Vance and Lem

Polish science fiction author Stanislaw Lem is usually compared to the likes of Philip K. Dick, Borges, and Kafka, but I think some interesting similarities can be drawn with Jack Vance too. (Of course, Lem would have a pretty low opinion of Vance, as he had of most western science fiction. But let's ignore that.)

First and foremost, both Lem and Vance like to deal with failures of communication. In the case of Lem, those failures tend to be between different species: The planet Solaris and the scientists who study it, the natives of the planet Eden and the astronauts stranded there, the Quintans of Fiasco and the human contact mission. He uses them as methaphors for the Cold War, as a way tho show the limits of knowledge, and to critique anthropomorphism.

Vance depicts failed attempts at understanding between human cultures. The most extreme case is the conversation between Kergan Banbeck and the Weaponeer in The Dragon Masters, but there are a lot more examples strewn across Vance's body of work.

"I heard you distinctly," replied the Weaponeer. "Your words have no meaning, they are absurdities, paradoxes.

(Jack Vance: The Dragon Masters)

"Can you not understand me?" barked Kergan Banbeck in exasperation. He glanced at the sacerdote, an act of questionable decorum, then performed in a manner completely unconventional: "Sacerdote, how can I deal with this blockhead? He does not seem to hear me."

The sacerdote moved a step nearer, his face as bland and blank as before. Living by a doctrine which proscribed active or intentional interference in the affairs of other men, he could make to any question only a specific and limited answer. "He hears you, but there is no meeting of ideas between you. His thought-structure is derived from that of his masters. It is incommensurable with yours. As to how you must deal with him, I cannot say." [..] The sacerdote reflected. "He speaks not nonsense, but rather a language you fail to understand. You can make him understand your language by erasing all knowledge and training from his mind, and replacing it with patterns of your own."

(ibid.)

There are few aliens in Vance's stories: humans are more than weird enough. Not to be able to understand an alien mentality is unsettling; not to be able to do the same with a human one is even more so. For Vance, like for Max Weber, human societies are "suspended in webs of meaning they themselves have spun". But the configuration of those webs can diverge radically, even if their outer strands are attached to the same physical universe and a common human nature.

Vance and Lem are both satirists. In the case of the former it's a little difficult to see because of all the pulpy adventure, but it's there. Many passages from the Dying Earth books are reminiscent of Lem's Star Diaries, with their bizarre societies and strange cosmovisions. Both authors have penned roughly comparable satires of bureaucracy (Dodkin's Job and Memoirs Found in a Bathtub). Both authors have made fun of academic culture (compare the beginning of The Futurological Congress with the conclave of xenologists in Night Lamp).

Another similarity is that they share an uncanny ability to coin new words that sound just about right. Take for example the creative insults used by the robots to denigrate humankind in the eleventh voyage of the Star Diaries, or the ones directed at people who violate the societal norms of the utopia described in Vance's Wyst.

The apartments were originally intended to house male or female couples, or mated couples, but the philosophy was denounced as "sexivationist", and apartment assignments are now made at random, though often persons will trade about.

(Jack Vance: Wyst)

"Port Mar is hardly notable for sophistication; the Rhunes, however, consider Port Mar a most worldly place, characterized by shameless alimentation, slackness, laxity and a kind of bestial lasciviousness to which they apply the term 'sebalism'.

(Jack Vance: Marune)

Rearding female characters, neither Vance nor Lem posssess any remarkable skill at depicting them. Gustave Flaubert they are not.

Finally, Vance is no stranger to the Borgean delights of fictional erudite books and the reviews thereof. He did a little of that in the Demon Princes novels, which feature extracts form the work of a pompous philosopher-sociologist, Baron Boddisey. Although Vance hasn't devoted an entire book to reviews of imaginary texts, like Lem did in A Perfect Vacuum.