Jack Vance (Jack John Holbrook Vance) Biography

American writer of science fiction and fantasy, born in San Francisco, educated at the University of California; he has also written some detective fiction under other names. Some of his best work is contained in the linked stories published as The Dying Earth (1950), in which he transposed the interplanetary romance of E. R. Burroughs to the distant future. ‘Dying Earth’ novels have since become numerous, but even the most sophisticated are directly indebted to Vance. Vance went on to create a large number of planetary landscapes filled with sentient beings, some of them human, in novels such as Big Planet (1957), The Dragon Masters (1963), The Blue World (1966), Trullion: Alastor 2262 (1973), and Maske: Thaery (1976) which variously promulgate a universe teeming with difference. In Lyonesse (1983) and its sequels his landscape moves to Earth's own past.