ship to Coralyne and take revenge on the Basics? He walked around to stand under the spire which had housed his apartments, and by some strange freak of chance came upon a rounded fragment of yellow marble.
Weighing this in his palm he looked up into the sky where Coralyne already twinkled red, and tried to bring order to his mind.
The Banbeck folk had emerged from the deep tunnels. Phade the minstrel-maiden came to find him. 'What a terrible day,' she murmured. 'What awful events; what a great victory.'
Joaz tossed the bit of yellow marble back into the rubble. 'I feel much the same way. And where it all ends, no one knows less than I.'
John Holbrook Vance
The author was born in 1916 and educated at the University of California, first as a mining engineer, then majoring in physics and finally in journalism. During the 1940s and 1950s, he contributed widely to sf and fantasy magazines. His first novel, 'The Dying Earth', was published in 1950 to great acclaim. Since then he has won both of sf's most coveted trophies, the Hugo and Nebula awards; he has also won an Edgar Award for his mystery novel 'The Man in the Cage'. He lives in California in a house he designed.
