Jack Vance, described by his peers as “a major genius” and “the greatest living writer of science fiction and fantasy,” has been hidden in plain sight for as long as he has been publishing — six decades and counting. Yes, he has won Hugo, Nebula and World Fantasy awards and has been named a Grand Master by the Science Fiction and Fantasy Writers of America, and he received an Edgar from the Mystery Writers of America, but such honors only help to camouflage him as just another accomplished genre writer. So do the covers of his books, which feature the usual spacecraft, monsters and euphonious place names: Lyonesse, Alastor, Durdane. If you had never read Vance and were browsing a bookstore’s shelf, you might have no particular reason to choose one of his books instead of one next to it by A. E. van Vogt, say, or John Varley. And if you chose one of these alternatives, you would go on your way to the usual thrills with no idea that you had just missed out on encountering one of American literature’s most distinctive and undervalued voices.

That’s how Vance’s fans see it, anyway. Among them are authors who have gained the big paydays and the fame that Vance never enjoyed. Dan Simmons, the best-selling writer of horror and fantasy, described discovering Vance as “a revelation for me, like coming to Proust or Henry James. Suddenly you’re in the deep end of the pool. He gives you glimpses of entire worlds with just perfectly turned language. If he’d been born south of the border, he’d be up for a Nobel Prize.” Michael Chabon, whose distinguished literary reputation allows him to employ popular formulas without being labeled a genre writer, told me: “Jack Vance is the most painful case of all the writers I love who I feel don’t get the credit they deserve. If ‘The Last Castle’ or ‘The Dragon Masters’ had the name Italo Calvino on it, or just a foreign name, it would be received as a profound meditation, but because he’s Jack Vance and published in Amazing Whatever, there’s this insurmountable barrier.”

The barrier has not proved insurmountable to other genre writers — like Ray Bradbury and Elmore Leonard, who have commanded critical respect while moving a lot of satisfyingly familiar product, or like H. P. Lovecraft and Raymond Chandler, pulp writers whose posthumous reputations rose over time until they passed the threshold of highbrow acceptance. But each of these writers, no matter how innovative or poetic, entered the literary mainstream by fully exploiting the attributes of his specialty. Vance, by contrast, has worked entirely within popular forms without paying much heed to their conventions or signature joys. His emphasis falls on the unexpected note, the odd beat. The rocket ships are just ways to get characters from one cogently imagined society to another; he prefers to tersely summarize battle scenes and other such potentially crowd-pleasing set pieces; and he takes greatest pleasure in word-music when exploring humankind’s rich capacity for nastiness. For example: “As he approached the outermost fields he moved cautiously, skulking from tussock to copse, and presently found that which he sought: a peasant turning the dank soil with a mattock. Cugel crept quietly forward, struck down the loon with a gnarled root.” While Vance may play by the rules of whatever genre he works in, his true genre is the Jack Vance story.

His loyal readers are fiercely passionate about him. An inspired crew of them got together in the late 1990s to assemble the Vance Integral Edition, a handsome 45-volume set of the great man’s complete works in definitive editions. Led by Paul Rhoads, an American painter living in France (whose recent critical appraisal of Vance, “Winged Being,” compares him to Oswald Spengler and Jane Austen, among others, and anoints him the anti-Paul Auster), the V.I.E. volunteers painstakingly compared editions and the author’s drafts to restore prose corrupted by publishers. Hard-core Vancians also created Totality (pharesm.org), a Web site where you can search the V.I.E. texts, which is how we know that he has used the word “punctilio” exactly 33 times in his published prose. It was an extraordinary display of true readerly love — a bunch of buffs giving a contemporary genre writer the Shakespearean variorum treatment on their own time.