Asimov's "introductions" to the two Vance stories appearing in
The Hugo Winners, vol. 2 could add some fuel to that speculation. In the first one Asimov talks about how his method when introducing these stories is not to talk about the story (which, as an award-winner, can be assumed to be good, and which is about to be read anyway) but instead about the authors, almost all of whom he knows or has corresponded with so the chances of the anthology including an author he doesn't know and hasn't corresponded with is very small. He then mentions as an aside that he doesn't know and has never corresponded with Jack Vance, but that's okay because he'll get another crack at him later in the book.
For the second story we get this:
Asimov in The Hugo Winners, vol. 2 wrote:Now I must deal with Jack again.
Knowing that I didn't know Jack Vance and that he would appear twice, I was in a terrible quandary. I had to find out something about him; something significant. It was no use determining that he lived in California; and that he was about my age and shape (which is very good in itself, of course). I wanted something more.
What to do? So I picked up my phone and called Robert Silverberg. It meant I would interrupt him at work since his schedule is something like mine but I would be doing him a favor because I understand he fights with his typewriter. (It keeps shrieking at him because it has sensitive keys and he has cold fingers.)
"Tell me about Jack Vance, Bob," I said.
So he did, and I listened and listened, and finally Bob said, "He's strangely uncommunicative in a way. That is, he loves to talk shop, but when I asked him whether he was influenced more by Kafka or by Dunsany, he changed the subject."
I was delighted, for right then I knew that Jack Vance was an all-right guy. I hate those writers who have been terribly influenced by Lord Kafka or Franz Dunsany - big show-offs. Personally, I was influenced by guys like Nat Schachner and Clifford Simak and John W. Campbell, Jr.
Back in the 1930s, you see, I was reading science fiction. A fellow with science fiction writing ambitions should read science fiction. I didn't waste my time reading Proust and Tolstoy and all them other highfalution Greeks.
And neither, I'll bet, did Jack Vance. Good boy, Jack! It's you and I against the world.
It's easy enough to surmise that Jack might not have been particularly thrilled by these twin "introductions," and might see reason decades later to describe ol' Isaac to an interviewer as a jackass or show-off.
As for the other one, I really have no idea, and no way of guessing. Ellison is of course a natural (seeing as how he
is both a jackass and a show-off). Heinlein could be another, since both his worldview and writing style seem pretty distant from Vance's (which, in the Heinleinian scheme of the universe must mean that Vance is objectively wrong on both counts and therefore deserving of scorn and contempt). I don't know enough about the reputed personalities of other SF luminaries to even be able to make guesses.
