The Dying Earth

Jack Vance 1950 Buy from Amazon.com

The Dying Earth is the first book in this series, combined into Tales of the Dying Earth consists of six stories set on an earth far in the future, close to the time when the sun will go out. Humans now live in a semi-feudal society where magic is common and all science is considered to be magic too.

This is a fairly atypical Vance novel, it has a definite melancholy that is not usually present in his work. The world is dying, and that feeling infects the stories set in this world. There are occasional flashed of the Vance style though, particularly in the dialogue, which is pure Vance. He has a particular, almost archaic way of constructing his characters’ sentences that can be jolting, but quickly becomes familiar until other writers often seem almost too relaxed by comparison.

The Dying Earth is considered to be a classic, and it is a wonderful example of the style of writing that was common in the fifties, with ideas that have by this time been overdone, but back then were fresh and original, and they have an unselfconscious glamour because of that.

Gene Wolfe’s masterwork series the Book of the New Sun is said to have been partly inspired by this book, and it is interesting to read it with that in mind if you are familiar with Wolfe’s work.

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