[8] Vance's great-grandfather is believed to have arrived in California from Michigan a decade before the Gold Rush and married a San Francisco woman.

[9] With the separation of his parents, and the loss of use of the San Francisco house, Vance's mother moved him and his siblings to their maternal grandfather's California ranch near Oakley in the delta of the Sacramento River.

This setting formed Vance's love of the outdoors, and allowed him time to indulge his passion as an avid reader of his mother's large book collection, which included Edgar Rice Burroughs’ Tarzan of the Apes and his Barsoom novels and Jules Verne's The Mysterious Island.

[11] Vance described this era as a time of personal change: “Over a span of four or five years, I developed from an impractical little intellectual into a rather reckless young man, competent at many skills and crafts, and determined to try every phase of life.”[9] He subsequently entered the University of California, Berkeley, and over the next six years studied mining engineering, physics, journalism, and English.

He found a job as a rigger at the Kaiser Shipyard in Richmond, California, and enrolled in an Army Intelligence program to learn Japanese, but washed out.

Vance continued to live in Oakland, in a house he built and extended with his family over the years, including a hand-carved wooden ceiling from Kashmir.

The Vances traveled extensively,[14] including on one around-the-world voyage, and often spent several months at a time living in places like Ireland, Tahiti, South Africa, Positano (in Italy) and on a houseboat on Lake Nagin in Kashmir.

Vance began trying to become a professional writer in the late 1940s, as part of the San Francisco Renaissance, a movement of experimentation in literature and the arts.

was one of the early Magnus Ridolph stories to Twentieth Century Fox, who also hired him as a screenwriter for the Captain Video television series.

[9] While Vance derived pleasure from his sailing hobby, his increasingly poor eyesight and the high costs of outfitting, berthing, and maintaining the vessel led him to sell the Hinano.

They appeared in 1950, several years after Vance had started publishing science fiction in the pulp magazines, under the title The Dying Earth.

Vance returned to the "dying Earth" setting (a far distant future in which the sun is slowly going out, and magic and technology coexist) to write the picaresque adventures of the ne'er-do-well scoundrel Cugel the Clever, and those of the magician Rhialto the Marvellous.

His other major fantasy work, Lyonesse (a trilogy comprising Suldrun's Garden, The Green Pearl, and Madouc), was completed in 1989 and set on a mythological archipelago off the coast of France in the early Middle Ages.

[27] In the introduction to Dowling and Strahan's The Jack Vance Treasury, Vance mentions that his childhood reading including Edgar Rice Burroughs, Jules Verne, Robert W. Chambers, science fiction published by Edward Stratemeyer, the magazines Weird Tales and Amazing Stories, and Lord Dunsany.

[11] According to pulp editor Sam Merwin, Vance's earliest magazine submissions in the 1940s were heavily influenced by the style of James Branch Cabell.

[28] Fantasy historian Lin Carter notes several probable lasting influences of Cabell on Vance's work, and suggests that the early "pseudo-Cabell" experiments bore fruit in The Dying Earth (1950).

[29] Science fiction critic Don Herron[30] cites Clark Ashton Smith as an influence on Vance's style and characters' names.

Vance's science fiction runs the gamut from stories written for pulps in the 1940s to multi-volume tales set in the space age.

Scott Bradfield states that Vance "wrote about incomprehensibly far-off futures that weren’t driven by the splashy intergalactic military conflicts of his Golden Age predecessors, such as E.E.

"[31] While Vance's stories have a wide variety of temporal settings, a majority of them belong to a period long after humanity has colonized other stars, culminating in the development of a fictional region of interstellar space called the Gaean Reach.

In its early phase, exhibited by the Oikumene of the Demon Princes series, this expanding, loose and pacific agglomerate has an aura of colonial adventure, commerce and exoticism.

If there are battles, such as in the slave revolt against the nobility at the end of The Last Castle, they are depicted in an abbreviated length, as Vance is more interested in the social and political context than the clashing of swords.

Another way in which Vance expands the usually narrow focus of most speculative fiction writers is the extensive details ranging from the culture of language to food, music, and rituals.

Bird Isle, by contrast, is not a mystery at all, but a Wodehousian idyll (also set near San Francisco), while The Flesh Mask or Strange People ... emphasize psychological drama.

The theme of both The House on Lily Street and Bad Ronald is solipsistic megalomania, taken up again in the Demon Princes cycle of science fiction novels.

Vance was an original member of the Swordsmen and Sorcerers' Guild of America (SAGA), a loose-knit group of heroic fantasy authors founded in the 1960s and led by Lin Carter.

Other titles in the "Dying Earth" cycle also received hardcover treatment from Underwood-Miller shortly thereafter, such as The Eyes of the Overworld and Cugel's Saga.

After these first publications and until the mid-1990s, Underwood-Miller published many of Vance's works, including his mystery fiction, often in limited editions featuring dustjacket artwork by leading fantasy artists.

However, they have continued to publish Vance titles individually, including such works as Emphyrio and To Live Forever by Miller, and a reprint edition of The Eyes of the Overworld by Underwood.

Issues of the project's magazine Cosmopolis describe the production process (of interest to anyone wishing accurate transcription of scanned text) and the detection of some surprising errors such as the scanning of "and" being recognised as "arid" (Cosmopolis 17, page 8) yet resulting in a sentence that is both grammatically acceptable and plausible in context: "It was hot, arid dusty."