The Scars That Never Heal
Jack Vance offers rare insight into the development out of a Gamma mindset
Although his work never reached the heights of popularity enjoyed by his friend Frank Herbert, Jack Vance, best known for his Dying Earth series, is rightly considered one of the great writers of 20th-Century science fiction. In his Treasury, a collection of his short stories, Vance describes his childhood and his social development.
I was a precocious child, and I resolved to read everything I could get my hands on, in order to encapsulate the whole of human knowledge. At the time the project seemed less impractical than it does today. I did as best I could and by the time I was ten or twelve had read what I suspect was equivalent to a college education. No question but that I was bright, but probably not very likeable, nor dripping with charm. In the first place, I was quietly arrogant, also introverted, with my own view on how the world should be run. I was not at all gregarious, and without social skills. I was considered something of a freak by my brothers and sister. The older boys never altered their opinions; they are now dead. I hasten to say that there is no macabre connection between these two facts.
There were various factors involved, but I like to think my immature behavior was for the most part attributable to my youth, only fifteen at graduation from high school. I was shy around girls. The ones I admired and tried to impress would have nothing to do with me, which caused me bafflement. My intentions were honourable enough, as I recall; I merely wanted someone beautiful to listen to my daydreams and admire the scope of my intelligence. I see now that I did everything wrong.
Unlike many other science fiction authors, I respect Vance more than I admire him or enjoy his work, although I recognize his influence on many subsequent authors. One reason for my reservations about him and his flowery style is that even though he appears to have managed to eventually graduate from Gamma, more or less, his perspective on women and the SSH remained deformed by his youthful mindset.
It is only the evil, boorish men who dare to pursue the fair maidens, who dutifully reject these aggressive oafs as well as the handsome, diffident aristocrats their mothers would have them marry in favor of quietly heroic young men who are mysteriously attractive despite their lack of conventionally handsome features.
In the three years since his sixteenth birthday Glawen had changed little. He had grown as tall as Scharde, and from some source he gained an indefinable air of competence and decision, which was almost precocious. Like Scharde he was now spare and slender, with square shoulders and narrow hips. Again like Scharde, he carried himself with an understated economy of motion, almost elegant in its simplicity. His face, while less gaunt, bony and predacious than that of Scharde, was further softened by luminous dark hazel eyes, a cap of short thick black hair and a long generous mouth with a pensive droop at the corners: a face somewhat irregular and by no means classically handsome but one which romantic maidens found fascinating to consider.
That’s a description of the protagonist of Araminta Station, a novel that he wrote at the age of 71. Which, I think, demonstrates that the psychologies we develop in our formative years tend to stay with us, even when we manage to surmount the more troublesome aspects of our behavioral patterns.
This one hits home for me. Books were a big part of my life. "Pillar of Iron" and "Great Lion of God" by Taylor Caldwell were formative books that I read one long winter. Cicero, or her ideal of Cicero, became a an ideal of mine. I studied rhetoric (badly), and stoicism (less badly) as far as I could in the small Midwestern town of my birth.
But she was a certified nut. Crazy. When I read those books now, books that at the time formed part of my personality, I can see it burning through.
Same with Howard, Asimov, and a few others whose books I enjoyed. When I was able to see what they actually did in their private life, I had a few serious questions about how their books had been influenced by their views.
But I will credit Caldwell's book and later the Rome books by Colleen McCullough for my love of Roman history. Never mind that reality was not what the books portray, they led me to the source.
Where would you place Robert E Howard on the SSH? His books are written like a sigma but his biography sounds gamma