Night Lamp

John Holbrook Vance was born in 1916 and studied mining, engineering and journalism at the University of California. During the Second World War he served in the merchant navy and was torpedoed twice. He started contributing stories to the pulp magazines in the mid 1940s and published his first book, THE DYING EARTH, in 1950. Among his many books are THE DRAGON MASTERS, for which he won his first HUGO AWARD, BIG PLANET, THE ANOME, and the Lyonesse sequence. He has won the HUGO, NEBULA and WORLD FANTASY AWARDs, amongst others, and in 1997 was named a Grand Master by the Science Fiction Writers of America.

NIGHT LAMP should be cause for rejoicing among the faithful. The remarkable high consistency of Vance's poetic writing, coupled with his extraordinary visions of exotic planets, is one of the treasures of speculative fiction - WASHINGTON POST BOOK WORLDJack Vance is a peerless creator of strange landscapes, and in NIGHT LAMP he conjures up a kind of Asia among the stars. Buy it. It's cheaper and at least as exotic as two weeks in the sun - FINANCIAL TIMESVance is near the top of his form in this tale of interplanetary adventure and financial skulduggery ... NIGHT LAMP yields rich rewards in its humorous complexities - PUBLISHERS WEEKLYJack Vance is the richest of stylists . . . Night Lamp ranks with his very best, the quintessential Vance novel - Interzone