You have been terribly misled about science fiction. You’ve been told that it comes from the feverish pens of visionaries contemplating the wonders—or horrors—of the future. Sci-fi, from this perspective, is the literary equivalent of the crystal ball, a source of prognostication and predictions. The authors of these astounding stories — excuse me, I meant to say ASTOUNDING STORIES — are put in the same basket along with horse race handicappers, roadside psychics, stock market advisers and the writers of fortune cookie texts. Each aims to tell you tomorrow’s news today.
It’s a lovely story, but totally wrong. Most science fiction is written in the rearview mirror. Whether the subject is nuclear weapons or gender roles or climate change or whatever else you find on that list of Hugo Award nominees, genre fiction responds to the debate rather than creates it. I'm reminded of the observation of a corporate VP who ran a large research and development organization: "I can always tell what the lead story was in Scientific American last month —because that always what my researchers put into their next budget. Why don’t they bring me these ideas before they get on the cover of a magazine." Most sci-fi follows the same pattern, drawing on yesterday's news in shaping its vision of the future.
Viewed from this perspective, Jack Vance's The Dragon Masters —written in the months between the rising of the Berlin Wall and the Cuban missile crisis—is a parable about the arms race. A very clever parable, no doubt: his feuding clans keep trying to breed bigger and stronger dragons to out-do each other. Vance lovingly describes the hierarchy of attack dragons—the basic categories include Blue Horrors, Striding Murderers, Juggers, Termagants and Fiends—with a zeal that evokes both Aquinas's enumeration of angels and Jane's classification of tanks.
The Fiends flicked and feinted with their steel balls, scuttled forward. The Jugger chopped, shattered its sword on the rockhard armor of the Fiends….
This is classic Vance, action-packed for the thrill-seekers but played out with a chessplayer’s sense of strategy.
May the best dragon win!
But when you dig more deeply into the plot, you find that Vance is not looking into the rearview mirror. His dragons, at first glance creatures more aligned with fantasy fiction than sci-fi, are actually the result of daring gene-splicing experiments—the DNA of aliens has been manipulated to create servile dragon warriors. I note that on the very same day that I write this paragraph, the US government’s top intelligence officer is in the news—announcing that he has added "gene-splicing" to the official list of "weapons of mass destruction." Media outlets are raising alarms over this scary new development. I simply note that Jack Vance recognized this threat in 1962.
Two human communities live in uneasy truce on the planet Aerlith. One group is led by Joaz Banbeck, a typical Vance protagonist, a wary individualist who mostly keeps his own counsel. His adversary is the blustering, boastful Ervis Carcolo. Carcolo wants to conquer his rival, but Banbeck has bigger concerns: his astronomical observations suggest that a hostile alien civilization, known as the Basics, may soon return to seize and domesticate all remaining humans on Aerlith. The Basics had been defeated in a previous foray. In fact, their genetic stock produced the dragons in the Aerlith arsenals; but their technology is formidable, and it is unlikely that they can be bested on a second encounter. Adding to the strategic complexity, both Banbeck and Carcolo have to deal with the Sacerdotes, a passive and reclusive sect of quasi-humans who also live on Aerlith, yet pursue a mysterious agenda of their own.
Vance never settles for simple social dynamics. Which conflict is at the center of The Dragon Masters ? Do we focus on the Cold War rivalry of Banbeck and Carcolo? Or the intergalactic struggle of humans and Basics? Or the uneasy tension between clans and Sacerdotes? Or should we forget Clausewitz and Sun-Tzu entirely, and just focus on the bloody collisions of the dragons?
Of course, Vance wants us to do all of the above. And in a bravura performance he brings all of these elements together in a battle royale that comprise almost the entire second half of this novel. This is the most elaborate description of combat I’ve encountered in a science fiction novel, earning comparisons with the atom-splitting closing scenes of Joe Haldeman’s The Forever War and the theologically-charged wrestlemania of competing deities in Roger Zelazny's Lord of Light . But Vance's exchanges of hostilities are the most drawn-out of them all, doing full justice to each of the six species involved in the various phases of the encounter. This book originally appeared in Galaxy magazine in August 1962, exciting adolescent and teen readers with a cover illustration of a dragon-riding warrior with a sword encountering an even larger dragon brandishing an axe, with mouth wide open to display twenty fanged yellow teeth. I can imagine young sci-fi fans compulsively turning pages, anxious to determine which one triumphs in this ultimate contest to determine a Darwinian survival of the fittest over-sized reptile.
But most of the adolescent readers probably missed the more philosophical elements at play in this work. Students of linguistics and logic will be amused over a subplot dealing with the Sacerdotes inability to tell lies. A handful of later science fiction writers have found inspiration in the intricacies of truth propositions (see China Miéville's Embassytown , from 2011, for the definitive treatment of this rich topic), but Vance set the example with his delightful interrogation scene, in The Dragon Masters . Here a captured Sacerdote manages to mislead and equivocate, without ever stating a false proposition. No blood is shed here, but this interlude is as engaging as the prominent battle scenes at the heart of the novel.
Vance walked away with a Hugo award for this work—one of three that he earned over the course of a career in genre fiction that spanned almost seventy years. But I suspect that Vance could have flourished as a highbrow literary writer telling completely realistic tales of postwar American angst. Indeed, his antiheroes aren’t far afield from the James Dean and Marlon Brando types that set the tone for modern storytelling during the Cold War. Instead he lavished his talents on a callow young readership that may have missed the nuances amidst the battlefield theatrics. But they are there for the reader who pays attention to more than just plot.
“It is a mistake to read Vance for the narrative, beguilingly readable though those narratives are,” warns Adam Roberts in his comprehensive survey The History of Science Fiction . “It is the conjunction of the unflagging fertility of his imagination and the elegant chill mannerisms of his prose that generate the distinctive Vance quiddity.” His precision, his concern for details of flora and fauna, his anthropological sensibilities, his neologisms (a whole book has been devoted to the words he invented in his stories) and sensitivity to language—all are key constituents of the Vance modus operandi that, much like the M.O. of a criminal, may leave behind bodies and blood, but also more subtle clues for the penetrating investigator.
Ted Gioia writes on music, literature and popular culture. His latest book is Love Songs: The Hidden History , published by Oxford University Press.
Jack Vance (1916-2013)
This year marks the centenary of Jack Vance's birth. In honor of the occasion, we are publishing a series of essays on Vance's works. The complete edition of Vance's works spans 45 volumes and encompasses science fiction, fantasy and mysteries. His writings earned numerous awards including three Hugo Awards, the Nebula Award, the Jupiter Awards, the World Fantasy Award and the Edgar. In this essay, Ted Gioia writes about Vance's novel The Dragon Masters.