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The Dying Earth - Jack Vance
The Dying Earth
by: (author)
4.17 15
The stories included in The Dying Earth introduce dozens of seekers of wisdom and beauty, lovely lost women, wizards of every shade of eccentricity with their runic amulets and spells. We meet the melancholy deodands, who feed on human flesh and the twk-men, who ride dragonflies and trade... show more
The stories included in The Dying Earth introduce dozens of seekers of wisdom and beauty, lovely lost women, wizards of every shade of eccentricity with their runic amulets and spells. We meet the melancholy deodands, who feed on human flesh and the twk-men, who ride dragonflies and trade information for salt. There are monsters and demons. Each being is morally ambiguous: The evil are charming, the good are dangerous. All are at home in Vance’s lyrically described fantastic landscapes like Embelyon where, “The sky [was] a mesh of vast ripples and cross-ripples and these refracted a thousand shafts of colored light, rays which in mid-air wove wondrous laces, rainbow nets, in all the jewel hues....” The dying Earth itself is otherworldly: “A dark blue sky, an ancient sun.... Nothing of Earth was raw or harsh—the ground, the trees, the rock ledge protruding from the meadow; all these had been worked upon, smoothed, aged, mellowed. The light from the sun, though dim, was rich and invested every object of the land ... with a sense of lore and ancient recollection.” Welcome. “The Dying Earth and its sequels comprise one of the most powerful fantasy/science-fiction concepts in the history of the genre. They are packed with adventure but also with ideas, and the vision of uncounted human civilizations stacked one atop another like layers in a phyllo pastry thrills even as it induces a sense of awe [at] ... the fragility and transience of all things, the nobility of humanity’s struggle against the certainty of an entropic resolution.” — Dean Koontz, author of the Odd Thomas novels. “He gives you glimpses of entire worlds with just perfectly turned language. If he’d been born south of the border, he’d be up for a Nobel Prize.” — Dan Simmons author of The Hyperion Cantos.
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Format: mass market paperback
ISBN: 9780671655648 (0671655647)
Publisher: Baen
Pages no: 220
Edition language: English
Series: The Dying Earth -4 omnibus (#1)
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Community Reviews
Flicker Reads
Flicker Reads rated it
3.0 The Dying Earth
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 ...
Ricardo Sanchez Book Bin
Ricardo Sanchez Book Bin rated it
4.0 Songs of the Dying Earth
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...
Forrest Aguirre, in the Leaves
Forrest Aguirre, in the Leaves rated it
4.0 The Dying Earth
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...
suzemo
suzemo rated it
3.0 The Dying Earth
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...
Amadan na Briona
Amadan na Briona rated it
4.0 The Dying Earth (Tales of the Dying Earth)
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...
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