by Jack Vance
Hard Luck Diggings: The Early Jack Vance Copyright © 2010 by Jack Vance. All rights reserved.
Dust jacket Copyright © 2010 by Tom Kidd. All rights reserved.
Print version interior design Copyright © 2010 by Desert Isle Design, LLC. All rights reserved.
Electronic Edition
ISBN
978-1-59606-732-5
Acknowledgments
“Hard-Luck Diggings” first appeared in Startling Stories for July 1948;
“The Temple of Han” originally appeared in Planet Stories for July 1951; “The Masquerade on Dicantropus” was first published in Startling Stories for September 1951; “Abercrombie Station” first appeared in Thrilling Wonder Stories for February 1952; “Three-Legged Joe” first saw publication in Startling Stories for January 1953; “DP!” originally appeared in Avon Science Fiction and Fantasy Reader, Vol 2, edited by Donald A. Wollheim, Avon Books, April 1953; “Sjambak” first appeared in Worlds of If for July 1953; “Shape-Up” was first published in Cosmos Science Fiction and Fantasy for November 1953; “The Absent-Minded Professor” originally appeared as “First Star I See Tonight” in Malcolm’s Mystery Magazine for March 1954 (under the pseudonym John Van See); “When the Five Moons Rise” first appeared in Cosmos Science Fiction and Fantasy for March 1954; “The Devil on Salvation Bluff” originally appeared in Star Science Fiction Stories, No 3, edited by Frederik Pohl, Ballantine Books 1955; “The Phantom Milkman” was originally published in Other Worlds Science Fiction for February 1956; “Where Hesperus Falls” first appeared in Fantastic Universe for October 1956; “Dodkin’s Job” originally appeared in Astounding Science Fiction for October 1959.
Quoted material from Jack Vance comes from This Is Me, Jack Vance!, Subterranean Press, 2009, the Introduction to The Dark Side of the Moon, Underwood Miller, 1992, and from conversations between Jack Vance and Terry Dowling, December 1995.
Subterranean Press
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Table of Contents
Introduction
Hard-Luck Diggings (1948)
The Temple of Han (1951)
The Masquerade on Dicantropus (1951)
Abercrombie Station (1952)
Three-Legged Joe (1953)
DP! (1953)
Shape-Up (1953)
Sjambak (1953)
The Absent-Minded Professor (1954)
When the Five Moons Rise (1954)
The Devil on Salvation Bluff (1955)
Where Hesperus Falls (1956)
The Phantom Milkman (1956)
Dodkin’s Job (1959)
Introduction
“I plead youth, inexperience and good intentions.”
—Jack Vance
In the opening pages of his 2009 autobiography, This Is Me, Jack Vance!, the author reminds us that “Like any craft, writing is mastered by practice and patience, and if one has any ‘knack’ for it at all, that very knack—paradoxically—can explicate everything under the sun but itself.”
That said, when you assemble a collection of stories from the first dozen years of any writer’s career, you cannot help but find the author learning his or her craft, refining process, improving techniques for delivering narrative, creating characters, mastering dialog and motivation, invariably locking in favorite themes and preoccupations as well; in short, revealing the basic shape, form and direction of what that career will most likely become.
As well as delivering fine vintage entertainment from one of the true Grand Masters of science fiction and fantasy, that’s the other thing you’ll find in this collection. In a real sense, these stories show Vance working to become a “million-word-a-year-man” so he could pay the mortgage, buy the groceries, travel the world, eventually build his own private “dream castle” and start a family with his wife Norma.
In doing this, like any writer serious about staying in the game, he targeted the available venues of the day, doing what was required to cater to the tastes of the various editors and their readerships, while at the same time bringing his own special way of doing things to the table so that his name, in modern marketing parlance, stood a chance of becoming a viable “brand.”
Fans of Vance’s work know only too well how he succeeded at this task, and how, for reasons both practical and artistic, he quickly made the novel, often novels in series, his preferred form. The shorter, always interesting but far less lucrative work received less and less attention and was soon set aside altogether.
But as so many writers have said, it is in the shorter and mid-length work that the craft is best learned: the practicalities of economy, pacing and narrative style, the versatility and adaptability, how to manage the hook, the tease, everything from mastering point of view to self-editing for greatest effect. When reading (or re-reading) the stories featured here, all of these things are on show.
To take it further, the following selection illustrates the useful writing workshop corollary that you write short stories for the reputation and longer work to pay the mortgage. Novels take skill, ideas and time. Short stories take skill, ideas and much less time. You can afford to try different things, take risks, make mistakes, get feedback sooner. These stories, with their range and variety, show how Vance’s shorter tales were first the mainstay then, with the “brand” sufficiently in place, became the other thing he did because there were often quick dollars to be made, invitations from editors, ideas that didn’t require amplification beyond a certain point. Inevitably, those smaller notions and nifty ideas were incorporated into the plots of the longer work, and the shorter form became first a rarity, then a thing of the past.
This becomes even more evident when we put the stories in Hard-Luck Diggings in context and remember the other storytelling projects Vance was engaged in around the time of their writing, so that the nature of the output and the sheer “coal-face” experimentation going on can be seen as part of a definite rising curve of commitment, skill and confidence.
Our title story, for instance, was produced several years after Jack had already completed the suite of stories that would be published by Hillman in 1950 as The Dying Earth, and do so much to establish the Vance “brand.” With its action adventure approach and spare delivery, “Hard-Luck Diggings” sits in striking contrast to those wry, lyrical, bittersweet pieces.
“Abercrombie Station”, with its feisty female lead off to make her fortune among the Solar System’s elite, appeared the same year that Thrilling Wonder Stories published “Big Planet”, detailing the adventures of a handful of stranded space-travellers trekking across that enormous world. So, too, “Where Hesperus Falls” delivered its minor riff on the less salutary aspects of immortality in 1956, the same year that the rich and memorable immortality novel, To Live Forever, saw print. “Dodkin’s Job” was published the year following “The Miracle Workers” and The Languages of Pao, and so on.
With this in mind, let’s return now to the first twelve years of Vance’s writing career to when the adventure was just beginning, to when the shorter works weren’t the rarity, and any success at all was very likely counted success enough.
“Hard-Luck Diggings” originally appeared in Startling Stories for July 1948 when the author was in his early thirties, and is a no-nonsense who (or what) done it that was the initial outing for the author’s earliest interstellar sleuth, Magnus Ridolph, complete with a wholly appropriate tip of the hat to Arthur Conan Doyle’s Sherlock Holmes in its opening lines. Written soon after his time in the merchant marine, it was Jack’s fifth story sale, an exotic puzzle story that, in the best pulp tr
aditions of Weird Tales and Blue Book, might as easily have been set in the Amazon or darkest Africa as outer space. Ridolph’s arrival at the site of his first investigation might be in humanity’s interstellar future, but this is very much the space age with slide-rules, where a spaceship smells of “hot oil, men, carbolic acid, paint”, giving us a taste of life aboard the more conventional freighters of the author’s recent first-hand experience.
“The Temple of Han” was first published in Planet Stories for July 1951. It features another of Vance’s competent, resourceful heroes in a rather dazzling trans-galactic adventure originally titled “The God and the Temple Robber”, and was written in 1946 when Jack was 30 as part of an early, subsequently discarded novel. As well as being a quick-sketch tale tailored to the demands of the magazine market, the pacing, narrative economy and author confidence here are quite impressive, techniques well in advance of the rather conventional adventure storyline to which they are applied.
“The Masquerade on Dicantropus” originally appeared in Startling Stories for September 1951 and is a modest xenological mystery with a simple setting-up and, for modern readers, a simple enough resolution. Once again it’s Vance writing according to perceived structures and expectations, though, again, we see that his economy of delivery, his sure-handedness with quick-sketch characters and dialog were there from the first, however slight, even perfunctory, the tale being told. “Masquerade” is of additional interest because of how the story’s final reveal was used eleven years later in the author’s Hugo-winning short novel The Dragon Masters.
While many of the earlier Vance stories show the lean, “steam and rivets” quality suited to the markets of the day, we can see how quickly the author hits his stride by comparing, say, “Hard-Luck Diggings” with “Abercrombie Station” when it appeared four years later in Thrilling Wonder Stories for February 1952. Given the additional length, and the fact that the story (and/or the author, to make that crucial distinction) was judged a sufficient draw-card to warrant the extra space, “Abercrombie Station” is a different order of achievement entirely, filled with assured characterization, an easy wit and an authorial voice comfortable with the added room to move. A second Jean Parlier adventure, “Cholwell’s Chickens”, appeared later the same year.
“Three-Legged Joe” first appeared in Startling Stories for January 1953 and is in many ways the classic “gadget story”, to use Vance’s own term for much of his early work. If “Hard-Luck Diggings” might as easily have been set in the Amazon, then “Three-Legged Joe” is a backwoods tall story, very much the “fairy-tale stuff” Milke describes it as to his partner Paskell on the lonely, supposedly dead world Odfars. Given Vance’s flair for humor and witty dialog, it is easy to find similar “tall story” variations in his subsequent work, as with, say, the Bugardoig episode in The Book of Dreams nearly thirty years later.
“DP!” originally appeared in Avon Science Fiction and Fantasy Reader, Vol 2, in April 1953. Addressing subject matter that is as topical now as the day it was written, it was completed while the Vances were staying in the village of Fulpmes in the Austrian Tyrol in 1951, turned out in the same spate of writing that produced Jack’s young adult novel, Vandals of the Void. As an interesting side-note, this particular tale remains one of Harlan Ellison’s all-time favorite Vance stories.
“Sjambak” was first published in Worlds of If for July 1953. Despite a somewhat perfunctory ending (if ever a Vance story cried out for an extra thousand words, this is it), we have a beguiling, transplanted terrestrial culture and an intriguing example of the close cultural observation that would remain such an important trademark feature throughout the author’s long career.
“Shape-Up” first appeared in Cosmos Science Fiction and Fantasy for November 1953. While the plot relies on a point of astral physics that seems all too obvious in hindsight, its staging is intriguing to the point of being compelling, even disturbing, a reminder too that many of Jack’s stories were designed along the lines of classic mysteries because of his own great love for the form.
“The Absent-Minded Professor” (the author’s preferred title) originally appeared as “First Star I See Tonight” in Malcolm’s Mystery Magazine for March 1954 under the pseudonym John Van See. Again, it shows a true mystery writer’s delight in creating situations where the schemer is caught out by his own schemes, both something his all-time favorite creation Cugel the Clever would specialize in eleven years later, and a reminder that the author’s mystery novels, The Fox Valley Murders and A Room to Die In (under the Ellery Queen byline) among them, would turn upon situations where characters sought to carry out perfect crimes, only to be brought undone. This modest but elegant sampling of the form is one of the author’s personal favorites, and lets Vance revel in his lifelong love of astronomy.
“When the Five Moons Rise” was first published in the March 1954 issue of Cosmos Science Fiction and Fantasy, and possesses the sort of eerie, unsettling quality Vance brings to so many of his tales set on alien worlds. This account of the fortunes of the occupants of a lonely lighthouse charged with safeguarding mariners sailing an alien ocean has much of the force and suspense of Wilfrid Wilson Gibson’s haunting 1912 poem “Flannan Isle.” Here, too, it is the mood and staging as much as plot that accounts for its effectiveness.
“The Devil on Salvation Bluff” first appeared in Star Science Fiction Stories, No 3 in 1955 and showcases a key axiom demonstrated in almost all of the author’s science fiction at novel length: alien worlds will invariably lead to alien ways and, in time, an alien humanity. This story enacts the process in a potent miniature form.
“The Phantom Milkman” originally appeared in Other Worlds Science Fiction for February 1956. Simple, linear and effective, it is based on a rather odd event in Vance’s own life while on his way to Mexico with wife Norma and Frank and Beverly Herbert, and was published the same year as To Live Forever.
“Where Hesperus Falls” first appeared in Fantastic Universe for October 1956, and is, on the one hand, a thoughtful, bitter tale of disillusionment and personal obsession; on the other, a relaxed, confident if curious return to the “gadget” angle of the earlier work.
Completing our line-up is another of Jack’s favorites, written when the author was in his early forties. “Dodkin’s Job” originally saw print in Astounding Science Fiction for October 1959, and in a world where an unspecified “they” are still held accountable for so much—“Look what they did!” “They don’t know what they’re doing!”—it holds as much irony now as when it was published half a century ago.
And a healthy sense of irony, a delight in wonder, a regard for craft, and a wholly allowable forbearance, are appropriate for approaching this sprightly, rag-tag bunch, this motley crew to push an entirely allowable seafaring, starfaring metaphor.
And to borrow one or two more, Hard-Luck Diggings becomes a kind of fireside archaeology, an agreeable armchair tour of how the Jack Vance enterprise came to be. It may be a “warts and all” tour at times, but it’s also full of zest and life, the thrill of the upward climb, of so much more to be done. As such, this is a book to be approached and savored with a twinkle in the eye, a knowing smile, but most of all, with an appropriate love of adventure and high romance firmly in place.
Terry Dowling & Jonathan Strahan
Sydney and Perth, September 2009
Hard-Luck Diggings
In solving a problem, I form and consider every conceivable premise. If each of these results in an impossible set of implications, except one, whose consequence is merely improbable: then that lone hypothesis, no matter how unprecedented, is necessarily the correct solution of the problem.
—Magnus Ridolph
Superintendent James Rogge’s office occupied the top of a low knoll at Diggings A, and his office, through a semi-circular window, overlooked both diggings, A and B, all the way down to the beach and the strange-colored ocean beyond.
Rogge sat within, chair turned to the window, drumming his
fingers in quick irregular tempo. Suddenly he jumped to his feet and strode across the room. He was tall and thin, and his black eyes sparkled in a face parched and bony, while his chin dished out below his mouth like a shovel-blade.
He punched a button at the telescreen, waited, leaning slightly forward, his finger still holding down the button. There was no response. The screen hummed quietly, but remained ash-gray, dead.
Rogge clenched his fists. “What a demoralized outfit! Won’t even answer the screen.”
As he turned his back, the screen came alive. Rogge swung around, clasped his hands behind his back. “Well?”
“Sorry, Mr. Rogge, but they’ve just found another,” panted the cadet engineer.
Rogge stiffened. “Where, this time?”
“In the shower room. He’d just been cleaning up.”
Rogge flung his arms out from his sides. “How many times have I told them not to shower alone? By Deneb, I can’t be everywhere! Haven’t they brains enough—” A knock at the door interrupted him. A time-keeper pushed his head in.
“The mail ship’s in sight, Mr. Rogge.”
Rogge took a step toward the door, looked back over his shoulder.
“You attend to that, Kelly. I’m holding you responsible!”
The cadet blinked. “I can’t help it if—” he began querulously, but he was speaking to the retreating back of his superior, and then the empty office. He muttered, dialed off.
Rogge strode out on the beach. He was early, for the ship was still a black spot in the purple-blue sky. When it finally settled, fuming and hissing, on the glinting gray sand, Rogge hardly waited for the steam to billow away before stepping forward to the port.
There was a few minutes’ delay while the crew released themselves from their shock-belts. Rogge shuffled his feet, fidgeting like a nervous race-horse. Metallic sounds came from within. The dogs twisted, the port opened with a sigh, and Rogge moved irritably back from the smell of hot oil, men, carbolic acid, paint.
