Customer Reviews

Tales of the Dying Earth: Including 'The Dying Earth,' 'The Eyes of the Overworld,' 'Cugel's Saga,' and 'Rhialto the Marvellous'

5 star:		(23)
4 star:		(5)
3 star:		(1)
2 star:		(3)
1 star:		(0)

 

 

Jack Vance, who is possibly a nonagenarian, began writing for the pulps in the 1940s, just after the war -- mostly science fiction, but other genres as well. He is plausibly the successor of Leigh Brackett, one of the supreme practitioners of the subgenre known as planetary romance. But Vance is a bigger talent. Brackett's forte was the long short-story or novella, sometimes in cycles, adding up to an episodic longer tale. Vance used a bigger canvass than Brackett. The title of one of his early significant tales is, indeed, "Big Planet." Vance created not only whoe societies, but whole world jostling with distinc societies. "Tales of Dying Earth" are set, as the title suggests, on a far-futural earth in the sidereal decadence of the solar system. The sun has cooled; the human race has aged -- into a kind of senility. The whole planet has lapsed into a new feudalism and magic, perhaps the remnants of a previous superscience, is once again part of the technical repertory of mankind. The main character is a picaroon, in the mold of the protagonists in Quevedo and the Spanish Sevententh Century writers. He is a would-be master magician whose spells generally go disastrously wrong. The plot, such as it is, is not very important. What holds the reader's interest is the richly imagined background of weird, end-of-time societies. The action is semi-comic, but the atmosphere is eery, and this makes for a pquant mixture. Call it Lazarillo de Torres meets Oswald Spengler. Recommended.

A long-time admirer of Vance's works, I have little to add to the praise of other reviewers. His style is his single best quality: elegant, dry, amusing. The purple passages of "The Dying Earth," while beautiful and stylistically meaningful in themselves (decadent prose for a decadent Earth), begin to give way in the book's last tale to the livelier, witty picaresque that becomes Vance's hallmark in the Cugel books, in "Rhialto," and in his Lyonesse trilogy. And, not sufficiently mentioned, Vance can be funny as hell, especially in the later works.

There are some interesting criticisms on this site, some with little merit. If you don't like short stories, or if the only acceptable prose is modeled on Hammett and Hemingway, then don't expect to like Vance. It helps to be an aesthete, or wish you were one.

And as for the lack of continuity in the Cugel stories, (1) they were originally published in magazines, not composed as a single narrative, and (2) the picaresque is, just about by definition, one damn thing after another. Vance loves strangeness for its own sake, weird cultures, bizarre customs. He has a touch of the Enlightenment-era anthropologist about him: with so many diverse ways of living, can we say that any one is the "right" way? The picaresque plots let him do what he does best, move from village to village (or, in his SF, planet to planet) and invent something new every time.

The misogyny complaint is the most accurate criticism that I see here. Vance is a conservative in many ways, in a classical sense rather than in the bible-thumping American sense. (Note the laissez-faire attitude to politics & religion in the Lyonesse books.) Men are men, women are women, and that's it. Any homosexual in his books is a degenerate villain. Cugel certainly is brutal to the women he meets in "The Eyes of the Overworld," though since he's a cutthroat and a scoundrel in any event, that's not to be wondered at.

But characters like T'sais in "The Dying Earth" show the promise of a broader perspective, and for whatever reason-the 20th century rubbing off on him, perhaps-Vance has more sympathetic females in his later works, including of course Suldrun, Glyneth, and Madouc in the Lyonesse books. The case of Cugel is interesting: he kidnaps and, effectively, rapes Soldinck's comely 3 daughters in "Cugel's Saga," but when their trick on him is revealed, they don't miss the opportunity to scoff at his erotic inadequacies.

As for Rhialto, he's a ladies' man, and he knows it. The rescued princess in "Fader's Waft" is treated as a free agent, albeit one who finds R. charming & accepts his advances. As for the tale of the Murthe, let's just say I found it a tad obnoxious *before* I got married, and now find it actually kind of sweet. Whether that tells something about Vance or just about me, how can I say?

Vance will never be a feminist (when Glyneth has kids, she drops off the map, and so on), but I think "misogyny" is too strong.

There is something unusual about Jack Vance which reminds me of two of my other favorite writers, Philip K Dick and Stanislaw Lem. That is the conceit of hiding subtle, and nuanced social commentary beneath a veneer of light escapism. Lem, writing from behind the iron curtain, wrote brilliantly clever Robot fairy tales with sly underlying critiques of power and human folly. Those who know Philip K Dick's work also know how much biting wit he hid behind what seem superficially goofy sci fi tales.

I'm starting to realise Vance was doing much the same thing. The first time I read the Dying Earth (the original anthology of short stories) was when I found it on a bookshelf as a young teenager. I found the stories entertaining at the time, with hints of genius, but ultimately they seemed like nothing more or less than escapism, of the kind of fantasy found in the dungeons and dragons games I was into back then (no coincidence, Vance was a key inspiration for that game, for better or worse), albiet perhaps the best possible example of the genre I had encountered.

As I ran into the other Dying Earth novels over the years, and read them again and again, I think I originally had the same reaction many other people did. I was a little put off at first by the grandiose words and odd use of language (I had to read the books with a dictoinary by my side) the flowery dialogue, the 'thin' unlikely plot. But early on I recognized something about it that was unique.

Over the years, as I vorcaciously absorbed basically everything written in the Fantasy and Sci Fi Genres, it was Vance and one or two others that stuck with me. Returning again and again to the Dying Earth books in particular, it was the small things about them which increasingly struck me as more than merely clever and amusing... the ironic prose, the delightful come-uppances, the ruthless turn-abouts, the put downs and verbal contests. As so much else fell by the wayside, the words of Jack Vance stayed with me.

As I grew older and began to experience people from all walks of life, some of these characters and situations resonated still more. It struck me, that what had seemed like haphazard or almost random human situations in those stories were actually archetypes of many dilemmas in the human condition, some of which I had never seen expressed as clearly anywhere else. The self serving morality, the technical obfuscation, the distorted spirituality... the facility of man to delude himself. These traits shine through from the characters in the books, and I recognized them more and more often in real life. How many times have I encountered the rationaization of the "laws of Equivalency" in real life, or felt the pang of self doubt that cugel does just as he realises he's been duped yet again...

Of couse, while amusing, cugel is a fairly awful person, (though he seems to evolve ethically somewhat by the end of the second novel, finally learning something about the futility of revenge) . I think in general thinking of cugel as any kind of literal moral guide is silly. Similarly, those reviewers who thought the Murthe novella was 'mysogynisitc' miss the point. It is a swiftian parody of mans failure to understand, or even be willing to try to understand women. There is one hilarious passage where the learned Wizards discuss a profound tome purported to explain everything understood about the nature of woman at the very end of history, wherin the female genius is compared to a river which occasionally overflows it's banks. The only reccomended solution is to ride it out with 'stout boat of high freeboard'. My girlfriend found this hilarious.

Yes, cugel is a lout and a bufoon. In a sense, he reminds me of an anti-heroic variation of Don Quixote. While Don Quixote's grandiose schemes of glory and noble chivalry fall through, Cugel's equally grandiose schemes of revenge and domination over his enemies also invariably fail, in both cases causing great chaos for those around them. Cugel of course lives in an even more cynical time at the very end of the world. A time where there ARE wizards and dragons and giants, but they are as petty and manipulative as the peasants and bandits faced by Quixote. As cugel travels from one scene to another, we are treated to a lurid landscape of all the myriad forms that human self delusion and inspired stupidity can take. Even as Cervantes uses the backdrop of Don Quixote's travels to lampoon 16th century Spain, Vance uses cugel's travels across the Dying Earth to do the same thing to all of humanity, from the very beginning of time to the day the sun winks out of existence.

Ultimately, not just the protagonist cugel, but all of the characters in the Dying earth novels have one thing in common: they are all fools. Even at the very end of history, we have learned nothing except perhaps, a better vocabulary. I think this is something Vance is telling us about ourselves.

One thing I can promise you about the Dying Earth, the laughs do come harder and longer with every read, even if you feel to some degree as if you are laughing at yourself.

DB

An ingenious, creative masterpiece.
Jack Vance's writing style is unparalleled. His rogue character, 'Cugel the Clever', is one of the most hillarious ever to grace the world of fantasy...

What I found wonderful about these stories and most of Jack Vance's work in general, is that inspite of the bleakness of the situation (The constant death gasps of the Dying Sun), the cynicism of the times, Vance's hero's and heroines march on, not perky and euphoric, but determined that life will be better or that they can make it better. The other classic, a Hugo winner in fact, The Last Castle the protagonists free the slaves in spite of the fact that it means the end of their plush lifestyle. Vance's tenacity if not optimism is wonderful.

In the ancient Earth's Last Days, even the collected remnants of mankind's Forgotten Lore will make a man into a Magician King. My all time favorite fictional work. Jack is the master of Science Fantasy and romantic sci-fi adventure. Awesome.

If you can't judge a book by its cover, well, that's darn poor graphic design if you ask me, and the cover to this collection of fantasy novels looks like the Starship Enterprise or something. It has literally nothing to do with the book's contents. Ignore it. Ok, that's the only way anybody could have possibly have messed up this book, because what matters -- all the words and stories and stuff inside, you know, that Jack Vance wrote -- is classic by any standard. If you are any kind of fantasy reader and haven't read this, you have no excuse whatsoever for not dropping everything and doing so right now. No, I take that back. There is one possible excuse. If you haven't read Vance's equally classic Lyonesse books, I guess you might also drop everything and read them first, then come back to Tales of the Dying Earth. Six of one, half dozen of the other. Hey! Why are you still bothering with this review? You are wasting valuable seconds that could be spent procuring a copy of Tales of the Dying Earth! Go to it!

Great escapist fiction. "The Dying Earth" is fascinating. The Cugel stories are fascinating as well, and have some of the funniest moments in fantasy. "Rhialto the Marvelous" isn't as good as the first three parts, but it's still entertaining. If you've never read Jack Vance, this is the place to start.

All praise TOR books for reprinting this collection of Dying Earth - it will save Vance lovers the bother of searching used bookstores for these fantasy gems. As other reviewers have stated, this is actually four books in one, and each is highly entertaining. Vance is one of the most original fantasy and science fiction writers of all time, and these books are representative of his seemingly inexhaustible imagination.

If you enjoy escapist fantasy, you should read Vance's Tales of the Dying Earth. The stories are light-hearted, and not what I would think of as serious literature. However, for sheer entertainment value, they can't be beat.