VIE

One of the things I have to do to occupy myself is a reading assignment.

I recently joined as a volunteer proofreader at the Vance Integral Edition or VIE. The VIE's goals are modest: to produce archival quality version of Jack Vance's works, and it is working with Vance himself to do this. The project has been working at proofreading and publishing for three or four years now, and the work is nearly complete. The VIE volumes are quite nice, and I've been lucky to score a few from EBay, including my favorite Vance novel Lyonesse!

An interesting thing about the project is some of the titles are changed, which I can only assume means that Vance prefers the newer titles. Example include Suldrun's Garden instead of Lyonesse (I should get used to calling it that, although Lyonesse: Suldrun's Garden became common after The Green Pearl came out), Mazirian the Magician instead of The Dying Earth, Cugel the Clever instead of The Eyes of the Overworld, and Cugel: The Skybreak Spatterlight instead of Cugel's Saga. Something else I noticed is the order of the storied withing The Dying Earth is different - the book opens with Mazirian the Magician instead of Turjan of Miir.

I'm a bit of a collector - I own at least eight copies of Lyonesse or Suldrun's Garden:

• 1 Vance Integral Edition hardback, bought off Ebay
  
• 1 Underwood Miller hardback
  
• 1 Berkeley hardback
  
• 3 ACE paperbacks (1 trade paperback, 1 regular paperpack that was the original copy I read, 1 "pristine" regular paperback for my collection)
  
• 1 UK Edition paperback, bought on a trip to Australia
  
• 1 electronic version in MS reader format
  

My first assignment was The Kragen, which I think is part of The Blue World. I recently received a new assignment, Guyal of Sfere. I've already read it as it was previously published in The Dying Earth, a fantasy classic. I'm sure nothing significant has changed, only perhaps some minor text corrections and an occasional word substitution.

The complete set is rather expensive, and I already own most of it anyway in other editions. Now that the VIE is available in "special collections" (i.e. subsets) it is tempting to get the "Fantasies and Sagas" group... but it is still expensive for books I already own.

A common theme in Vance's work (Lyonesse, Tschai, Cadwal Chronicles, Maske: Thaery, etc.) is that of the lone adventurer versus a hostile world, and the struggle to outwit, swindle, or otherwise best all the obstacles. Of course, it is the details along the way that make me love the stories so much!