Cugel's Saga
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Dust-jacket of the first edition
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| Author | Jack Vance |
|---|---|
| Cover artist |
Kevin Eugene Johnson |
| Country | United States |
| Language | English |
| Series | Dying Earth |
| Genre | Fantasy novel, Dying Earth subgenre |
| Publisher |
Timescape Books (first) Underwood-Miller |
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Publication date
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November 1983 June 1984 (second) |
| Media type | Print (hardcover) |
| Pages | 334 pp (1983–84 eds.) |
| ISBN | (first) |
| OCLC | 9919734 |
| Preceded by | The Eyes of the Overworld |
| Followed by | Rhialto the Marvellous |
Kevin Eugene Johnson
Cugel's Saga is a picaresque fantasy novel by Jack Vance, published by Timescape in 1983, the third book in the Dying Earth series, the first volume of which appeared in 1950. The narrative of Cugel's Saga continues from the point at which it left off at the end of The Eyes of the Overworld (1966).
The Internet Speculative Fiction Database calls Cugel's Saga "[t]wice as large and less episodic than Eyes of the Overworld", and catalogs it as a novel rather than a fix-up, but also qualifies that label. "This is marketed as a novel, but there is a table of contents, and some of the parts were previously published (although none are acknowledged thus)."
The story begins on Shanglestone Strand, a desolate beach far to the north of Almery, where Cugel had been dumped at the end of The Eyes of the Overworld by a winged demon after he mispronounced the spell intended to inflict the same fate on his nemesis, Iucounu the Laughing Magician. Avoiding the village of Smolod, the scene of his first adventure in The Eyes of the Overworld and where "memories are long", Cugel heads down Shanglestone Strand and arrives at Flutic, a manse owned by the avaricious Master Twango, whose business is salvaging the scales of an Overworld entity named Sadlark from a miry pit in his back garden.These scales are another relic of the Cutz Wars of the "17th Aeon" along with the violet eye-cusps that figured in "Eyes of the Overworld". The scales are sold to the firm of Soldinck and Mercantides, who trans-ship them to a customer in Almery. Taking employment at Flutic, through sheer luck Cugel obtains the Pectoral Skybreak Spatterlight, the most valuable of all the scales, as it constitutes Sadlark's central node of force, or "protonastic centrum". The Skybreak Spatterlight, which absorbs every living creature with which it comes into contact, imprisoning them in limbo, is central to the plot of the novel since it is coveted by none other than Iucounu, the mysterious final customer for the scales, who believes himself to be Sadlark's avatar and is trying to reconstruct the Overworld entity scale by scale. (Chapter I.1)
After defrauding Twango of a substantial sum, only to be double-crossed by Yelleg and Malser, Twango's "scale divers", Cugel absconds from Flutic, still in possession of the Skybreak Spatterlight. At the nearby port of Saskervoy he takes employment as a lowly worminger (a crew member responsible for the maintenance of huge marine worms) aboard the worm-propelled Galante, a merchant ship owned by Soldinck and Mercantides, hoping to reach Almery by sea. On the island of Lausicaa, where he is to be replaced by a more competent worminger and thus remain stranded, Cugel first takes advantage of a local custom (the mature men must wear viels)to impersonate others and extort funds. Then Cugel hijacks the Galante, kidnapping Soldinck's wife and three comely daughters. Madame Soldinck, to whom Cugel naively entrusts the duties of night helmsman, outwits her captor by turning the ship in the opposite direction every night while Cugel is asleep after dallying with her daughters. To evade retribution at the hands of Master Soldinck, who is pursuing the Galante in a lubberly cog, Cugel runs the ship aground on the Tustvold mud flats and wades ashore. (Chapters I.2, II.1, II.2, II.3)
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