by Jack Vance
I must admit going into this with the mistaken belief that The Dying Earth was a novel. In fact, it is a series of fantasy short stories that are loosely tied together through character and setting. As with most works of this type, I found the contents hit and miss. Some of the early stories struck ...
Jack Vance has been one of my favorite writers ever since I first read his short story "Nopalgarth." I immediate read my way through everything of his I could find, and when I finally encountered The Dying Earth, my mind was blown. The merger of science and magic and the idea of an Earth so old nobo...
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 th...
The Dying Earth is one of those classics I knew I should get around to reading. I absolutely adored Vance's Lyonesse books, and I thought I would like this as well.At which point the best I can say is "meh, maybe not so much." The books are solid. Vance's writing is still solid, his magical syst...
This collection of short stories set in Vance's Dying Earth is old school fantasy and may suffer from the phenomenon of seeming to be derivative by virtue of being the thing that everyone else has been imitating. It's swords and sorcery mixed with hints of lost technology in a far future age when Ea...
Meh, what on earth?I went into the book expecting to like it, and it is nice and short, but after a good start it just went downhill for me. The first couple of stories about a wizard and two identical girls created by magic are great, but the subsequent stories just bored me. The prose is nice and ...
This gets four stars for the idiosyncratic writing and for sheer imagination. The stories in this "novel" were almost all quest stories, which I found a bit repetitious and tiresome. To me, the stories here seemed more akin to fairy tales than science-fiction or high fantasy stories. I will be retur...
This, the first part of the "Tales of Dying Earth" saga, is Vance in his early days as a writer and it shows. It lacks the well-roundedness and maturity that he was to develop later on in his career but it is still most definitely him, his unique writing style and humour plainly evident, even at thi...
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