The Dying Earth
Ratings31
Average rating3.6
New races of man had evolved, new species of beast; science had vanished and magic had arisen to dominate the twilight of our world as it dominated the earth's morning. The Dying Earth is Jack Vance's finest work - a stunning evocation of a world peopled by wizards, witches, demons, monsters, dashing princes and forlorn maidens. A bejewelled gallery of strange and wonderful beings in the eminent tradition of Tolkien and William Morris. Jack Vance's preferred title for this collection is Mazirian the Magician, but while we have elsewhere deferred to his wishes, in this case the book is so famous under a title of which he apparently strongly disapproves that we concluded it would be absurd to change it. All Jack Vance titles in the SFGateway use the author's preferred texts, as restored for the Vance Integral Edition (VIE), an extensive project masterminded by an international online community of Vance's admirers. In general, we also use the VIE titles, and have adopted the arrangement of short story collections to eliminate overlaps.
Tags
Mood
Content Warnings
Series
Featured Series
4 primary books6 released booksThe Dying Earth
The Dying Earth is a 6-book series with 4 primary works first released in 1950 with contributions by Jack Vance and Michael Shea.
Reviews
Popular Reviews
Reviews with the most likes.
This writing feels just a little better then 15th-century Le Morte d'Arthur. It's unnecessary “disconnected”(?). The first reviewer says it best: is grandiloquent and eccentric, harsh and grating, and crammed full of hard words”
This is an awful book, for me at least. If I were to try to give it a compliment, it is as bad as Shakespeare or some other book of these kind. It is highly regarded though, as it is the book who influenced D&D's magic system.
So there is 100 spells left in the world, there is just a handful of wizards left. They are all very powerful, and seek knowledge.
The first tale of the book is a very short story of one of these wizards on a quest for another wizard, in order to gain the knowledge of one of his spells. He can create like and give it intelligence. Or some at least.
Naturally, these wizards all want to create women to “make them company”, and they basically don't care that they are brain dead.
Read 1:28 / 6:24 22%
terribly dated, but still strangely addicting (today it feels quite ridiculous as prose and ideas, but I still can't stop reading and the world is very original and surprisingly nasty)
