Читать книгу Songs of the Dying Earth - Gardner Dozois - Страница 25

I SEEM to be fairly unique in acquiring my taste for Jack Vance’s fiction as an adult.

Most Vance readers seem to have encountered him when they were young. I did, too, but I must have read the wrong stuff, or I read it badly, or maybe I just didn’t get it.

But then I kept hearing from my writer friends about what a terrific writer Jack Vance was, and how much they admired him. And these were writers whose taste I trusted.

So off I went to read The Demon Princes series. Then the Alastor books, and the Tschai series, Big Planet, and—by and by—The Dying Earth.

And so I developed a grownup’s appreciation for Vance’s glorious high style, his psychological acuity, and for the breadth of his invention.

In the Dying Earth novels and stories, I very much enjoyed the scheming of Vance’s sophisticated, amoral wizards, obsessed with politesse, possessions, and prestige, and I thought to tell a story of a character who had not yet earned a place among the elite. Vespanus is young, insufficiently schooled, and possibly second-rate. In order to take his place among the rulers of the Dying Earth, he must employ his limited powers with subtlety and finesse.

Abrizonde, Pex, and Calabrande are countries of my own invention, though I hope I have invented them in the Vance style. They are populated by Vancean creations such as sendestins and twk-men, callow-fields and miniaturized sorcerers, as well as some of my own inventions such as the Halcyon Detonation.

I was delighted to include such Vancean objects as alidades, altazimuths, and dividing engines, which though used in the story by Calabrandene engineers are actual implements used in our actual world by actual surveyors.

Perhaps reality itself pays occasional homage to Jack Vance.

—Walter Jon Williams