Tales of the Dying Earth: The Dying Earth/The Eyes of the Overworld/Cugel's Saga/Rhialto the Marvellous

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Rhialto the Marvellous (The Dying Earth #1-4 omnibus)

4.16 of 5 stars 4.16 · rating details · 1,813 ratings · 160 reviews

Jack Vance is one of the most remarkable talents to ever grace the world of science fiction. His unique, stylish voice has been beloved by generations of readers. One of his enduring classics is his 1964 novel, The Dying Earth, and its sequels--a fascinating, baroque tale set on a far-future Earth, under a giant red sun that is soon to go out forever.

This omnibus volume co...more

Paperback, 741 pages

Published December 1st 2000 by Orb Books (first published 2000)

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Jun 23, 2011 Dan Schwent rated it 4 of 5 stars

Shelves: birhday-2010, pulp, sf, fantasy, 2010

Earth is on its last leg. The sun is a red giant, the moon has vanished, and magic has returned.

This omnibus includes the following four books:
The Dying Earth: The Dying Earth is a collection of linked short stories. And here they are:
Turjan of Miir: Turjan, a wizard, seeks the help of Pandelume, another wizard, in creating artificial life. Turjuan is a good intro to the Dying Earth. The basics of the setting are covered and it sets the tone for the rest of the short stories. The story itself is...more

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Jul 08, 2011 Matt rated it 5 of 5 stars

Shelves: fiction

Awesome. Especially the volumes that tell of Cugel and his exploits. Compare him to Tom Jones or Barry Lyndon, but in a surreal fantasy setting on our own world, surrounded by crumbled civilizations and overlooked by a sun that could blink out any any moment.

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Mar 29, 2012 Enric rated it 5 of 5 stars · review of another edition

Shelves: high-fantasy

This is possibly one of the best fantasy series ever written.

It is a genre-trespassing epic from the hand of the very master world builder: Mr John Holbrook Vance himself.

In this series he creates a gloomy decaying world in the extremely distant future including traits from science fiction (some technically advanced cities appear in some chapters), high fantasy but also from classical fantasy, so that it is indeed somewhat difficult to place into a specific sub genre.

The stories where original...more

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Jun 11, 2010 Chris Youngblood rated it 3 of 5 stars · review of another edition

Shelves: fantasy, dystopium, science-fiction, reviewed, owned

I guess Jack Vance thinks everyone in the far, far future is a sociopath. :)

If the protagonists (please note I don't use the phrase 'good guys') aren't abandoning their party mates at the drop of a hat, bargaining for their lives with the lives of others, killing or abandoning weaker or vulnerable individuals to survive, or otherwise acting entirely in their own interests, they're probably asleep, and dreaming of ways to act entirely within their own interests.

That being said, I have to give poi...more

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Feb 17, 2010 Amanda marked it as to-read-have-already

Shelves: fant-mstrwrk-series

SO....After having this on my wishlist for over a year and thinking i'm getting it in the mail... I receive a book today that's from the person whose supposed to be sending it to me and i open the package up and...the moron sent me the wrong book!! Instead of Tales of the Dying Earth, i receive My Horizontal Life: A Collection of One-Night Stands by Chelsea Handler!! WTF! How dif. are those two books... i mean come on people, get with it. The sad thing is, this is the 4th time this has happened...more

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Apr 29, 2013 Jonathan rated it 4 of 5 stars

The problem with many kinds of works of real genius is that they live somewhere on the edge of human rhetorical and cognitive space: if a person comes up with something truly novel, then its very novelty makes it difficult to talk about. This problem, as it pertains to Tales of the Dying Earth, is exacerbated by the resemblance, however superficial, that these stories bear to less interesting kinds of literature, and the tendency of the writing to avoid, so to speak, direct eye contact.

This part...more The problem with many kinds of works of real genius is that they live somewhere on the edge of human rhetorical and cognitive space: if a person comes up with something truly novel, then its very novelty makes it difficult to talk about. This problem, as it pertains to Tales of the Dying Earth, is exacerbated by the resemblance, however superficial, that these stories bear to less interesting kinds of literature, and the tendency of the writing to avoid, so to speak, direct eye contact.

This particular collection of Jack Vance's work is also burdened by several short stories which precede the main events, two novellas about Cugel the Clever, which don't stand well on their own.

The bulk of this book consists of `The Eyes of the Overworld` and `Cugel's Saga`, two stories which follow the fortunes and misfortunes (mostly the latter) of Cugel, a man of "many vicissitudes" as he cons his way across the surreal landscape of The Dying Earth, which we gather to be our planet, eons in the future. Nihilism suffuses both novels, especially the first: everyone is criminal, but laconic in their criminality, and even the structure of the plot has an uncanny obsession with the immediate, with the narrative almost reflexively picaresque. Characters sometimes pause, mid swindle, to gaze up at the sun, which has momentarily gone out, only to resume their petty dealings when it sputters back to life. What emerges from all this is a subtle, but canny, sketch of the obstinacy of the human will to collapse under even the most powerful assaults of the universe on the meaningfulness of action.

Cugel's Saga is more upbeat in this vein, becoming a series of almost meditative episodes where Cugel sometimes even manages to find a kind of pleasure in work and the mere contemplation of the bizarre landscapes of a world at its very end.

Vance has a facility for language which is used strangely, if admirably, throughout the book. The dialog is a series of highly formal, sly backhanded insults, and there is a real sense of strange presence to the land and landscapes.

After we spend enough time with Cugel, the other stories in this volume suddenly make more sense as strange, sad stories of the human condition.

In short, I recommend giving these books a read.

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Feb 11, 2013 sologdin rated it 2 of 5 stars

Shelves: speculative

Nutshell: assorted losers use the always already imminent destruction of the Earth as an excuse for grave breaches of sense & decency; sadly, the destruction of this Earth is not presented herein.

Though the volume designates a metonym by which the setting stands for a particular subgenre, the setting here is incidental rather than intrinsic to the narratives; the setting predominates conceptually for readers, but is really mere window-dressing for the actual stories. By contrast, the dying o...more

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Dec 16, 2012 Tim Hicks rated it 5 of 5 stars

Shelves: fantasy

Well, gosh, this is just so intelligent and effortlessly written and dryly funny and a joy to read. Such a change from the dreck coming out of the tetralogy factories in 600-page volumes. (Yes, a very few of these are actually good - but few.)

When I criticize books here, it's because they show so badly when compared to the work of a true professional like Vance.

You might not care for his dry, low-key sense of humour. Others have mentioned that everyone is a Vance story is out to swindle everyon...more

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Oct 28, 2012 Andy rated it 4 of 5 stars

A collection of Jack Vance's 4 books on a barely recognizable earth that likely inspired Clarke's proclamation that 'any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic.' Vance is a good writer with a talent for pithy and grandiloquent banter among the 'magicians' of the far future who speak in a quasi-victorian dialect and tend to suffer from extreme amoralism.

The best parts are the middle two books - picaresques of an antihero named Cugel who travels from village to village ta...more

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Oct 24, 2012 Smcleish rated it 4 of 5 stars · review of another edition

Originally published on my blog here in February 2001.

The Dying Earth

Jack Vance's debut is something of a fantasy classic, and was a big influence on writers like Michael Moorcock. Although described as a novel in the list of Vance's works at the front of his books, it is really a collection of linked short stories.

The links are more to do with setting and characters than shared plot elements, and some even contradict others (as dead characters live again, for example). The setting is most impor...more

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Apr 18, 2012 Jean-marcel rated it 5 of 5 stars

Sometime in my teen years I all but stopped reading fantasy, and this was because I was only familiar with the dozens of modern purveyors, all of whom I felt were just trying to ape Tolkien in the most awkward and pandering way. I hadn't yet realised that Tolkien had many contemporaries who had their own voices, styles and abilities, who could have taken the genre in wholly different directions had they been as well known. One day, I happened upon the first volume of the Dying Earth tales, and,...more Sometime in my teen years I all but stopped reading fantasy, and this was because I was only familiar with the dozens of modern purveyors, all of whom I felt were just trying to ape Tolkien in the most awkward and pandering way. I hadn't yet realised that Tolkien had many contemporaries who had their own voices, styles and abilities, who could have taken the genre in wholly different directions had they been as well known. One day, I happened upon the first volume of the Dying Earth tales, and, vaguely remembering having read something about him being a science fiction writer in the past, decided to give it a try. Within a few pages, I was completely drawn in, and there was simply no escape for me. What accomplished this, without doubt, was Vance's unparalleled wit and the effortless beauty of his grandiloquent prose. I believe at the time I was already familiar with the decadent fantasies of Clark Ashton Smith, and with Vance's Dying Earth I was much reminded of the stories of lonely Zothique, the last continent on an Earth at the end of its natural life. Vance occasionally allows himself to become incredibly unrestrained, such as in the early battle of two wizards, and it was this sense of wildness and dreamy delirium that utterly won me over with the early Dying Earth tales. They read like the myths of some far-flung, decadent and ancient culture, where magic and science are the same thing and both spoken of with equal wonder. There's a mad logic underpinning everything and the setting is as alive and potent as in something like peake's Gormenghast. Reading this, my sense of the otherworldly and alien was kindled to such an extent that there was simply no way I wasn't going to track down everything else by the man, and he became a favourite author, even if most of his other work doesn't have quite this feeling of the fantastic and strange about it.

This omnibus volume is the perfect way to experience everything about the Dying Earth. In the first set of published stories, one becomes familiar with the setting, and, if you like, the "mythology" and its function. Here the characters are not so important, but I aappreciate the way Vance uses brief mentions of characters or situations from one story to lead into the next, where that character or situation will tend to be the element of focus. I think this is particularly well handled with liane the Wayfarer, who proves himself to be an utter bastard in his brief and accessory role in one story only to appear to escape scott-free, and then in the next tale our attention centres wholly on him and we learn of his eventual fate.

The second and third books deal with the exploits of "Cugel the Clever", so named by the man himself, which is a neat trick because he's really not so clever at all. It's here that Vance's love of the absurd and picaresque really comes out, and we're given rapier-sharp humour and dry wit that's sometimes extraordinarily clever and sometimes just a bit ribald and often elicited laughs from me. Some of the jokes might even go over your head if you don't have a dictionary handy, and some of them only make sense after they're repeated a few times (I particularly like the bit about the Blue Concentrate!). Cugel's misadventures are classic stuff, and these two books make up the "novel" part of the series and form a full, coherent narrative. I groaned and laughed with delight when at the end of Eyes of the Overworld it transpires that Cugel basically has to cross the world all over again because of a stupid mistake, and so he does this, but travelling in the opposite direction in the next book. A cool thing if you ask me is that these stories are basically just a conceit for Vance to take us all over his Dying Earth, so we can meet an unbelievable host of bizarre characters, visit dozens of strange places with even wilder customs, and learn how it is that Vance manages to create interesting quirky societies all as though it were nothing at all to him. There were times when I just stopped reading for a bit and shouted aloud, "just how does he dream up all this stuff?" They're basically travel books in a fictional universe told more-or-less from the perspective of a total scoundrel who tries to get the upper hand in every dealing but usually ends up with the short end, even if he never entirely realises it. I was sometimes reminded of Gulliver's Travels, or Candide, which is high praise indeed.

Finally, the last book in the series, Rhialto the marvelous, is all about the arch magicians of the Dying Earth: their rivalries, foibles, travails, and the various tools at their disposal. I enjoyed reading about their antics, and Vance takes great care in explaining here how magic really works in this universe, without making it at all boring and tedious, which is quite a feat. However, I feel like he must have been having some bad times while writing this one, because the sense of justice throughout is, to put it mildly, pretty skewed, and the ending kind of left a bad taste in my mouth. I'm sure this was deliberate, and maybe Vance was getting more cynical in his older years, but the tone doesn't quite seem to connect with the rest of the series, and the last story in particular is a bit of a downer...strange, me saying this, as I tend to be attracted to "dark and doomful", but this was just kind of bloodyminded. Still, Rhialto is a joy to read and contains some of Vance's most flamboyant prose.

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Mar 31, 2012 Charles Dee Mitchell rated it 3 of 5 stars

I am not by nature a fantasy reader. I am not intrigued by magic or wowed fantastic creatures; I find pseudo-medieval settings or language off putting; and, the sexism in anything written before about 1985 is awkward. So I picked up Jack Vance with low expectations, knowing that he had earned his Grand Master status with the SFWA in 1997 at the age of 81, but that much of his writing, and in particular the group of writings I had chosen, were firmly placed in the realm of fantasy rather than SF....more I am not by nature a fantasy reader. I am not intrigued by magic or wowed fantastic creatures; I find pseudo-medieval settings or language off putting; and, the sexism in anything written before about 1985 is awkward. So I picked up Jack Vance with low expectations, knowing that he had earned his Grand Master status with the SFWA in 1997 at the age of 81, but that much of his writing, and in particular the group of writings I had chosen, were firmly placed in the realm of fantasy rather than SF. (Full disclosure: I have read only the first two of the four books in this collection.)

That said, I realized just a few pages into the first story ofThe Dying Earth that here was a real storyteller. On an earth where its few inhabitants realize that their sun is dying and where magic has replaced science as the highest pursuit of mankind, Vance zips his characters from continent to continent, delights in their peccadilloes and blunders, and gleefully concocts for them personalities riddled with the baser range of human qualities. Most of them I wouldn't trust as far as I could throw them, but with the right bit of runic magic I could throw them into another universe or a million years back in time.

Magic, as a narrative device, is usually an exercise in adolescent wish-fulfillment. Why else do ten-year-old boys ask for magic kits for their birthdays? There is plenty of that here, along with that other adolescent standby -- beautiful women in diaphanous gowns; but, Vance has a sardonic approach to the dark arts. Unlike science, magic is a closed system. Its mysteries are available only to the few and must be jealously guarded. The desire to attain greater magic makes fools of most of his characters and can cost them their lives.

The Eyes of the Overworld is a series of stories that link together and form an entertaining picaresque novel. Our hero, Cugel, is one of Vance's finest creations. He is known as Cugel the Clever, although that epithet is certainly self-assigned. Cugel is wily and gets away with most everything he tries, but it is rare that cleverness is the quality that saves his days. Dumb luck is often on his side and his casual regard for the lives of others comes in handy. Vance's stories are among the most lightheartedly bloodthirsty I have ever read. Individuals or entire villages can be struck down thanks to Cugel's machinations, and the mass deaths are all part of a day's work. His outrageous actions serve an egotism crystalline in its purity. In one scene, Cugel trades a princess, whose kingdom he has just ruined, to bandits. In exchange he receives directions, probably not trustworthy, to his next destination.

One piece of magic in Vance's own possession must be a spell that spontaneously generates an endless supply of silly names for people, places, food items, and just about everything else in his far future world. I quickly tire of unpronounceable names, but Vance has a real flair for it. He reels them off in lists that it would take me days to dream up, and mine would never be as fun as Vance's. Monty Python may have learned a thing or two from this particular Grand Master.(less)

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Feb 16, 2011 Tim S. rated it 4 of 5 stars

Shelves: fiction

Two good books and two somewhat bland ones. The original Dying Earth novel is so average you may actually want to skip it altogether or least read it last. It’s a collection of rather pointless meandering fantasy stories involving one note (if that) characters by a young writer just learning the craft. Rhialto is somewhat better, coming as it did later in Vance's career, but still manages little in the way of actual charm.

The Cugel works, however, are probably some of the cleverest fantasy stori...more

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Jul 07, 2010 Hugo rated it 4 of 5 stars · review of another edition

Shelves: dying-earth, fantasy, sci-fi

This is a collection of Jack Vance's Dying Earth stories, written between 1950 and 1984, and as such it shows different levels of quality. The starting stories, in the section The Dying Earth are the original ones, written for magazines and all independent (although with some returning characters), while the next two sections (Eyes of the Overworld and Cugel's Saga) features Cugel as the main protagonist. As such, he comes off as fairly unsympathetic - he is vain, greedy and egoistic - but never...more

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Oct 03, 2012 Neale rated it 4 of 5 stars

Shelves: science-fiction-and-fantasy

Jack Vance’s ‘Dying Earth’ series is one of the most outrageous, most purely enjoyable works of fantastic fiction. Starting fairly simply, with the fable-like, rather primitive stories of ‘The Dying Earth’, the series really hits its stride with the appearance of Cugel, Vance’s archetypal shifty rogue. ‘Eyes of the Overworld’ and its later sequel, ‘Cugel’s Saga’, are hilarious examples of Vance virtually parodying himself: turning all his trademark quirks of style up to 11 to tell a bunch of pic...more

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Mar 29, 2012 Bob rated it 5 of 5 stars

Shelves: jack-vance, six-stars

TALES OF THE DYING EARTH by Jack Vance

Set on a far-future Earth, under a giant red sun that is soon to go out forever, The Dying Earth and its sequels comprise one of the most powerful fantasy concepts in the history of the genre.
Within these pages you will meet lovely lost women, wizards of every shade of eccentricity, melancholy deodands (who feed on human flesh), and the twk-men (who ride dragonflies and trade information for salt). Each being is morally ambiguous: The evil are charming, the...more

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Jan 18, 2013 Marsha rated it 2 of 5 stars

Shelves: fantasy, literature-fiction, science-fiction-speculative-fiction, romance, supernatural, anthology-short-stories

Set on an Earth that is witnessing the dying of the sun, the stories in this book are so rich in description that they stagger the imagination. Whether Mr. Vance describes indigenous people, florae and faunae, rivers, mansions, huts, mountains, deserts or forests, he does so in exquisite detail.

The main part of this tome, itself comprised of four separate novels, deals with the travels of Cugel the Clever. In describing the peregrinations of this protagonist, we are taken on a far-reaching jour...more Set on an Earth that is witnessing the dying of the sun, the stories in this book are so rich in description that they stagger the imagination. Whether Mr. Vance describes indigenous people, florae and faunae, rivers, mansions, huts, mountains, deserts or forests, he does so in exquisite detail.

The main part of this tome, itself comprised of four separate novels, deals with the travels of Cugel the Clever. In describing the peregrinations of this protagonist, we are taken on a far-reaching journey of action, adventure, magic and skullduggery as the irrepressible rogue tumbles into and out of danger, missing death often by the skin of his teeth. Like Sinbad the Sailor, he gains and loses wealth with little purpose in his life save the next score or getting revenge on Iucounu the Laughing Magician whose demands have sentenced (or doomed) him to a wandering life.

Cugel is neither hero nor savior. He’s not on a mission or quest. He’s a thoroughly selfish, amoral rascal, equally given to scheming, lies, assault, rape, murder or theft as the moment takes him. However, he always manages to land on his feet. In spite of his amoral nature, Mr. Vance makes him rather engaging.

Where Mr. Vance fails is due in large part in creating noteworthy female characterizations. Most of his women are whiny, bitter, hostile or shrewish. When women of power exist, like Llorio the Murthe, they are seen as obstacles to be overcome, their lives as being subject to and subjugated by the whims and desires of men. If they are beautiful, the men seek nothing more than to bed them. If they are plain or ugly, they have little conversation besides the superficial.

This diminution of the female sex is baffling. It is acceptable for the first novel, which was penned in the 1950s; women in fantasy and science fiction were given short shrift then, being little more than beautiful adjuncts to muscle-bound heroes. But the latter novels in this volume were written in the 1980s. Surely he could have managed a wider scope to his female characterizations by then, given the vast social changes women achieved through the decades. All this being the case, I cannot recommend this book as wholeheartedly as I would like.
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Jan 08, 2011 Adam Calhoun rated it 5 of 5 stars

Shelves: all-time-all-stars

I got this book a year ago, partly because I kept hearing how this 'Vance' character was a master fantasy writer that I had somehow missed, and partly because it followed one of my rules for purchasing books (if it has a wizard or a spaceship on the cover, buy it!). The moment I started reading the first novel in this book, I knew Jack Vance was something special. It took me a year to read it because the writing was so good, I wanted to stretch out how long I could read it for the first time. Of...more

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Feb 23, 2009 Todd rated it 2 of 5 stars · review of another edition

Tales of the Dying Earth is an omnibus of four books. I have only completed the first book, The Dying Earth , and am disinclined to read the rest.

The Dying Earth is a collection of loosely-connected short stories, each a quest involving monsters, magic and predictably beautiful women. There are rich descriptive passages, but, as with so much fantasy, psychology and social topography are naively simplistic. The stories contain some exciting flashes of imagination, but much also is familiar. It m...more

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Jun 17, 2009 Karlo rated it 2 of 5 stars

I'm not familiar with Vance or his writing beyond his semi-regular name dropping by recent writers of post-apocalyptic fiction. This is an omnibus of 4 of his novels written over 30+ years. The books are divided into short stories all taking place somewhere in the far future of earth; so far in the future that the sun is now weak, red, and may shortly go out. Magic and Science both coexist, and the weight of history is so heavy that any forest or valley may lead to fantastical discovery.

I found...more

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Feb 29, 2012 Cheezstk rated it 2 of 5 stars

Shelves: read-2012

It felt like this was one of those instances where you read a book that feels like such a cliche... because it was the book that created the cliches in the first place. If I recall, Vance was the guy who came up with the basis for the D&D system of magic, where you memorize X number of spells a day out of a book. There are also Ioun stones. So the stories are interesting from a historical perspective, if nothing else.

As a series of stories, these were not my favorites. The main characters a...more

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Apr 09, 2013 Chris Garner rated it 4 of 5 stars

If you remember the original AD&D Dungeon Masters Guide from the 80s and wondered where Gary Gygax got his purple prose style from, look no further. This is basically a set of 4 novellas set in Vance's "Dying Earth" setting, which is quasi-medieval fantasy set in Earth's far, far future, dying days. It's a rich background, the stories are wildly inventive and rather tongue-in-cheek (although not outright comic like Terry Pratchet or Douglas Adams). Overworld, Cugel's Saga, and Rhialto are pr...more

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May 13, 2012 Brian rated it 4 of 5 stars

This represents four volumes combined into one. All are set in the Dying Earth, our own planet in the unimaginably distant future where the sun is dying, but not yet dead. The heart of the work is the saga of Cugel the Clever, which occupies the two middle books. Cugel is a selfish, heartless, greedy, lazy, lustful ne'er-do-well whose efforts to get rich quick invariably bring him - and everyone he meets - to the brink of ruin. They are marvelous works of clever wordplay, baroque vocabularies, a...more

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Jul 28, 2012 Morgan rated it 4 of 5 stars

This is a nice collection of some pretty stellar work. It has all you need (it ignores the Dying Earth pieces by other authors). It is a pretty substantial tome to lug around, and while at times I'd wished that I'd carried these books around individually, I likely wouldn't have gotten to Rhialto the Marvellous, my favorite book of the four, had it not come in one piece.

I think that these stories are brilliant compressions of insane ideas and experiments in language. Despite the fact that everyth...more

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Dec 14, 2009 Moonglum rated it 5 of 5 stars

Shelves: science-fantasy, fantasy

All of the dying earth stories in one volume!

I love Jack Vance for many, many reasons-- his influence on Dungeons and Dragons, the detached, awesomely witty, elegant, and matter of fact conversations that his characters engage in, that his writing is probably one of the reasons that I received such high verbal scores on the various standardized tests that I have had to take over the years...

What I found interesting about re-reading the dying earth stories was that I liked Cugel a lot more than...more

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Apr 01, 2011 Mike rated it 5 of 5 stars

Shelves: fantasy

Can't believe I never read these before. Actually I read a couple of the stories that were included in first book ("The dying earth") but all four books here are extremely good. The first is really a collection of short stories that were edited into a continuous novel, although relatively few characters appear in more than one "chapter". The first book is more straightforward sword & sorcery/science fantasy type stuff, with many bizarre settings and characters. The next two books, "The eyes...more

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Aug 22, 2009 Nick rated it 5 of 5 stars

I had dimly heard of Jack Vance as one of the great secrets of the Sci-Fi world, and with a vacation on hand and a beach to read on, I took a chance with a half-dozen of what were recommended as his best. For the most part, Vance amply fulfills the expectations created by all those other authors who cite him as a master. The Tales of the Dying Earth are set eons hence when our sun is dying, and our magicians have dwindled away to a dyspeptic few, mostly engaged in getting revenge on one another...more

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Jul 10, 2010 Boone rated it 5 of 5 stars

Absolutely amazing! I've never read anything quite like Vance's Dying Earth stories, and that's a good thing. I'm not a huge fantasy fan, but this is generically classified as fantasy.

Jack Vance has a knack for language. He uses words that aren't well known but add a different type of depth to the story. The dialogue is unique. It's very formal yet at the same time very witty and full of sarcasm. Other reviews condemn the stories for the florid and formal dialogue, mostly because it's not conve...more

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Dec 10, 2010 Brian rated it 4 of 5 stars

Shelves: gaming, role-playing, fantasy, character-studies

Vance does a marvelous job suggesting an ancient Earth, with magical developments and pragmatic peoples. It reads real enough, anyway, to imagine outside the self-centered perceptions of its main characters.

You could say there is a surplus of novels based on role playing games. This is not one of them. Dying Earth is rare example where a series of stories became an integral component in the genesis of the fantasy role playing game genre. Having never heard of it before, and being written some tw...more

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May 08, 2012 Brendan rated it 4 of 5 stars

Every so often I encounter a book that reignites my love of classic old-school science fiction/fantasy. This was one of those books.

The world described here is that of Earth at the near-wane of the Sun. The Sun glows red and threatens to blink out of existence at any moment of the stories herein. Millions of years of history has transpired since the present, and technology and biology has evolved to the point of being indistinguishable from what we would consider magic.

This really isn't a novel...more Every so often I encounter a book that reignites my love of classic old-school science fiction/fantasy. This was one of those books.

The world described here is that of Earth at the near-wane of the Sun. The Sun glows red and threatens to blink out of existence at any moment of the stories herein. Millions of years of history has transpired since the present, and technology and biology has evolved to the point of being indistinguishable from what we would consider magic.

This really isn't a novel so much as a group of short stories glued together into one (or rather four) narratives. The first "novel" consists of several stories of vaguely related characters and events describing the world and its inhabitants. The ethos of these stories (and subsequent ones) is surprisingly pulp in its outlook. Characters are not particular good or bad according to our various methods of moral evaluation. At worst, most of the characters are mischievous. Most, though, have their own interests and goals, which they pursue with determination.

The two middle texts "Eyes of the Overworld" and "Cugel's Saga" focus on a vaguely like-able rogue named Cugel who keeps finding himself propelled to the opposite side of the Earth as his home, the first propelling being fully justified (punishment for trying to steal objects from a local -- and very powerful -- wizard), the second due to a mistake on Cugel's part. Both novels narrate his journey home. These are very, very funny stories, particularly since Cugel is quite adept at figuring out quick personal gain in any situation. He also causes a lot of trouble, sometimes on purpose, sometimes on accident. He does have a tendency to abandon companions and run from, rather than confront, danger, particularly that brought on by his own devices.

The last text "Rhialto the Magnificent" describes the exploits of the eponymous magician. He is even less sympathetic a character than Cugel. He too has a tendency to look out only for his interests over those of the overall group.

One of the great things about these stories is that they are clearly meant to be read in the context of the current day. The second Cugel novel invariably deals with stories in which Cugel -- much to his dislike -- must actually work for a living. Rather than focussing on a wish-fulfillment need for writing fantasy (as in "Gosh, I would love to live in such a world and go out adventuring"), Vance looks at the world from a workingman's point of view -- and even a sociologist's perspective: how do people live, how do they make money? what happens when someone from a foreign culture interferes with current practices?

The Rhialto stories focus on the privileged life -- Rhialto and his peers are overprivileged and under-worked. They are blatantly the lesser generation of a long line of noble magic-users, who end up squandering the waning days of the Earth squabbling over artifacts and personal power, while the rest of the (vaguely) human population still plods on trying to survive the best it can.

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About Jack Vance

Aka John Holbrooke Vance, Peter Held, John Holbrook, Ellery Queen, John van See, Alan Wade.

The author was born in 1916 and educated at the University of California, first as a mining engineer, then majoring in physics and finally in journalism. During the 1940s and 1950s, he contributed widely to science fiction and fantasy magazines. His first novel, 'The Dying Earth', was published in 1950 to gr...more

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“What are your fees?" inquired Guyal cautiously. "I respond to three questions," stated the augur. "For twenty terces I phrase the answer in clear and actionable language; for ten I use the language of cant, which occasionally admits of ambiguity; for five, I speak a parable which you must interpret as you will; and for one terce, I babble in an unknown tongue.” — 29 people liked it

“Notice this rent in my garment; I am at a loss to explain its presence! I am even more puzzled by the existence of the universe.” — 18 people liked it

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title link	preview: Tales of the Dying Earth: The Dying Earth/The Eyes of the Overworld/Cugel's Saga/Rhialto the Marvellous
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Tales of the Dying Earth: The Dying Earth/The Eyes of the Overworld/Cugel's Saga/Rhialto the Marvellous (The Dying Earth #1-4 omnibus)

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