The Fly

It's so much easier to talk about a terrible book than a good book; with a good book I don't want to spoil the experience for anyone and with the terrible I desperately want to warn people away. So take this review as a warning.

So says "Das Übernerd", whose mission is to review every Hugo, Nebula and World Fantasy Award winning-novel since the dawn of time. This is a person who reads a lot of science fiction and fantasy, and we can all be grateful that he's there to warn us off the bad stuff.

But... you knew there was a "but". Which book does he introduce with this dire warning? Sadly it's none other than Madouc by Jack Vance: by any rational analysis (i.e. mine), one of the titanic works of fantasy.

Having roundly panned Glen Cook last week, I'm in no position to throw stones at negative reviews, and can only observe that there are all kinds of opinion in the world. While I could rebut Das Übernerd's arguments point by point (including some errors of fact), it's probably enough to observe that there is no book so good that someone won't hate it. Das Übernerd also strongly disliked (and profoundly misunderstood) Vance's The Dragon Masters and The Last Castle, so this is just one of those cases where wavelengths are awry.

Those of us who've ever had a bad review can surely take comfort from Das Übernerd's ranting conclusion to his thoughts on Madouc:

And then there's what I can only generously describe as "prose". It gets so purple in the novel that it shifts to ultraviolet. The dialog is amazingly clunky as it switches wildly between common dialog and peppering it liberally with archaic terms. It's all heavily overwritten and made me groan at how painful it was.

Not only is Madouc a fantasy novel that features everything I hate in fantasy novels, it is a bad novel on every level. There is not a redeeming feature in it.

And that, ladies and gentlemen, is the style of someone who presumes to condemn Jack Vance's prose. We can do no better than conclude with the observation of the great aphorist Samuel Johnson:

A fly, Sir, may sting a stately horse and make him wince; but one is but an insect, and the other is a horse still.

Buzz off, Übernerd!