Life & Wisdom Quote by Jack Vance

Jack Vance’s line has the dry snap of a man noticing that the future arrived, then immediately got stuck in traffic. It’s a small sentence with big disappointment baked into its rhythm: “I thought” sets up a private, almost childlike expectation, then the repetition of “fast” lands like a verdict. The joke isn’t really about mufflers or airplanes. It’s about the way technological promise gets sold as pure velocity and arrives as complication, regulation, and noise.

Vance, a science fiction writer famed for baroque worlds and razor-edged social systems, is doing something characteristically sly here: puncturing the standard narrative of progress without sounding like a scold. “Mufflers” is an especially telling detail. It evokes mid-century optimism that engineering would tidy up the inconveniences of modernity - that machines would become cleaner, smoother, less intrusive. Instead, the 20th century delivered a different bargain: more power, more infrastructure, more friction. Cars got faster on paper while streets filled up; planes got faster for a while, then normalized around safety, economics, and security theater.

The subtext is that progress is always mediated by human systems - markets, politics, crowded cities, risk management - which convert speed into something else: waiting, bureaucracy, externalities. Vance isn’t mourning a lost golden age so much as mocking our naive faith in a straight-line future. We imagined sci-fi; we got logistics.