Science & Tech Quote by Jack Vance

Vance’s complaint has the bluntness of lived logistics: not a romantic lament about “the writing life,” but a friction report from a novelist whose tools stopped matching his body. The line lands because it flips the usual techno-utopian script. The computer “speaks,” yes - the assistive promise is there - yet the miracle is throttled by tempo. Writing isn’t just having access to language; it’s keeping up with the velocity of thought, the micro-timing of revision, the quick back-and-forth that lets a sentence find its final shape. When that loop slows, authorship starts to feel like translation through molasses.

The subtext is an artist insisting that craft is physical. Vance is often filed under “imagination” because of his baroque worldbuilding and crystalline diction, but here he’s talking about muscle memory: the speed of hands, the spatial intuition of a page, the instant navigation of a draft. Assistive tech turns those tacit skills into deliberate steps. The phrase “terribly slow” repeats like a metronome of frustration, emphasizing that the obstacle isn’t intelligence or ideas but throughput.

Context matters: Vance lost his sight later in life and continued working with audio interfaces and dictation at a time when accessibility software was markedly clunkier than today. His understatement - “I’m so slow on it” - also reads as a quiet rebuke to anyone who equates “having the technology” with having solved the problem. It’s not inspiration he’s fighting for; it’s time, autonomy, and the right to work at a professional pace.