Try it free |
Read books on your computer or other mobile devices with our FREE Kindle Reading Apps.
|
| ||
| Digital List Price: |
$2.49
What's this?
|
| Kindle Price: | $2.49 includes free wireless delivery via Amazon Whispernet |
|
Product Details
Would you like to give feedback on images?
|
|
Share your thoughts with other customers:
|
||||||||||||||||||||||
|
Most Helpful Customer Reviews
12 of 12 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
Super Sci-fi Shorts,
By
This review is from: The Men Return (Kindle Edition)
I was excited to see this set of 5 short stories arrive on Kindle. These tales were written by Vance in the 50's for the sci-fi pulps.
The tales vary in length but on average would equal about 20 pages a tale in regular book print. Here is a brief description of the stories within: When the Five Moons Rise: A lighthouse keeper on a strange and foreign world finds the odd warnings of his vanished partner to be sage advice. "When the five moons rise together it is wise to believe nothing" Worlds of Origin: A mystery novel and a fine example of Vance's trademark imagination with worlds and customs of alien origin. No less than a dozen wholly unique Vance worlds come to light during Magnus Ridolphs' inquiry into the mysterious death of a man on a space station retreat. A Practicle Man's Guide: Set in a magazine editors office, what happens when a collector of strange and usually useless inventions becomes manically obsessed with a manuscript of instructions which should reveal the world as it is. The Men Return: Completely alien earth where our universal rule of cause and effect no longer has any meaning and only the insane flourish in the new dynamics. The Devil On Salvation Bluff: An Earth colony on a strange planet called Glory, where the counting of time is almost useless as the many suns rise and fall with no pattern. The effects of forcing "Earth" structure on this alien landscape and its aboriginal inhabitants. These stories are all classic Vance. His humor and clever insight into what makes us distinctly human and his wild and vivid imagination make for a very good read. Having been written for the pulps of the day some have most assuredly been edited down to the bone but the stories are strong enough to overcome even the most ruthless editors delete key. You get the sparse feeling of the surroundings in "When The Five Moons Rise" and the slow degrade of reason in "A Practicle Man's Guide" My favorite among these stories was probably "Worlds Of Origin" I am always astounded by Vance's imagination which he simple tosses about so casually in this short story as if he had so much to spare that he could easily afford to leave amazing ideas in this tiny tale. All in all a very good addition to any Vance fan's collection and a great set for any one who enjoys fantastical short stories.
4 of 4 people found the following review helpful:
4.0 out of 5 stars
A Little-Known Master of S-F,
By Elliot (Irvine, CA USA) - See all my reviews
Amazon Verified Purchase(What's this?)
This review is from: The Men Return (Kindle Edition)
Jack Vance, although he won a Hugo and a Nebula (and an Edgar award for one of his mysteries), is not well known to most science fiction fans. As this collection shows, that is a shame-- he wrote some of the most innovative and imaginative works in the genre.
This anthology includes five short works, all of which were first published in small, obscure science fiction magazines (Cosmos, Super Science Fiction, Star, etc.) in the 1950s. (The e-book tells the magazine and date of publication for each story, which is a nice touch; most science fiction anthologies for the Kindle do not include any bibliographic information. Kudos to Wonder eBooks for this feature.) "Worlds of Origin" is the most conventional story in the collection; it features Magnus Ridolph, about whom Vance published a series of stories in the 1940s and 50s. In this one, Ridolph solves a murder at an interplanetary resort by analyzing the cultural characteristics of the home worlds of each of the suspects. "A Practicle [sic] Man's Guide" is a short, funny piece about an editor of a Popular Mechanics-type magazine who receives an article from an apparent crackpot discussing an invention that will destroy reality as we know it. The humor of the piece conceals Vance's unconventional ideas about reality, a theme explored more explicitly in the other three stories in this collection. "When the Five Moons Rise" also appears on the surface to be a conventional piece of science fiction, albeit set on an unusual, exotic world which Vance ably conjures up through a few brief, deft descriptions. But the story is really about the gap between objective reality and our subjective perceptions of it, a theme that other science fiction writers (especially Philip K. Dick) would mine in later decades. "The Men Return" has to be one of the strangest stories in the history of the Sci-Fi pulps; one can only wonder what the readers of the July 1957 issue of "Infinity Science Fiction" made of it. The story imagines a future where cause and effect have ceased to exist, and literally *anything* can happen. Only the insane can survive in this surreal world, and normal humans have become a dying species. Finally, "The Devil on Salvation Bluff" is another piece that stretches the stylistic bounds of magazine science fiction. A group of missionaries try to bring the benefits of civilization to the inhabitants of a distant planet, who reject "progress" for a lifestyle the missionaries think is insane-- until they learn that what is "sane" on earth is not sane elsewhere. This is another thought-provoking story which prefigures the work of science fiction's 1960s avant garde.
5.0 out of 5 stars
Vintage Vance,
Amazon Verified Purchase(What's this?)
This review is from: The Men Return (Kindle Edition)
I thought I had read everything Jack Vance had written, so it was a great pleasure to find this collection of 5 new short stories.
Share your thoughts with other customers: Create your own review
|
|
Tags Customers Associate with This Product(What's this?)Click on a tag to find related items, discussions, and people.
|
|
This product's forum
Active discussions in related forums
Search Customer Discussions
|
Related forums
|
