K-SCORE: 33
Short Story Collection: The Dying Earth
Spoiler Level: Moderate
The Dying Earth is the first in my volume with a similar name, Tales of The Dying Earth. It definitely has some weaknesses or at least did in this first set of stories.
Jack Vance’s mastery of language is incredible. His sentences are complex and beautiful, while still being fluid, and pop vivid images into a reader’s head effortlessly. That I enjoyed, save for the dialogue, which I found irksome. His characters are incredibly eloquent, far more so than me, but that meant they all spoke in essentially the same voice regardless of who they were.
“I can’t imagine ever recommending other people read this.”
The Dying Earth comprises six stories that are kind of hit and miss. I liked the first, Turjan of Miir, but was disappointed when the interesting alchemical life-brewing conflict came quickly to a resolution because I was looking forward to a whole book with Turjan.
The second, Mazirian, the Magician, follows an interesting anti-hero and unveils a set of magical rules I found fascinating. I thought it was a fine base layer for magic in The Dying Earth series, but then this particular type of magic never comes up again.
The third story, T’Sais, I flatly didn’t like it. The character T’Sais was a woman created by a wizard who accidentally made her so that she saw evil and ugliness in all things good and beautiful… or so he said, except not really at all. She’s just naive and wants to be loved.
Liane the Wayfarer is the best of the six. Liane is pompous and disingenuous and gets his just desserts in a very satisfying way that reveals he was only ever a tiny pawn in a much larger plot.
The last two stories are a little longer though needlessly. Ulan Dhor is weird, but at times describes “modern” technology from the perspective of a person who lives in an age where mankind has regressed, riding horses and wielding swords as the earth is dying and its population shrinking. But those moments are too few given that the rest features strange masses of tentacles slaughtering cities of half-blind peoples for reasons unexplained. I did like the name Ampridatvir though.
The last story, Guyal of Sfere, is either two times as long as it should have been or ten times too short. Vance tries to tie in a Museum of Man that houses all Earth’s knowledge across all time to a story about demons and ghosts and northern tribal people. It’s way too much, but he could have made it work by cutting one half of it or the other.
Mostly The Dying Earth is an inaccessible hodgepodge of Vance’s imaginations in a future so far away as to be incomprehensible. It’s a master class on language usage and translating fictional-world ideas onto a page, while simultaneously being uninspired in terms of plot and character depth.
“boring”
Addendum:
Novel: The Eyes of Overworld
By the conclusion of The Eyes of Overworld by Jack Vance I firmly decided that I hate the antihero Cugel the Clever with a rare zeal. Over the course of the novel he lies, cheats, steals, murders, tricks, and swindles everyone he encounters, never learning a lesson when things went poorly and never changing his ways. It’s an amoral journey of no development. By the end he has such a rap sheet of abhorrent actions I couldn’t possibly name them all. Worst, I think, is when he sells a young woman he’d essentially forced from her castle into slavery to some common bandits for no gain.
“squeezed through every situation... by sheer luck”
A lot about the book is frustrating. Again, as I complained with The Dying Earth, all the characters speak with the same remarkable eloquence that hurts their abilities to stay distinct. Some of the characters are interesting and vivid despite that, but only a tiny few are relevant to the whole story so it’s hard to care about them. My favorite is Firx, a spiney demon lodged in Cugel’s liver that doesn’t speak but periodically pokes and squeezes the man’s innards when he goes off the course of his mission to return to his home city from a land in the far north of the world with a purple cusp that allows the user to see the beautiful Overlords. But Firx is casually tossed aside in the final chapter and that upset me.
My biggest issue though is how Cugel squeezed through every situation, at the very last moment narrowly escaping death or something more horrid Vance had dreamt up. And it seems like he always does so by sheer luck.
For my struggles, however, I was awarded with a pretty satisfying final page and some truly astonishing prose. Vance’s descriptions of place and circumstances are vivid and awesome, bringing to life a world he may not have mapped, but nevertheless could see in all its intricacies in his brain. The chapters are enjoyable to read, distinct, interesting, and often clever, even if I did wish at any moment that someone would pluck out Cugel’s eyes, chop off his hands, cut out his tongue, and leave him for dead somewhere unglamourous. Selfish prick.
The story is cruel to its characters, and in that spirit of cruelty, the next novel in my Dying Earth volume is called Cugel’s Saga. I’ll likely read it, though I really hope he develops, toils tremendously to redeem himself, or has a wickedly twisted unendingly torturous demise.
Addendum:
Novel: Cugel’s Saga
Cugel’s Saga is precisely the kind of not-great book that somehow marginalizes reading itself in my life.
As I’ve complained about before, all of the characters in Jack Vance’s Dying Earth series speak with nearly the same extremely intellectual voice, and in Cugel’s Saga, that just becomes the overall tone of the book. Eventually I got used to it, even if I didn’t respect it. Also Cugel is less abhorrent a man in this second tale of his, but still generally unethical.
What I didn’t like was the pointlessness of it all. No character but Cugel persists for more than a chapter and the structure is always the same. Cugel comes to town X, gets into trouble, and runs away. Some of the ways he got into trouble are interesting, like the worms that powered the ships and the strange town with numbered columns and angry women, but mostly I didn’t care. I even didn’t care at the very end when Cugel finally faced off again with Iocouan the Laughing Magician.
“An author with a talent for language and very little of consequence to say, no decent story to tell, is the toughest kind of author to read.”
Cugel’s only progression over the course of The Eyes of Overworld and Cugel’s Saga is to become tired of travel and adventuring. So whether he defeats the Laughing Magician or not, lives or dies, it makes very little difference. His story, seemingly intentionally, fizzles. Who wants that? You want your characters to go out with a bang! Rest should come after incredible conflicts and mind-blowing revelations that fundamentally change people and outlooks. Cugel is the same, just ready to lie down in the same spot for a while until the sun finally burns out.
Vance does (or did rather) have a talent with language and some of his sentences and descriptions are truly beautiful. So from a prosaic standpoint, it is inspiring, but that’s not enough to make you want to keep reading. An author with a talent for language and very little of consequence to say, no decent story to tell, is the toughest kind of author to read.
Addendum:
Rhialto the Marvelous, Murthe - Murthe is altogether uninteresting, which didn’t surprise me much as I’ve only come to appreciate the masterful command of language in the prose and be wholly underwhelmed by all things content. There is an ancient witch sort of half-trying to turn some wizards into women. Her scheme is foiled before a reader gets to know the characters, the rules of the game, or the stakes.
Rhialto the Marvelous, Fader’s Waft - Fader’s Waft is among the best, if not the best, Dying Earth story I’ve read (all but one). Unlike Cugel, Rhialto is a likeable guy, clever, honorable, kind, and a tad wise. The story is of how his fellow wizards had wronged him, stole his possessions, accused him of crimes he didn’t commit, and convicted him at a trial he was unaware of and didn’t attend. Fader’s Waft chronicles his efforts to prove his innocence. There are amusing moments throughout and it is satisfying by the end as Rhialto triumphed, but ultimately it is boring and lame. They keep casually travelling back in time to thousands of years in Earth’s past, jumping around for no real reason or without significant effect, the demonic entities that are enslaved by the wizards and simultaneously torment Rhialto are flat characters and nothing really becomes of their pages and pages of lying, manipulation, and malfeasance. I think all Jack Vance really cared about when writing stories was rhetoric.
Rhialto the Marvelous, Morreion - Of course it isn’t great. I’ve come to expect this now, and only read this, the last story in my Tales of The Dying Earth volume so I feel more satisfied when I slide it back onto my bookshelf. In Morreion, Rhialto is far too minor a character for the protagonist and seems to have have changed oddly since Murthe and Fader’s Waft. The story takes the magicians off Earth to ultimately reveal that they are even bigger douchebags than I had anticipated. There are no meaningful explanations.
My feelings on the whole saga are well-documented now. I can’t imagine ever recommending other people read this. Though I should say I’ve been holding off until now one important point: the fact that Earth is dying the stories is completely meaningless! And it leads nowhere! Is it too much to ask that a series with that name has Earth die eventually or somehow be saved or at least has characters that grow to understand or appreciate their planet’s imminent demise? I feel like a took a 740 page vocabulary quiz.