Thoughts on/from Jack Vance's Suldrun's Garden

I am currently listening to Suldrun's Garden from Jack Vance's Lyonesse series.


Jack Vance is my favorite author, regardless of genre. He is literary and imaginative, and I think I've finally figured out what it is about his writing that I love so much. His attention to detail translates into vivid imagery, brilliant turns of phrase, wit, and sly social commentary. His humor is wry without the sharp elbow to the ribs that Fritz Leiber is sometimes guilty of. This attention to detail results in rounded characters and world building without the simple formulaic fractility that seems to be the crutch of the current glut of best-selling authors.


Attention to detail is nothing new; the specificity of focused vision is the hallmark of keen writing, but also tiresome writing. That's not it. He is able to focus his vision on a story set in a lush garden o ideas. The garden is--gasp: cliché--organic. For me it isn't the detail of visual imagery that I find so compelling it is the way he grows and interweaves cultures.


For example. In Lyonesse a certain king has an affection for birds. An affection that has become an affectation grown to an obsessive madness: he has passed laws forbidding eating eggs, courtiers wear decorative feather plumage, he has an implied encyclopedic knowledge of birds.


So what? Every dm's campaign has people like this. Yes, that is partially true. This can be found in many campaign settings, but often those cultivated eccentricities overrun the garden with weeds and the setting begins to feel like the marvel universe with every pet character clamoring for special attention. In Vance's creations the natural hierarchy is preserved and the eccentricities manifest from and according to the permissiveness of the power structures, while varying according to the local constraints.  We see this in real life too.


Everyone has their particular interest or hobby, outside of their vocation, to which they would love to devote more time, or even turn into their primary occupation. This interest is a matter of emotional feeling and interest and submits only to logic in terms of budgetary, time and social constraints. A king so disinclined to regard social approbation, indeed even encouraged in the their benign diversions, has a freedom of excess to an extreme that can corrupt social norms, and form cultures. It is not hard to imagine such a source for many real life cultural norms. It is the affect of individuals in power, whether on the small scale or large, in times of crisis and peace, whether powerfully acute or gently chronic, which, through their influence, generate these customs, idioms, rituals, philosophies. Each incident a thread in a tapestry upon which individual dramas play out. This is what Vance does: he takes an observation, exaggerates a quality, then deconstructs it, then lets it form the living background for his stories.