Hie Thee to Space, Cowboy

"Now I'm lost in a sea of sunken dreams
While the sound of drunken screams echoes in the night"

 

Brandi Carlile - Dying Day

 

 

Continuing my thoughts on space cowboys, I chanced a sub-genre which should have been right up my apocalyptic-minded alley, Jack Vance's Dying Earth books. From the very first couple of short stories I was surprised to find his influence quite palpable in role-playing games -- and only then remembered the D&D spell memorization mechanic is indeed occasionally called "vancian" magic. Not to diminish the touch of Tolkien's fantasy races and Moorcock's chaos/order conflict and even older works, but the general feel of D&D, of "you all meet in a tavern" and the confused mix of tech and magic and quest hooks and magic devices and the adventuring party and bluff checks appears to owe most and most directly to Vance. He may not have originated all of them, but a surprising number of little details like, say grues and de(m)odands, prismatic sprays or the imprisonment spell and such-and-such-wizard's such-and-such-spell made it into game lingo over the decades. Which is not to call these, in themselves, detailed.

 

I've only bothered with the first couple of volumes, and am unlikely to continue. Being published decades apart ('50, '66, '83) those first two at least each read slightly different. The eponymous first is a collection of random short stories and has a more general fairytale atmosphere with alternate worlds, gigantic gods embodied, fair maids riding horses through meadows, a character shrunken and put in a jar, etc. The Eyes of the Overworld is another string of disparate chapters only slightly held together by featuring the same picaresque protagonist, but feels more consciously post-LotR in its more down-to-earth themes. In both cases though it takes very little time to spot weakness after weakness in the writing.

 

In his notion of preindustrial manners and mores Vance seemed content with mimicking Alexandre Dumas, with every single possible character from wizards to fishermen, priests to scullions and princesses to rat-men discoursing up and down, from phrase to phrase and page to page in nothing but the pompous, flowery boasts and imprecations of ancien regime dandies. His world-building is in fact... none of such. The geography could as easily be flipped upside down and jigsawed backwards. Grues, deodands, demons and other monsters are all the same breed of nondescript boogeymen. He may as well have called them all goblins or vampires. Per pulp fantasy routine, impressive-sounding place names and ancient empires lie strewn through the text, most forgotten by the next sentence, and even the few recurring ones no more developed than "place hero visited" with, if they're very lucky, precisely one colorful custom.

 

But to me the most infuriating part was the title: The Dying Earth. You'd think that would have something to do with it. No it does not. About once every other short story, a character might toss in a phrase like 'in this time when the sun is dying' to remind you what the setting should ostensibly concern. "Turjan of Miir" begins with the notion of preserving humanity before devolving to generic spell-slinging and "Guyal of Sfere" manages, by its last couple of pages, to scrape up a thematically appropriate concern for the preservation of knowledge in the face of decay. Aside from that, the entire opus may as well have been set at Scarborough Fair for all it matters. There's nothing to it but the same utterly generic sword-and-sorcery tripe supplied by a thousand other contemporaries. Even the few repetitions of "the sun will go black" make no sense. How often do you think about the sun eventually going orange? Or having shone brighter upon Snowball Earth? Societies which display no other notion of time or history, each isolated tribe utterly unmoored from its global context, somehow all uniformly know and believe this one token scene-setting sound bite, an event so slow they would have no way of tracking it. And it affects their lives not in the slightest.

Had these books not been picked up by DnD, would anyone remember them? Hell, considering even I was willing to try a second volume (more than I did for E.E. Smith) maybe Vance did something right after all. Look at the Numenera setting taking up and running with the 'use magic device' skill displayed by characters pointing tubes of blue whatever at each other in Eyes of the Overworld. Look at the roguish thieving Cugel disarming traps in a wizard's mansion (albeit by poking random furniture with a stick) and it's not hard to see how among the budding pastime of role-playing games in the '70s, players could let their imaginations fill in what became class features. The very vagueness of Vance's random babbling, the half-assed name-dropping of imaginary locales and featureless monsters, invites 'this would read cooler as:' extrapolation. (And probably explains why so many of his fans try to emulate such nonsense sensibilities.)

 

That's probably the best influence bad writing can hope to exert.

 

For comparison, though (so as not to rehash my overused reference to The Time Machine) try a very brief 1949 story by Arthur C. Clarke called The Forgotten Enemy. Here we have, just as the central point unjustly claimed by those Dying Earth buckle-swashes, Clarke's human remnants dwindling in the face of a cosmic shift. But this time the plot stays true to the central theme, the protagonist's circumstances changing according to logical ramifications, the conclusion fully in keeping with the premise.

 

More than other factors, that separates true speculative fiction from space cowboys, space operas, unresearched historical fiction and fantasy worlds whose characters are indistinguishable from adolescents of the writer's own social milieu. Is the setting in fact relevant? Or did the writer substitute the supernatural for incompetence in conveying both the super and the natural?

 

But, conversely, this also demonstrates our need for speculation. Fine, yes, send your cowboys to space. Just don't forget to make the space count for something. Even slapped together as a superficial pretext, the fantastic can spark activity in other minds who will complete the original half-baked idea, in a way that yet another war story or domestic drama simply will not. Half a century of dice and character sheets may not necessarily count as a writer's saving grace, but it's at least a saving throw.