THE THREE MIMES
- THE THREE MIMES - A black ink and black color pencil drawing on an 11 x 14 size coquille board. It appears in the book, "Cugel's Saga" by Jack Vance.
Of all the authors whose fantasy stories I have read, Jack Vance, by far, used the most colorful and sensuous words to describe the unique characters and the extraordinary events that took place in the tales he created to entertain us. That special quality in his work seems to keep
him apart from the other popular writers of SF and fantasy; like Asimov, Clarke, Heinlein, and Herbert. He didn't write the way they did, his stories were more stylish, more sophisticated, more elegant, if you compare the others to martinis, he would be a rare fine wine.
The average reader is probably style-deaf. If given a story to read that has ten chapters, each one written by a different writer, the reader would be unable to point out which chapter was written by which writer. And that's because the average reader is not a student of the art of writing, doesn't really care about "style," their minds are focused on the "story-line".
When I was a young student, the teachers I had in school did not seem to be aware of that aspect of writing either, they never pointed out the difference in the style between Poe and Twain, or Hemingway and Erskine. I was not taught to appreciate "style" as an aspect of writing, I was totally unaware of it in the books I had to read and report on.
But later, when I read book reviews in SF magazines and fanzines, of the works of Bradbury, and Sturgeon, and Heinlein, and others, I was made aware of how their personal "style" played an integral and important part in their work. I began to "see" it in their stories, and it made reading a more rewarding experience for me, especially when I read a story by Jack Vance.
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