Fri 17 Jun 2022
SF Stories I’m Reading: JACK VANCE “Phalid’s Fate.â€
Posted by Steve under Science Fiction & Fantasy , Stories I'm Reading[2] Comments
JACK VANCE “Phalid’s Fate.†Novelette. First appeared in Thrilling Wonder Stories, December 1946. First collected in The Dark Side of the Moon (Underwood-Miller, hardcover, 1986).
As a strike against the enemy in the ongoing Earth-Phalid war, Ryan Wratch agrees to have his mind transferred to that of a Phalid that has been captured. Ryan’s own body had been all but destroyed in a Phalid attack, his brothers having been killed in the same incident. The Phalids are insect-like creatures with long black carapaces, oddly jointed legs, and rubbery tentacles with mottled gray undersides, hardly human looking at all.
The plan is to have Ryan rescued in space by the Phalid, then taken to their hitherto unknown home planet, where he can act against them from the inside. The plan succeeds exceedingly well, and if you don’t realize that there has to be a beautiful female captive that also needs rescuing, you haven’t read all that many space opera stories like this one.
And that is exactly what this story is. Out-and-out space opera. And I enjoyed it immensely. This was only the third published story in Vance’s long career, and it’s hardly representative of the kinds of story he became famous for. You can tell that he was a writer, though, even at this early stage, or that he was going to be one, especially in passages in which he is describing the Phalids’ home planet, in what I’m going to refer to as what became his well-established baroque style.
June 17th, 2022 at 11:17 pm
It’s often forgotten that Vance primarily wrote books that could only be called space opera for most of is career. However baroque his language there was a strong streak of space opera in much of his early work.
June 18th, 2022 at 12:52 am
And along the way his stories have inspired quite a few follow-up works by other authors. Ttaken from Wikipedia:
A Quest for Simbilis by Michael Shea (DAW, NY, 1974) (authorised sequel of the Cugel novel Eyes of the Overworld although Vance later wrote his own sequel Cugel the Clever; Shea also wrote Nifft the Lean (DAW, NY, 1982), and The Mines of Behemoth (1997) about a Cugel-like character; and In Yana, the Touch of Undying (DAW, NY, 1985) which is also Vancian. A Quest for Simbilis was reprinted in 2020 by Spatterlight Press under the “Paladins of Vance” label.).
The Archonate series by Matthew Hughes (beginning with Fools Errant (Aspect Books, 2001)) is set in a Vancean universe which at long intervals changes between running on science and rational cause-and-effect to magic and sympathetic association, with cataclysmic effects for its inhabitants. Stories set before this change, including the Henghis Hapthorn and Luff Imbry series take place in a futuristic space opera setting reminiscent of Vance’s Gaean Reach while those set after, including the Raffalon and Baldemar series are in the Dying Earth subgenre. Hughes also published an authorised sequel to the Demon Princes series with Spatterlight Press under the “Paladins of Vance” label; titled Barbarians of the Beyond, the book was released in summer 2021.
Phaedra: Alastor 824 by Tais Teng (Spatterlight Press, 2019) (authorised Alastor Cluster novel under the “Paladins of Vance” label.)
Dinosaur Park by Hayford Peirce (Tor, NY, 1994).
Fane by David M. Alexander (longtime Vance friend). (Pocket Books, NY, 1981).
The Pharaoh Contract (Bantam, 1991), Emperor of Everything (Bantam, 1991), Orpheus Machine (Bantam, 1992) by Ray Aldridge.
Gene Wolfe has acknowledged that The Dying Earth influenced his The Book of the New Sun.
Dan Simmons’s Hyperion Cantos has many echoes of Vance, explicitly acknowledged in one of the later books.
The Golden Age by John C. Wright has some similarities to Jack Vance’s works, including an ornamented language, and a baroque and sterile culture toppled by a lone individualist.
The Arbiter Tales (1995–1956), three novels by L. Warren Douglas, were strongly influenced by Vance’s Alastor Cluster stories. (Douglas’s first novel, A Plague of Change (1992), is dedicated to Jack Vance.)
The Dog of the North (2008), a fantasy by Tim Stretton, is strongly influenced by Vance, as noted in the acknowledgements. He outlines his debt to Vance on his blog.
Songs of the Dying Earth (2009), a tribute anthology to Jack Vance’s seminal Dying Earth series, edited by George R. R. Martin and Gardner Dozois, both avid Vance fans.