Wow. I haven't seen Conn around for awhile. I hope he never sees this thread.
Massively abridged from the
SFE (apologies for the even-more-academic-than-usual aura given off by some of this):
[In the late 40s to 1950] Vance was beginning to compose the kind of story that would eventually make him one of the most deeply influential authors in the sf and fantasy genres after World War Two, an impact greater than that generated by fellow inventors of the modern (post-Edgar Rice Burroughs) Planetary Romance like Leigh Brackett, C L Moore or Clark Ashton Smith. The depth and duration of this influence may have something to do with Vance's long prime as a creative figure, for he was writing work of high quality nearly half a century after he came into his own voice, creating an oeuvre whose surface flamboyance never obscured an underlying seriousness. Authors clearly (and often explicitly) influenced by Vance include such widely divergent figures as Jack L Chalker, Avram Davidson, Terry Dowling, Harlan Ellison, Ursula K Le Guin (though the influences here were almost certainly governed by a mutual concern with Anthropology), George R R Martin, Michael Moorcock, Dan Simmons and Gene Wolfe. There are many others: though their points of view are radically dissimilar, it seems clear, for instance, that the adrift protagonists-in-bondage and the peneplainal venues characteristic of early J G Ballard give off a Vancian aura.
Within the broad remit of the Planetary Romance, Vance created two subgenres, the first being the Dying Earth story that takes its name from his first book, The Dying Earth...
Vance's second original sophistication of the Planetary Romance, the big planet story, again takes its name from his first novel to exemplify it: Big Planet...
As Vance's created worlds became richer and more complex, so too did his style. Always tending towards the baroque, it had developed by the time of The Dragon Masters into an effective high-mannered diction, somewhat pedantic, and almost always saturated with a rich but distanced irony. Vance's talent for naming the people and places in his stories (a mixture of exotic invented terms and obscure or commonplace words with the right resonance) increasingly generated a sense that dream ethnographies were being carved, almost as a gardener would create topiary....
As a landscape artist, a visionary shaper of potential human societies, Vance was central to both sf and Fantasy. For many of his fellow writers, and for a large audience, he was for more than half a century the field's central gardener of worlds. In 1984 he received the World Fantasy Award for lifetime achievement; in 1997 he received the SFWA Grand Master Award. He was inducted into the Science Fiction Hall of Fame in 2001.
He also won a Hugo and Nebula for the 1963 novelette "The Last Castle," a 1967 Hugo for "The Dragon Masters" (novella, I think), a World Fantasy Award for the 1990 novel
Lyonesse: Madouc, and a Hugo for his 2010 autobiography,
This Is Me, Jack Vance! (Or, More Properly, This "I").
I'm actually late in following up on Vance, personally - his Hugo winners were among the first SFF stories I read but it's only in the past several years that I've read several novels and a series and many more stories but have still only touched the tip of the iceberg. He's not so far one of my very favorite authors or anything, but he's certainly good and certainly huge and hugely important and not just historically. The cool thing about The Dying Earth, for instance, is that it's set so far in the future and is so much a science fantasy that it's essentially timeless.
I agree that there are so many "classics" it's practically impossible to read them all but he'd certainly be on a short list, rather than the long one.
