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Tales of the Dying Earth
Jack Vance, like most of his generation, is a veteran of the second world war, during which he started to write. He has continued to be published for over half a century, garnering a worthy collection of awards along the way, including one for his detective fiction. However, his most significant contribution has been to science fiction concepts of the far future and its tropes of planetary romance. In fact, his Tales of the Dying Earth largely defined a subgenre of the distant future. Even Gene Wolfe's Book of the New Sun, produced over 30 years later, has an apparent debt to Vance.
Tales of the Dying Earth is a recently released omnibus which begins with Vance's first published book -- The Dying Earth from 1950 -- and runs through to his last collection of stories from that setting, published in 1984. Over the extensive period in which the stories were produced, the definition of science fiction has changed, so that this omnibus is published in the UK as a "Fantasy Masterwork". However, it is apparent from the American cover that his work is still marketed within the SF mainstream there.
With the weight of opinion supporting Vance and the age of the early parts of this tome, it might seem that actually reading it would be a duty rather than a delight. Thankfully, this is not the case -- Vance has a light but sure touch. To an extent, he is making a virtue of his early inability to produce a complex plot, but the collection of vignettes and episodic stories allows a truly broad canvas.
In any case, the Dying Earth is not a place for great epics. When the bloated red sun may go out at any moment, heroics or malevolence each seem destined to go without reward. The world is a palimpsest and the rich breadth of history, whilst mostly lost or jumbled, is sufficient to ensure that few people of the last days expect to rank with the figures of the past. Nevertheless, the follies and foibles of human nature are inescapable and much of the verbiage is concerned with its wry investigation. Verbiage is used advisedly, as Vance clearly enjoys the richness of the English language and takes pleasure in the opportunity to add to what he finds. Some of his artful extensions have reached out of the book and into our usage -- the dying Earth is the native home of the grue , for example.
The first book, The Dying Earth, is a series of short stories, laying the foundations of a vast and ancient world. The next two, The Eyes of the Overworld and Cugel's Saga make up the bulk of the volume, describing Cugel's accidental journeys across the face of the planet. The final book, Rhialto the Marvellous, focuses on a coterie of magicians. The protagonists are flawed yet have a high opinion of themselves. Cugel often appears unlikely to get away with more than his life but faces both riches and poverty with equanimity. He is almost an archetypal trickster/thief and yet he is a very distinct individual. Rhialto also shows how influential Vance was in defining the idea of the magician, being both intelligent and cunning.
The magic within the book is vast and vague, allowing a reasoned approach to come to any conclusion it chooses -- perhaps deciding that the daemons have an extraterrestrial rather than a supernatural origin. Some of the stories offer the picaresque of a travelogue. Many offer a puzzle of some sort. On occasion, the narration reveals the solution before the character -- usually Cugel -- even notices the problem, allowing the reader to join in the amusement at the players' expense.
In other stories, mostly in the last book, only close reading will uncover something which the central figure considers almost too obvious to even mention. The Dying Earth has such depth and variety that both writer and reader are happy to return time and again to settings old and new. This compleat Tales of the Dying Earth is the essence of reading for pleasure.
You can purchase this book at FatBrain.
It's important to have authors who not only enjoy stretching the limits of the English language but also extending it. Particularly so in the sci-fi genre, where the concepts introduced have a similar effect on our sciences. Were it not for visionary writers such as this one, both our language and our sciences would be in danger of stagnation.
The Dying Earth has had more influence on later fiction than most people realize -- and it was also one of the core influences on the original Dungeons and Dragons system and its later offshoots, as those familiar with D&D will note while they read (Gygax admits this openly). It's also almost unique among this sort of work for having characters who are strangely amoral -- not evil, simply totally egoistic (sic). While many would consider this to be a horrible thing for any work of fiction (and if it were more widely known it would be banned in many circles) it leads to a very thought-provoking read. Having just reread the series (in this reprint) after many years, it was a refreshing mental exercise to consider such an alternate society. Highly recommended.