The Dying Earth Series

Let's talk about prose for a moment, because with Jack Vance, the prose is the thing. Most science fiction and fantasy prose is, at best, efficient: it conveys information, it establishes setting, it moves the story forward without getting in the way. Vance's prose is not like that. It is precise in a way that sometimes stops you cold, exactly the way a perfectly tuned musical phrase stops you. It is ironic in a way that is calibrated to the micron. It is — and this is the rarest achievement in genre fiction — genuinely, repeatedly funny, without ever being cheap about it.

Here is Cugel the Clever, the series' most famous character, described in his natural habitat: "Cugel was a man of many capabilities, with a disposition perhaps excessively compliant to the demands of self-interest." This is not a bad sentence. This is a great sentence. It tells you everything about Cugel — his intelligence, his amorality, his complete absence of self-awareness about his own amorality — in twenty words, using vocabulary that is slightly heightened without being pretentious, with an ironic distance that is maintained with perfect steadiness across two entire novels. Vance writes that way for six hundred pages. He never lets up. He never slips.

The World at the End of the World

The Dying Earth is a magnificent setting precisely because it is so thoroughly terminal. The sun is dying. Everyone knows the sun is dying. This has been true for so long that civilization has had time to develop, peak, decay, be forgotten, be rediscovered, be misunderstood, be parodied, be parodied again, and settle into the kind of baroque elaboration that only deep time can produce. The sorcerers who remain are the keepers of an inheritance so vast and ancient that no one fully understands it. They recite spells memorized from crumbling manuscripts, not entirely sure what those spells were originally for. They defend territories whose original significance has been lost to history. They pursue feuds whose original provocations are centuries old and long since irrelevant.

This is, among other things, a brilliant metaphor for the condition of culture in late modernity. We too are the inheritors of an enormous tradition that we incompletely understand, that we misremember, that we invoke in forms that have drifted significantly from the original. Our rituals are garbled memories of other rituals. Our beliefs are corrupted transmission of older beliefs. The Dying Earth makes this condition visible by exaggerating it to absurdity — and in making it absurd, makes it oddly moving.

Cugel: The Anti-Hero We Deserve

Cugel the Clever is one of the great comic characters in speculative fiction, and what makes him great is that he is entirely, cheerfully, consistently bad. He is selfish, cowardly, dishonest, ungrateful, and vain, and he pursues these qualities with the dedication of a man who has clearly never considered an alternative. He is not redeemed. He does not learn. He wanders through a world of extraordinary wonders and encounters and manages, consistently, to extract from each encounter precisely the wrong lesson. He is like if Odysseus had the values of a low-level con artist and the self-awareness of a golden retriever.

And yet you cannot stop reading about him. Partly because the world he moves through is so inventive and strange. Partly because his schemes are so elaborate and their failures so spectacular. But mostly because Vance's ironic distance — his absolute refusal to judge Cugel while also never endorsing him — creates a reading experience of rare pleasure. You are watching a man operate at maximum capability in pursuit of entirely ignoble goals, in a universe that is entirely indifferent to whether his goals are noble or not. It is the picaresque novel at its purest, and at the end of the world, the picaresque turns out to be the appropriate form.

Why Vance Matters

Jack Vance is the most influential SF/fantasy writer you may have never heard of. His vocabualry — the precise, slightly archaic, always-exactly-right word choices — influenced Gene Wolfe, George R.R. Martin, Neil Gaiman, and others who then influenced virtually everyone writing in the field today. D&D's magic system, with its memorized spells that vanish from the mind when cast, is directly derived from the Dying Earth books. The aesthetics of a dozen video games — the crumbling towers, the decadent scholars, the quests that feel like elaborate jokes — trace back to Vance.

To read the Dying Earth series is to read, in a sense, the origin point of contemporary fantasy aesthetics. It is also to encounter one of the great stylists in 20th-century American fiction, working in a genre that too often settles for the adequate. On this list of books that demand full attention and reward it extravagantly, the Dying Earth books are the most purely pleasurable — which is itself a kind of seriousness. Joy, Vance seems to be saying, with the calm confidence of someone who knows exactly what he's doing, is a worthy destination for great writing. Even at the end of the world. Especially at the end of the world.