Jack Vance: The Dragon Masters

The Dying Earth, p. 22

Phade ran down the passage which presently joined Bird Walk, so called for the series of fabulous birds of lapis, gold, cinnabar, malachite and maracasite inlaid into the marble. Through an arcade of green and gray jade in spiral columns she passed out into Kergan’s Way, a natural defile which formed the main thoroughfare of Banbeck Village.

The Dragon Masters, p. 7.

Whether he is describing an expiring millenial Earth steeped in magic born of rotting history, or a galactic cluster of 30,000 stars, or the planet Aerlith under the baleful eye of the wandering lizard star, Vance creates baroque tapestry. Not content to limit himself to the mere world-creation of traditional science fiction, Vance adds those graceful superfluities that give his times and places baronial richness, late Renaissance grandeur, and the weight of cultural and aesthetic substantiality.

Out of this baroque prose style arises the baroque realities that Vance creates in his science fiction and fantasy. Vance’s oeuvre may superficially be divided between “fantasies” like The Dying Earth and The Eyes of the Overworld in which the texture of reality is interwoven with magic, and works like The Dragon Masters, which justify every conceivable technical definition of “science fiction.” I say superficially divided because the cleavage is technical and not something one experiences as a reader. Vance’s “fantasy” has the same feel as Vance’s “science fiction.” Indeed both have generally been published as “science fiction,” and no one has seriously objected. For Vance’s tone, his outlook on reality, and the flavor of his work, arise from his style and mode, not from whether his material is “science fiction” or “fantasy.”

Vance’s worlds arise out of his own unique tone whether he’s writing “straight” science fiction or “magical” fantasies. It’s obvious in the Dying Earth and Cugel the Clever stories, where sorcery is treated something like a degenerate technology, where making miracles has become a science, where magic is a hand-me-down from a lost golden age of Faustian greatness. His fantasy is too detailed, convoluted, and realized not to be called science fiction, and his science fiction realities have the magical complexity of his fantasies.

The Dragon Masters, Vance’s Hugo-winning short novel, for example, is science fiction by any reasonable criteria. Yet it retains the quality and tone common to all of Jack Vance’s imaginative work.

Just as Vance’s tone arises out of his baroque prose style, so does that tone create story and character—especially when combined with Vance’s characteristic sardonic viewpoint and his relentless sense of irony.

The Dragon Masters has a conventional space-opera plot, if one were to define it by simply capsulizing the story line. Lizardmen have captured all human planets except Aerlith by using genetically-altered humans as specialized brainwashed slave warriors. On Aerlith, humans have captured a party of invading “Basic” sauroids, and bred them into the same sort of specialized slave warriors. The Banbeck and Carcolo clans eventually use these “dragons” to destroy an invading party of Basics and their human warriors and seize their ship.

But such a conventional plot summary is hardly adequate, for it doesn’t really describe what The Dragon Masters is all about. For Vance, plot and even character is a skeleton upon which to hang his overriding concern for place and time, for a sense of history always imbued with a mordant irony reminiscent of the later Mark Twain.

Like many of Vance’s societies, Aerlith has a political structure that is hereditary and feudal. The feuding forces of Joaz Banbeck and Ervis Carcolo battle each other for abstract advantage even as the Basics attack them both for the purpose of enslaving the last free men in the universe. To add another level of irony to the situation, the sacerdotes, a tribe of Aerlith humans who live in huge and eerie cave cities, consider themselves the only true humans and attempt to live out an insanely extreme philosophy of detachment in the face of the Basic assault. Vance’s view of religious mystics is no more sanguine than his opinion of political leaders.

In The Dragon Masters, we can see how Vance’s baroque style and sardonic stance transform what in other hands would be a straightforward science fiction story into a kind of sophisticated Grimm fairy tale entirely of a piece with works like the Cugel stories or the Dying Earth tales.

We can see this most clearly in the “dragons” of the title and the Basic-molded humanoids. Here are creatures out of some wizard’s vat arrived at through the conventions of science fiction. How human and Basic flesh is transformed into Giants and Heavy Troopers, Blue Fiends and Termagants, is never scientifically explained—nor need it be, given the story’s far-future context. If Vance could explain it, he’d get a Nobel Prize in biology. The difference between this kind of “science fiction” and the fantasy that produces Magnatz, Chun the Inevitable, deodands, and leucomorphs is something only an aged mandarin could distinguish.

What counts in both cases is the reality, the verisimilitude, the three-dimensionality, of the fantastic creatures the writer has created, not how they were technically arrived at. And here Jack Vance’s richness of style serves to best advantage, creating gothic creatures that reverberate with the mythic dimensions of the Brothers Grimm, but which have the solidity, believability, and even upon occasion the psychological depth of well-realized science fiction.

A palpable aura was cast up, a weft in space meshed of varying depravities. And the demons swooped like birds alighting and joined the delirium. Foul face after face T’sais saw, and each burnt her brain until she thought she must scream and die—visages of leering eye, bulbed cheek, lunatic body, black faces of spiked nose, expressions outraging thought, writhing, hopping, crawling, the spew of the demon-lands. And one had a nose like a three-fold white worm, a mouth that was a putrefying blotch, a mottled jowl and black malformed forehead; the whole a thing of retch and horror. To this Etarr directed T’sais’ gaze. She saw and her muscles knotted. “There,” said Etarr in a muffled voice, “there is a face twin to the one below this hood.”

The Dying Earth, p. 60.

No cardboard bug-eyed monsters, these. And in The Dragon Masters, we can see that the dragons and humanoids are not merely tour-de-force window dressing, but beings whose existence determines the plot—indeed, grotesques whose existence becomes the plot. A reality which contains such presences is clearly something other than what most of us experience from day to day—in quality not only in content—which is why the work has fascination. This is fundamentally what people read both science fiction and fantasy for and what they seldom get—an altered reality with the cogency and verisimilitude of our own. And a reality, moreover, more convoluted, more ornate, more paradoxical, more slippery—more magical, if you will.

But even as Jack Vance builds his ornate cathedrals around you, his viewpoint on his own creations remains mordant, sardonic, slyly misanthropic, perhaps even ultimately pessimistic. In the work of Vance, some enduring age is forever coming to a close, and men seem meaner and smaller than their ancestors:

“In ages gone,” the Sage had said, his eyes fixed on a low star, “a thousand spells were known to sorcery and the wizards effected their wills. Today, as Earth dies, a hundred spells remain to man’s knowledge, and these have come to us through the ancient books. …”

Читать дальше