John Holbrook Vance

John Holbrook Vance (b. August 28, 1916) is an American fantasy and science fiction author. He writes under his own name and the pseudonyms Jack Vance, John Holbrook, Ellery Queen, Alan Wade, Peter Held, and John van See. He won Hugo Awards in 1963 (for The Dragon Masters) and 1967 (for The Last Castle), a Nebula Award in 1966 (also for The Last Castle), a Jupiter Award in 1975, and the World Fantasy Award in 1990.

He has written over sixty books, a number with a common mythos, notably the Dying Earth series (seven novels, 1950-84), the Demon Princes (five novels, 1964-81), the Tschai series (five novels, 1968-84) and five or so other series. An exhaustive list of his works can be found at http://www.jackvance.com/.

The model of spellcasting introduced in The Dying Earth[?], where a spellcaster may only pack a certain number of spells into memory, depending on their power, was the very influential inspiration of the spellcasting rules for many fantasy role-playing games such as the seminal Dungeons and Dragons.

An effort is being made by fans of his to publish all his works, with fully revised texts, in the Integral Edition. For more information on this project, see http://www.vanceintegral.com/. The first batch of books has been printed already, as of May 2003.