I began reading Jack Vance's The Dying Earth because it had been cited as an influence on some of my favorite writers, including Gene Wolfe (in particular for his The Book of the New Sun tetrology) and Stephen King (for the Gunslinger series). Unfortunately, The Dying Earth, while briefer than all of its supposed progeny, is really bad.

The Dying Earth is a series of interconnected stories about humans living on a far-future Earth where the sun is dying and magic is real. In one story, Turjan (a dread magician) goes to the mysterious land of Embelyon to meet Pandelume, another dread magician who knows how to give intelligence to vat-grown homunculi. In another story, T'sais, a beautiful vat-grown woman who sees ugliness everywhere, learns what beauty really is--and defeats an evil witch along the way. And in the chilling "Liane the Wayfarer," the best story of the bunch, an amoral wanderer intent on impressing a beautiful woman embarks on a quest to steal half of a tapestry--but things are not as they seem.

The problems of The Dying Earth are many, but can be briefly told. In each of the stories there is very little by way of plot: they are either simple quests, or extended chase scenes, or random sequences of incidents. The writing is occasionally atrocious, as befits the book's ancient publication date (at least by science-fiction standards). Thus, Turjan at one point cries out, "Quiet, vixen! Lest I lose patience and stun you!" And, when T'sais achieves her epiphany, she says, "Etarr! My brain is whole! I see--I see the world!" Lovely. Finally, Vance simply doesn't do enough with his setting. I had hoped that the dying Earth would be one where science had become magic--but, instead, Vance writes about a world where there really is magic, and the sun is about to die. What's the point?

To be fair, if I had read this book when it was originally published, I think I would have been bowled over. There is a huge difference between The Dying Earth and other, far more optimistic fantasy tales and scientific romances: in The Dying Earth, a feeling of dread and decay pervades each story, giving the book a unique atmosphere, and there are very few people in the book who are noble, or bighearted. (Even Turjan, the hero of several stories, comforts a woman who has saved his life by saying he will grow another just like her in his vats.) And I suppose the setting was great at the time. But The Dying Earth simply doesn't compare to more modern books, and unless you have very little else to do it's simply not worth reading.

Copyright © 2002 Steven Wu