  During the whole of the book I found myself drawing strangely apt comparisons to the societal dead ends of the society Vance created, in particular those entitlements and demands of the Amaranth, to that of America today.  The spiritual malaise of the dystopia where the physical needs of individuals are all met and all "striving" comes to a shallow conclusion, and the social disruption that results from the revelation of the pointlessness of the "striving" seem to be strongly correlated to the news of today.  This was a better, or perhaps more relevant, book to me today than it was when I first ran across an old paperback at Book Buyers on Castro Street a decade or more ago.  A much better audio book than I expected it to be, and one that made me think more than was comfortable, perhaps.

[mgambino]

I love me some Jack Vance. Are there audiobooks of his Demon Princes series, because that is probably my favorite work of his.

[Wilbur]

I love me some Jack Vance. Are there audiobooks of his Demon Princes series, because that is probably my favorite work of his.

Not yet, as far as I know.  I would love to lay my hands on The Demon Princes books, or the Alastor Cluster works, or more of the Magnus Ridolph stories.

The following audio books of Jack Vance comprise all of his work I have been able to discover over the years.   If any others show up, let me know!

 

The Dying Earth (1950) - Arthur Morey

The Eyes of the Overworld (Cugel the Clever) (1966) - Arthur Morey

Cugel's Saga (The Skybreak Spatterlight) (1983) - Arthur Morey

Rhialto the Marvellous (1984) - Arthur Morey 

[Arthur Morey also reads The Songs of the Dying Earth, edited by GRRM.  All five of these are best in class quality productions - beg, borrow and steal to lay your hands on them.]

 

Lyonesse: Suldrun's Garden (1983) - two versions exist, one read by Kevin T. Collins and one by Suzanne Toren

Lyonesse: The Green Pearl (1985) - two versions exist, one read by Kevin T. Collins and one by Suzanne Toren

Lyonesse: Madouc (1989) - two versions exist, one read by Kevin T. Collins and one by Suzanne Toren

 

City of the Chasch (1968) - Elijah Alexander

Servants of the Wankh (1969) - Elijah Alexander

The Dirdir (1969) - Elijah Alexander

The Pnume (1970) - Elijah Alexander

 

Araminta Station (1987) - Simon Vance

To Live Forever (1956) - Kevin Kenerly

Ports of Call (1998) - Misty Freelander

 

The Four Johns (1964) writing as Ellery Queen - Mark Peckham

 

The Miracle Workers (1958) - two versions that I know of, one by Roy Avers and one by Mark Ashby

The Dragon Masters (1973) - Mark Ashby

The Men Return (1957) - Mark Ashby

Sail 25 (Gateway to Strangeness) (1962) - Mark Ashby

The Last Castle (1966) - Mark Ashby

The Gift of Gab (1955) - Mark Ashby

Noise (1952) - Mark Ashby

The Kokod Warriors (1952) - Mark Ashby

The Secret (1966) - Mark Ashby

The Moon Moth (1961) - Mark Ashby

The Mitr (1953) - Mark Ashby

The New Prime (1951) - Mark Ashby

[The Marquis de Leech]

Servants of the Wankh remains one of the most snigger-worthy titles in fiction. Excellent and memorable series though.

[Wilbur]

My Overdrive robot just came back with two new Jack Vance audio books - Ecce and Old Earth, read by Chris Courtenay, and Throy, read by Philip Bretherton.  These are the second and third books of the Cadwal Chronicles, which began with the book Araminta Station, which was produced over a decade ago and read by Simon Vance.  I am not familiar with Chris Courtenay, but I really like Philip Bretherton.

Apparently, we a blessed with these new audio books as a result of the "Copyright Visually Impaired Persons Act 2002 31-b", according to the sample I listened to on the Overdrive website.  I wonder if Jack made these available for audio works because of his own loss of vision later in his life.  In any case, it is great to get such a burst of new audio performances of Vance over the last year or so!

Anyway, I am very excited to work the levers of library bureaucracy until one of my own library systems makes these two books available in our local instances of Overdrive - it looks like I will be taking the resources manager out to lunch later this week to grease the skids.

The Cadwal Chronicles always struck me as if Jack was writing a combination English Country House Mystery combined with Space Opera, a la Margery Allingham featuring Robert Heinlein material.  Looking at my hard copies, they were printed in the US, the UK, and the US, respectively, so they were popular enough to get nice hard book editions and reprints, all featuring the typical this-artwork-has-nothing-in-common-with-this-story covers so popular in the 80s and 90s.

Samples: 

Ecce and Old Earth - http://excerpts.cdn.overdrive.com/FormatType-425/4987-1/1577646-EcceAndOldEarth.mp3?_ga=1.102515910.678185311.1454870042

Throy - http://excerpts.cdn.overdrive.com/FormatType-425/4987-1/2344775-Throy.mp3?_ga=1.102515910.678185311.1454870042

[Wilbur]

Review and notes on Ecce and Old Earth and Throy:

Chris Courtenay does a nice job on Ecce and Old Earth in this reading.  His neutral accent is a relatively transparent American standard or slightly toward mid-Atlantic, and his character voices have a bit more of a hint of various dialects from the British Isles, so he doesn't overpower the story in any way.  I enjoyed his reading of the story, which is almost as good as Araminta Station, and I was relieved that a story that I remembered as enjoyable was well read.  "Wayness Tamm's Thrilling Old Earth Adventure Mystery Travels" really works in this performance.  The few notes and appendices in the book are read when they are referenced in the main text, and if you didn't have a hard copy, you would not know that they had been inserted.  The conclusion to the book includes a clever trick or action from the group of protagonists worthy of Nero Wolfe, and Courtenay does a good job of putting it across.

Philip Bretherton is British, and his reading style is a lot more rich and thick and chocolate throughout.  Many reviewers of the book Throy over the years have complained that it is a poor ending book of the three, lacking the intricate plot lines of the previous two parts of the overall tale, so having a more dramatic reader with a wider range of accents and character flourishes probably adds to the performance.  I have felt that Throy is very much late Vance, similar in nature to Lurulu in that it portrays of a lot of somewhat inconsequential space travel and humorous discussions between picaresque characters in awkward social situations in place of deeper significance: PG Wodehouse in space, maybe.  I feel like Jack Vance's blindness in his later life may be a reason for this, as self-editing one's writing it difficult enough with your sight whole, much less without it.  The appendix notes are all read in a lump at the end, which is the only production decision that I would have changed.

Neither of the performances included the sort of multiple editing errors or sound level variances that can detract from the work of even good readers.

On a negative note, the threat of rape in the Cadwal Chronicles appears several times, and listening to all three back-to-back highlights just how often.  On the one hand, the threat drives the plot almost every time.  On the other, it is something that requires some serious consideration.  Vance also posits issues of racism, slavery, economic exploitation, privilege, inequalities of justice, and computer hacking without necessarily making a conclusive statement about the moral good or evil in each situation.  This means a thoughtful reader of mature years (ahem) has to ruminate on these topics more than the callow youth who read them the first time back in the day.  Tonally, the typical Vance humor derived from the characters' elevated language and social mores means that a lot of the books read like a comedy of manners, so these weightier topics form an underlying bass line that provides a little more intellectual heft than I recall in my first exposure.

Laugh out loud moment: When I realized who the pirate planet "Terence Dowling's Land" was named after.

In summary, I was pleased to find these two books in audio form and even happier to enjoy the professional performances from the readers.

[Arataniello]

Good to see that Jack Vance stories are still being published in some form.  Simply one of the best writers there was or will be.  I must dig out my complete set (smugness overload) and start rereading them again.