Tales Of The Dying Earth: The influential science fantasy masterpiece that inspired a generation of writers (FANTASY MASTERWORKS)

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Written in the 1940s and published as a collection in 1950, these stories apparently became an inspiration to quite a bit of the modern fantasy. 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”). This is the last hurrah of Earth and it seems that everyone is trying to make the most out of it, grognak the barbarian style.

After these first publications and until the mid-1990s, Underwood-Miller published many of Vance's works, including his mystery fiction, often in limited editions featuring dustjacket artwork by leading fantasy artists.

On the other hand his description of action is often so sparse it’s easy to get confused as to what happened. Vance wrote one of his first science fiction stories for an English class assignment; his professor's reaction was "We also have a piece of science fiction" in a scornful tone, Vance's first negative review. In a move that prefaces the psychedelic mind blowing trips of the 1960's, he sets out on a quest to find the greatest magician of his time, Pandelune, who lives in a hidden many-coloured realm of vermillion skies and turquoise forests. The occasional typo I would understand, but this book is absolutely riddled with them to the point of ridicule, often going so far as to replace whole words and confuse names, rendering the meaning of sentences hard to decipher for the reader.

So there’s no guarantee that the evolution of the sun hasn’t been altered in the past by humanity, even if it isn’t able to anymore. I’ve read SF and fantasy all my life, and I can say with confidence that his voice and imagery are unique. They use magic by memorizing lengthy formulas for spells and activating them by speaking the proper commands. There are only one hundred spells which are still known to mankind, of thousands which were discovered over the course of history. In this waning hour of Earth's life no man could count himself familiar with the glens, the glades, the dells and deeps, the secluded clearings, the ruined pavilions, the sun-dappled pleasaunces, the gullys and heights, the various brooks, freshets, ponds, the meadows, thickets, brakes and rocky outcrops.

All speculative fiction does that, of course, but Jack Vance just happens to hit on the particular things that I find most fascinating to speculate about: neuroscience, psychology, sensation, and perception. This Fantasy-Book is just "fantastic" and generations of Fantasy-authors havn't reached Vance's level of genius. Despite this, many of the situations they find themselves in are quite funny, in a dark and ironic sort of way.