Tales of the Dying Earth (2000)

NOTE: This book is an omnibus, containing four separate works. I will be reviewing each individually as I complete it. The overall star ranking will correspond to the entire volume, and will not necessarily be an average.

The Dying Earth:

Going into this book, I had no real idea what to expect. I knew Jack Vance only from a single short story, "The Moon Moth." But I liked that story, and looked forward to more of his output.

I was not disappointed, though I admit to being confused at first by the episodic nature of the book. This is a collection of short stories, linked by characters (at times) and the world in which they are set, but nothing more.

This is a world so far advanced that science and sorcery blend into one--indeed, the reader is left just as befuddled as the characters. But the precise mechanism is not important. What we find are humans left to attempt to understand a world that is old beyond imagining, one in which the knowledge of the ages is mostly lost.

The language, although inflated to pretentiousness at times, is at least done consistently enough to work. To a modern reader, the depiction of female characters is simplistic to the point of insult, but it was a product of its time, and must be viewed as such. The greatest success is the clear and compelling depiction of the world in which the stories take place. Rating: ****

Eyes of the Overworld

What an odd book. I can't say that I've ever before read a book in which I despised the protagonist more, wishing him to fail in everything he attempted. And yet... I was fascinated by the ways that Cugel the Clever got himself into troubling situations, and then just as quickly got himself out of them again.

This was not a comfortable book to read, nor one that I'd be likely to read again. I lost interest about halfway through, and only recently picked it up to finish. Perhaps Cugel is best in small doses. Rating: *** ( )

http://speculiction.blogspot.com/2012/07/review-of-tales-of-dying-earth-by-jack.... ( )

This is an omnibus of four of Jack Vance's books written at different times during his career, but all set on Earth in the last few decades of the Sun's lifetime, many millions of years hence.

The first one, "The Dying Earth", is a collection of loosely connected stories with some recurring characters and places. The second and third books, "The Eyes of the Overworld" and "Cugel's Saga" recount the travels of a trickster Cugel the Clever, while the last book, "Rhialto the Marvellous", has three stories featuring the title character and his fellow magicians.

I enjoyed the first and last of the books but found the middle two rather tedious, repeating the same basic plot over and over again: Cugel thinks of a way to dupe some innocent only to find the tables turned but he is able to escape to continue with the next stage of his journey back to Almery. It was probably meant to be funny, but I didn't find it so. Another tedium-inducing device was the long lists of made-up words for weapons, monsters, precious objects or whatever, where the only clue to the meaning of the words was their inclusion in the list. ( )

An absolutely terrible cover for this collection. The Dying Earth is a classic in the field. The other stories show the progression of Vance's writing; they aren't as good, since he's going over ground already covered, but still have that prose-poem feel. ( )

I've previously read (and reviewed) Eyes of the Overworld so I checked this book out to read the first "novel". As noted, the novel is simply a collection of short stories. Vance's style was much more accessible here than in his later Dying Earth works. I can see how his work was unique among the fantasy world back in the 50s and can appreciate his influence, but after reading "The Dying Earth" I'm not impressed enough to seek out anything else by Vance. ( )