Tuf Voyaging by George R.R. Martin

I read this one a while ago and I was going to write about it here, but I never got around to it, so now I'm belatedly posting about this book. I've read a couple of other books since, but I don't plan to write about them for now. We'll see. Anyway, it would be an injustice for me not to say anything about Tuf Voyaging.

This was easily the best science fiction book I've read in a while. How long of a while, I'm not quite sure. Last year, I read collections of stories written by Frederick Pohl and Jack Vance, both of whom also died last year (but that wasn't my fault). Those collections were largely amazing, but part of the value I saw in them was as a showcase of the short fiction of two of the great science fiction writers that started in the "Golden Age" and had long, impressive careers. Anthologies aside, it's been years since I've read any science fiction this good. I guess I'd say that this is the best science fiction novel that I've read since Greg Bear's "The Way" books, which I finished over a year ago. Granted, I haven't been reading much in that time, and also I wasn't quite as enthused about Tuf Voyaging as I was for those books, but it's still very, very good.

George R.R. Martin wrote the foreword to The Jack Vance Treasury (one of the two anthologies I just mentioned) and I knew he was influenced by Vance, but I didn't think his writing was overtly reminiscent of Vance. And then I read this book. It's exquisitely Vancean. I later did a Google search and confirmed my suspicion.

NG: You've frequently expressed admiration for Jack Vance. How Vancean is A Song of Ice and Fire in conception and style? In particular, does the narrative thread featuring the exotic wanderings of Daenerys Targaryen function in part as a tribute to Vance, to his picaresque inventiveness?
GRRM: Jack Vance is the greatest living SF writer, in my opinion, and one of the few who is also a master of Fantasy. His The Dying Earth (1950) was one of the seminal books in the history of modern Fantasy, and I would rank him right up there with Tolkien, Dunsany, Leiber, and T.H. White as one of the fathers of the genre.
All that being said, I don't think A Song of Ice and Fire is particularly Vancean. Vance has his voice and I have mine. I couldn't write like Vance even if I tried... and I did try, once. The first Haviland Tuf story, "A Beast for Norn," was my attempt to capture some of Vance's effects, and Tuf is a very Vancean hero, a distant cousin to Magnus Ridolph, perhaps. But what that experiment taught me was that only Jack Vance can write like Jack Vance.

I couldn't believe it when I found that. I was so sure that this book was deliberately emulating Vance, and it turned out I was correct. Anyway, it's also a great book in its own right. I highly recommend it to any science fiction fan. I'd say more, but I have an excuse for failing to do so, as usual. This time, my excuse is that I accidentally waited too long after reading the book. So I'll leave it at that.