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Original Title:	The Dying Earth
ISBN:	0671831526 (ISBN13: 9780671831523)
Edition Language:	English
Series:	The Dying Earth #1
Characters:	Guyal, Liane, Turjan, T'sais, Ulan Dhor, Pandelume, T'sain
Literary Awards:	Retro Hugo Award Nominee for Best Novel (2001)

The Dying Earth (The Dying Earth #1)

Jack Vance

Paperback | Pages: 156 pages

Rating: 3.93 | 7293 Users | 502 Reviews

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Title	:	The Dying Earth (The Dying Earth #1)
Author	:	Jack Vance
Book Format	:	Paperback
Book Edition	:	First Edition
Pages	:	Pages: 156 pages
Published	:	March 1977 by Pocket Books (first published 1950)
Categories	:	Fantasy. Science Fiction. Fiction. Short Stories. Classics

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I did not like this book much the first time I read it, but after reading it a second time while visualizing its characters as puppets, I found I liked it much more.

This book—particularly the first three stories—irritated me. I found its wizards to be contemptible creatures, morally inferior products of a degenerate age, capable only of memorizing a few detailed spells and casting them by rote (“Vancian Magic,” which later became a key element of “Dungeons and Dragons”). I was also appalled by their sexism: even the best try to fashion ideal women from scratch, while the majority desire only to catch women, cage them and rape them—the real reason for all their pathetic little spells. In addition, the book's prose—particularly the wizards' speeches—is grandiloquent and eccentric, harsh and grating, and crammed full of hard words. Such words—I remember thinking to myself—remind me of what Shakespeare's Angus says of Macbeth's titles: they “hang loose about him, like a giant's robe/ Upon a dwarfish thief.”

This Renaissance reference must have unearthed old memories, for soon I was transported back to grad school at Ohio State, some forty years ago. At the time I was studying John Marston, and I was having a good deal of trouble enjoying his tragedies (Antonio and Mellida, Antonio's Revenge) because the speeches were so pompous, so ridiculously passionate, the plots so elaborate and absurd. Then I discovered a fact that changed my reaction completely. Whereas Shakespeare wrote for a general audience at an open air theater featuring adult actors, Marston wrote for an elite audience in a candlelit indoor theater featuring an acting company of children. Each of these passionate, pompous speeches—filled with mammoth emotions and murderous intent—had been declaimed in chiaroscuro by a costumed child. Knowing this, I could now appreciate Marston's mix of humor and biting satire. He was using grand speeches in the mouths of children to show us the littleness of man, a poor paltry creature of monumental passions trapped in a flickering world.

So I read The Dying Earth again, as if it were a Punch and Judy show mounted with magnificent sets. Puppet wizards and puppet women now moved through a muted landscape, in a world of distilled evil dominated by a decadent sun. Sometimes they seem like mischievous children, sometimes like degenerate dwarfs, but at other times they seem like creatures of some new myth, a promise of stories to come beyond this dying world.

So my advice is: stick with it. Imagine the characters as puppets or children or mice if you have to, but read this book all the way through until you get to the end. These stories—which are among Vance's first—get better as they go along, and the last three are very good indeed. The most interesting, at least as a literary influence, is “Ulan Dhor Ends a Dream.” This account of a metropolis where two different peoples live side by side, completely unable to perceive each others existence, bears striking similarities to China Mieville's The City and the City,. My favorite is “Liane the Wayfarer,” about a quest for a tapestry possessed by “Chun the Unavoidable,” but equally as good is the novella about the inquisitive “Guyal of Sfere,” who has many questions to ask the Curator of “The Museum of Man.”

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Ratings: 3.93 From 7293 Users | 502 Reviews

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This special signed edition is limited to 250 numbered copies and 26 lettered copies. This is copy 219. Also signed by Tom Kidd.A very late signature, by an unsteady hand, one of the last he ever made probably.

I really hate it when I'm told over-and-over what a 'classic' this book or that book is, only to pick it up and find that the man who wrote it used his penis as much as his pen in it's composition. This volume of short stories could serve as a classic example of that. And yes, I understand that it was written in the 1950s when women were viewed exactly as this author staged them, but there's a line between simple disregard and misogyny, and Vance crossed it in the very first story where a wizard

First off, I strongly recommend Aerin's review, since it's her review that lead me to the book. For me, briefly, I pretty much knew, within about 50 pages or so, that Dying Earth was special. You can read oceans of speculative fiction, enjoying a great deal of it, but it's only on occasion that you run across something that strikes you as Original, that exists beyond the time in which it was written. (I would probably liken this reading experience (espicially so with Vance's use of "high

I had never heard of Jack Vance until Subterranean Press announced it would be publishing a tribute anthology containing stories from some of my favourite authors. Apparently Vance is a master fantasist, on par with Tolkien, and his Dying Earth series inspired all of those authors, and many more, in the latter half of the twentieth century. So I ordered the massive volume from Subterranean Press, and then I set about finding a copy of the original book that started it all. Since then, Vance has

Let's do some quick math. Jack Vance's The Dying Earth was originally published in 1950. I was born in 1969. I first started playing Dungeons and Dragons, in earnest, in 1979. It is now 2014. On second thought, screw the math. You can plainly see that my reading of The Dying Earth is tardy, given that Gary Gygax and Dave Arneson cited Vance's work as influences on the development of the Dungeons and Dragons game.And how.More than an influencer, The Dying Earth is a wholesale supplier of D&D

I've known for quite a while that George RR Martin thinks highly of Jack Vance and The Dying Earth and last year I had the opportunity to read his anthology, Songs of the Dying Earth, where a number of authors wrote short stories set in The Dying Earth. I loved it. It remains, and easily so, the best anthology I've ever read. And that only meant one thing, I had to read the original tales.I'm also very glad I read the anthology, even though one of the stories in The Dying Earth was spoiled a bit

To read The Dying Earth by Jack Vance is like to find oneself inside the fabulous canvas painted by some artist exiled to the end of the fatigued time Or in the garden of paranoiaDeep in thought, Mazirian the Magician walked his garden. Trees fruited with many intoxications overhung his path, and flowers bowed obsequiously as he passed. An inch above the ground, dull as agates, the eyes of mandrakes followed the tread of his black-slippered feet. Such was Mazirian's gardenthree terraces growing