"But, for instance, when I was awfully young, I read all the Oz books. They were an enormous influence on me"
About this Quote
Jack Vance confesses an early apprenticeship to wonder. Saying he read all the Oz books when he was awfully young signals not just childhood fandom but a template for how fantasy might work: a journey through vivid, self-contained polities; companions gathered and shed along the road; danger handled with wit rather than brute force; a tone that lets whimsy sit beside menace without apology. L. Frank Baum’s America-flavored fairyland, with its color-coded regions, comic tyrants, and matter-of-fact magic, maps neatly onto Vance’s later picaresques in The Dying Earth, Cugel’s adventures, and even Lyonesse. His travelers meet bizarre societies ruled by arbitrary customs, escape entanglements through clever talk, and carry on with a shrug and a quip. The Emerald City’s cheerful bureaucracy, Tik-Tok’s mechanical literalism, the Gump’s improvised airship: all anticipate Vance’s delight in contraptions, names, and the dry comedy of systems taken too seriously.
The affinity is less about style than sensibility. Baum writes in a transparent, nursery clarity; Vance composes with baroque sparkle and sardonic cadence. Yet both favor episodic structure, a parade of set pieces stitched by the road, and a steady hum of invention that makes magic feel as ordinary as weather. Baum’s democratic fairy tale, suspicious of pomp and eager to puncture pretension, becomes in Vance a satirical eye for social orders, guilds, cults, and petty sovereignties. The resourcefulness of Dorothy and her friends prefigures Vance’s scrappy protagonists who rely on charm, bluff, and improvised gadgetry. By naming Oz as an enormous influence, Vance places himself in an American tradition of fantasy that sidesteps medievalism for the carnival, the midway, the curiosity cabinet. It clarifies why his worlds feel so richly various and why peril so often arrives smiling: early enchantments taught him that the road of marvels is also a school in tact, nerve, and guile.
The affinity is less about style than sensibility. Baum writes in a transparent, nursery clarity; Vance composes with baroque sparkle and sardonic cadence. Yet both favor episodic structure, a parade of set pieces stitched by the road, and a steady hum of invention that makes magic feel as ordinary as weather. Baum’s democratic fairy tale, suspicious of pomp and eager to puncture pretension, becomes in Vance a satirical eye for social orders, guilds, cults, and petty sovereignties. The resourcefulness of Dorothy and her friends prefigures Vance’s scrappy protagonists who rely on charm, bluff, and improvised gadgetry. By naming Oz as an enormous influence, Vance places himself in an American tradition of fantasy that sidesteps medievalism for the carnival, the midway, the curiosity cabinet. It clarifies why his worlds feel so richly various and why peril so often arrives smiling: early enchantments taught him that the road of marvels is also a school in tact, nerve, and guile.
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