Ever since I read The Time Machine (I think I was about 12) I have hankered after stories of an ancient, dying earth, circling an ancient, dying red sun. Some might dwell on the Eloi and the Morlocks; my abiding memory of the novel is the "monstrous crab-like creature" scuttling on a beach 30m years in the future, as "the sun, red and very large, halted motionless upon the horizon, a vast dome glowing with a dull heat, and now and then suffering a momentary extinction".
It fired my imagination something proper, so I am at a loss to understand why it's taken me until now to read Jack Vance's Tales of a Dying Earth. Particularly given that it was more than a year ago that I said it'd be my next world of fantasy title. Moving on from my laxness - with apologies to anyone who's been waiting (Lioc, I am thinking of you - you made my day posting here!) – I've finally finished it, and boy oh boy, am I excited. The omnibus, which collects Vance's four Dying Earth stories, is exactly, but exactly, why I set out on this (much delayed) fantasy quest in the first place. I wanted to find those books and authors who shaped the fantasy writers of today, and here, in Vance, I see foreshadowings of so much.
The collection starts with Vance's 1950 debut, The Dying Earth, six interlinked short stories set on a far future version of Earth. "A dim place, ancient beyond knowledge. Once it was a tall world of cloudy mountains and bright rivers, and the sun was a white blazing ball. Ages of rain and wind have beaten and rounded the granite, and the sun is feeble and red. The continents have sunk and risen. A million cities have lifted towers, have fallen to dust. In the place of the old peoples a few thousand strange souls live. There is evil on Earth, evil distilled by time … Earth is dying and in its twilight." The "few thousand strange souls" are "feverishly merry, for infinite night was close at hand, when the red sun should finally flicker and go black". There is magic, but we learn it is somehow derived from "a strange abstract lore … termed 'mathematics' … Passive itself and not of sorcery, it elucidates every problem, each phase of existence, all the secrets of time and space. Your spells and runes are built upon its power and codified according to a great underlying mosaic of magic."
The stories are strange, and disturbing, and glowing. In the first, Turjan the magician journeys to the land of Embelyon to learn how to create humanity. He makes the beautiful woman T'sain, sister to T'sais; the pair look identical but T'sais was made with a warp and finds everything beautiful ugly, and ugly beautiful. In another, Turjan is captured and made tiny by the evil magician Mazirian, tormented for his knowledge until T'sain can free him. T'sais and the cursed man Etarr attend a Black Sabbath ritual of witches in a third, the eyes of Liane the Wayfarer are taken by Chun the Unavoidable in another. My favourite is the story of Guyal of Sfere, a man with a "void in his mind" which means he can't stop asking questions, and his journey to find the Curator, knower of all things.
The Dying Earth is followed by two books about Cugel the Clever. In the first, The Eyes of the Overworld, Cugel makes the mistake of burgling the home of the magician Iucounu, only to be caught in the act – "do not strain, as Thief-taker is woven of wasp-legs" – and sent in reparation to steal a "violet hemisphere" from the land of Cutz. It was that, or have the Charm of Forlorn Encystment, "which constricts the subject in a pore some forty-five miles below the surface of the earth", applied; Iucounu makes sure he'll keep his promises by wrapping the small white alien Firx around Cugel's liver. What follows is a lengthy peripatetic tale of adventures for the hapless Cugel; he might call himself Cugel the Clever, but he is tricked into being a watchman on a pedestal hundreds of feet above the ground, he eats a strange glowing object which turns out to encompass totality … he's basically utterly immoral, largely hopeless and hugely entertaining.
His adventures are continued in Cugel's Saga, and in the fourth novel in the sequence, Rhialto the Marvellous – set "toward the middle of the 21st Aeon", a group of magicians embark on various adventures. All is recounted in Vance's wonderful, unique prose. Is it possible to be both deadpan and flowery at the same time? I think he pulls this off, to hilarious effect. "These girls seem not to relish the garland of pulchritude," says Guyal of a collection of unattractive women. Cugel, after ditching a former princess into the hands of a brigand (it was his own hopelessness which led to her losing her kingdom), justifies himself angrily. "'The woman is a monomaniac!' he told himself. 'She lacks clarity and perceptiveness; how could I have done else, for her welfare and my own? I am rationality personified; it is unthinking to suggest otherwise.'"
There are remnants of ancient civilisations: floating roads and air-cars. There are horrific images galore: a pyramid of screaming flesh half a thousand feet high. And so, so much of these stories can be seen in the work of later authors. Mazirian's garden of nightmarish plants ("'K-k-k-k-k-k-k,' spoke the plant. Mazirian stooped, held the rodent to the red mouth. The mouth sucked, the small body slid into the stomach-bladder underground. The plant gurgled, eructated, and Mazirian watched with satisfaction.") reminds me a much-loved childhood novel, Douglas Hill's Blade of the Poisoner, and the poisoner's deadly garden. The Twk-men – tiny men-things mounted on dragonflies, with skin "of a greenish cast", bring Philip Pullman's Gallivespians to mind. Mazirian's plunge into the Lake of Dreams after uttering the Charm of Untiring Nourishment, breathing the water as if it were air and chasing T'sain across the lake's bottom, recalls the scene in Harry Potter and the Goblet of Fire when Harry uses gillyweed to breathe underwater. And this is just the first 29 pages …
Most of all, though, I loved these stories for their shiveringly evocative images of Earth at its end of days, that sun, "old and red as an autumn pomegranate". As I said, I blame HG Wells for this particular obsession. "Soon, when the sun goes out, men will stare into the eternal night, and all will die, and Earth will bear its history, its ruins, the mountains worn to knolls – all into the infinite dark," writes Vance, and it's cracking stuff. I'm sorry I've finished them, and am sure I'll return to them time and time again. Meanwhile, there's the George RR Martin-edited Songs from the Dying Earth to be getting on with … and another world of fantasy title to choose. I am entirely open to suggestions: where shall we go next?