Vancian

English

Alternative forms

• Vancean

Etymology

From Vance +‎ -ian.

Adjective

Vancian (comparative more Vancian, superlative most Vancian)

1. (literature) Of or relating to Jack Vance (1916–2013), American writer of mystery, fantasy, and science fiction stories.
   • 2016, Tom Shippey, ““People are Plastic”: Jack Vance and the Dilemma of Cultural Relativism”, in Hard Reading: Learning from Science Fiction, Liverpool: Liverpool University Press, →ISBN, →JSTOR, page 111:

     Vance has, in short, more than any other science fiction writer ‘colonised’ the entirely new imaginative space created by the nineteenth- and twentieth-century science of anthropology, […] Is it merely local colour? To answer that, one has to note, beneath the constant Vancean surface of strange ‘xenography’,⁸ the recurrent Vancean theme of human ‘plasticity’.

Derived terms

• Vancian magic