Man is a creature whose evolutionary environment has been the open air. His nerves, muscles, and senses have developed across three million years in … - Jack Vance

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Man is a creature whose evolutionary environment has been the open air. His nerves, muscles, and senses have developed across three million years in contiguity with natural earth, crude stone, live wood, wind, and rain. Now this creature is suddenly--on the geologic scale, instantaneously--shifted to an unnatural environment of metal and glass, plastic and plywood, to which his psychic substrata lack all compatibility. The wonder is not that we have so much mental instability but so little.

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About Jack Vance

John Holbrook Vance (August 28, 1916 – May 26, 2013) was an award-winning science fiction and fantasy author, who wrote the four-book Dying Earth series.

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Birth Name: John Holbrook Vance
Alternative Names: John H. Vance
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“My term of penitence is over and tomorrow I leave this dust hole and that sullen beast Arsloe behind—forever, or so I hope. I must take pains, of course, to avoid my previous faults.”
“What did you do?” asked Gaing. “Did you—” and he coarsely suggested an act of sexual perversion committed upon the young daughter of the Chief Magistrate.
“No, nothing like that. What I did was worse. I gave voice to unpopular opinions.”

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