In a Mad Men postwar MAD world of New Look housewives (and national security policy) and spic-and-span American Dream homes bloomed a sick, fecund flora of tainted growths with gorgeous, cloying scents, redolent of Clark Ashton Smith, Weird Tales and the last American offshoots of European decadence. The Dying Earth cycle of stories by Jack Vance, unfolding under a red ailing sun in a far distant future where technology has long grown indistinguishable from magic, carried the heritage of fantasy literature forward into the 1950s and set the scene for almost every subsequent development in the genre before Tolkien.
Vance published the first of the four volumes that make up this omnibus, the eponymous “The Dying Earth,” in 1950, pulling together the connected stories he had written during his wartime service in the U.S. Merchant Marines. The book was ranked the 16th best fantasy novel of all time in 1987 by a poll of subscribers to SF bible Locus.
Other stories set in the same world followed at intervals, continuing many of the same themes and motifs, often in a more meandering and whimsical vein than the hard well-cut glitter of the early stories.
All of them are collected in this volume in the Vance Digital Edition, created from the definitive Vance Integral Edition, available in Mobi/Kindle and EPUB formats, and without DRM, and sold from the official Jack Vance website, or via Amazon in some jurisdictions.
“The Dying Earth Omnibus” showcases Vance’s greatest virtues and defects as a writer. There is the endless inventiveness. There is the droll, sardonic wit, often muffling its subject matter with baroque turns of phrase. (If you ever wanted to know how it feels to administer an enema to a sea-worm as long as a ship, this is the book for you.) There is the terrific verbal fecundity. There is the wilfully arcane and recherche dialog. (“The Murthe is at large among you, with squalms and ensqualmations. I will say no more until my safety is assured.”) There are the bizarre and arcane societies and customs. There is the coy and sometimes sadistic eroticism. There is the Vancean magic system that helped inspire Dungeons and Dragons.
Carbuncles and all, this is the one Vance volume that any science fiction or fantasy fan should own. Michael Moorcock’s “The Dancers at the End of Time,” M. John Harrison’s “Viriconium,” Gene Wolfe’s “The Book of the New Sun,” the entire Dying Earth subgenre are inconceivable without it.
The Spatterlight Press Vance Digital Edition is simply beautiful–very robust, which is essential in such a big volume, and typeset and designed with flair. If I give this edition a rating of four out of five, it’s only because Vance’s prolixity becomes wearing if, like a good reviewer, you sit down and read it all the way through. It’s tailor made for dipping into, though. (Recommended)
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