Читать книгу Songs of the Dying Earth - Gardner Dozois - Страница 13

BACK IN the early sixties, when I was busy becoming a teenager, my eldest brother was into science fiction. He would leave paperbacks and pulp mags around the house, and I would take them up and devour them. One was an issue of Galaxy with a story called “The Dragon Masters” by someone named Jack Vance. I read it and was transported. As I moved toward my twenties, whenever I had nickels and dimes enough, I would haunt used bookstores, vacuuming up sf as fast as I could. Any day that I came across a new Vance book or a mag with a new Vance story was a good day.

By my mid-thirties, I had pretty much stopped reading sf in favor of crime fiction. But I still bought and read anything new by Vance; once, when I was supposed to be on vacation, I lay on a hotel bed and did nothing all day but read Suldrun’s Garden, the first Lyonesse book. Now, forty-five years after I first encountered him, Jack Vance is the only author I reread, and I never cease to fall under the spell.

In a well-run world, prominent geographical features and wide, impressive plazas and boulevards would bear his name.

—Matthew Hughes