Book description
The Potters of Firsk includes the majority of Vance's 'Magnus Ridolph'
stories, previously collected in The Many Worlds of Magnus Ridolph. In
the VIE edition this book is titled Gadget Stories.
Contents: Planet of the Black Dust, Dead Ahead ("Ultimate
Quest"), Hard Luck Diggings, Sanatoris Short-cut, The Unspeakable
McInch, The Howling Bounders, The King of Thieves, The Sub-standard
Sardines, To B or Not to C or to D ("Cosmic Hotfoot"), Spa of
the Stars, The Enchanted Princess ("The Dreamer"), The Potters
of Firsk, The Visitors ("Winner Lose All"), Plagian Siphon
("The Uninhibited Robot"; "The Planet Machine"),
Dover Spargill's Ghastly Floater, Sabotage on Sulfur Planet, Three
Legged Joe, Four Hundred Blackbirds, Sjambak, Parapsyche, Sail 25
("Gateway to Strangeness"; "Dust of Far Suns").
All Jack Vance titles in the SFGateway use the author's preferred
texts, as restored for the Vance Integral Edition (VIE), an extensive
project masterminded by an international online community of Vance's
admirers. In general, we also use the VIE titles, and have adopted the
arrangement of short story collections to eliminate overlaps. Jack
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
Master, for which he won his first Hugo, Big Planet, The Anome and the
Lyoness sequence.
