7/1/2023 0 Comments The dying earth![]() ![]() ![]() ![]() What ‘story’ there is tends to be loosely picaresque and episodic, as if to give Vance the greatest freedom to show off the remarkably vivid and eccentric world he has created. Tales of Dying Earth is more about world-building than story. Pleasingly, there’s even a reference to a ‘crystal maze’ (also the title of that most fantastical of game shows) in The Eyes of the Overworld, the second volume of this endlessly inventive tetralogy, which captures the playfulness but also the deliciously vivid setting of this highly imaginative quartet of novels, comprising four earlier novels: The Dying Earth, The Eyes of the Overworld, Cugel’s Saga, and Rhialto the Marvellous. It shouldn’t have taken a self-confessed fantasy fan like me that long: the creators of Dungeons and Dragons cited Vance’s Tales of Dying Earth as an influence on their development of the role-playing fantasy game, and I devoured Weis and Hickman’s early D&D tie-ins, the Dragonlance novels, as a teenager. ![]() I’ll admit that Tales of Dying Earth, the fat bumper edition of Jack Vance’s novels set on an Earth whose sun is about to go out forever, sat on my bookshelf for around fifteen years before I actually got round to reading it. In this week’s Dispatches from The Secret Library, Dr Oliver Tearle enjoys Jack Vance’s inventive quartet of picaresque fantasy novels ![]()
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