Friday, July 04, 2008

Publication Day - Part II

Having now skipped out to Waterstones I can report on a hugely impressive display including a picture of the author which will be familiar to readers of this blog. Photographic evidence will follow in due course.

In another noteworthy event, the July edition of DeathRay magazine includes a short article by yours truly on subject always close to my heart, the enduring excellence of Jack Vance.

The recent death of Arthur C. Clarke leaves Jack Vance as one of the last survivors of the Golden Age of science fiction. Active since the late 1940s, Vance has won both the Hugo and Nebula Awards (including a Grand Master Award in 1996) as well as the World Fantasy Award.

But a list of awards understates Vance's influence: cited by writers as diverse as Gene Wolfe, Dan Simmons and George R.R. Martin as an inspiration, Vance has also attracted a hard-core of devoted fans across the years. In 1999, a group of those devotees set out on an extraordinary voyage: the Vance Integral Edition (VIE). As a writer who had been captivated by Vance’s work for over twenty years, I was delighted to be part of the project—even if I didn’t realise then that we wouldn’t finish until 2006!

I'm afraid you'll have to buy the magazine to read the rest...

2 comments:

mattfwcurran.com Web Admin said...

Hi, Tim

Deathray has quickly become the genre magazine I buy (that and the fiction-gold-standard The Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction). I haven't read through the Jack Vance piece yet, but at a glance it looks pretty good - you must be thrilled! Any ideas when the review of Dog of the North will be published in its hallowed pages?

All the best

Matt

Tim Stretton said...

I think the review will be in the next issue.

I'd never seen DeathRay before but it has a lot of good stuff - intelligent book and film reviews and some good interviews. A bit too much on comics for my tastes, but they'll never please everyone!