Dying Earth
Dust jacket of the 1999 omnibus edition
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The Dying Earth (1950)
The Eyes of the Overworld (1966) Cugel's Saga (1983) Rhialto the Marvellous (1984) |
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| Author | Jack Vance |
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| Cover artist | various Gerald Brom, depicted |
| Country | United States |
| Language | English |
| Genre | Fantasy, Dying Earth subgenre |
| Published | 1950–1984 |
| Media type | |
| No. of books | 4 by Vance (see sequels) |
Dying Earth is a fantasy series by the American author Jack Vance, comprising four books originally published from 1950 to 1984. Some have been called picaresque. They vary from short story collection to fix-up (novel created from older short stories) perhaps all the way to novel.
The first book in the series, The Dying Earth, was ranked number 16 of 33 "All Time Best Fantasy Novels" by Locus in 1987, based on a poll of subscribers, although it was marketed as a collection and the ISFDB calls it a "loosely connected series of stories".
The stories of the Dying Earth series are set in the distant future, at a point when the sun is almost exhausted and magic has reasserted itself as a dominant force. The Moon has disappeared and the Sun is in danger of burning out at any time, often flickering as if about to go out, before shining again. The various civilizations of Earth have collapsed for the most part into decadence and its inhabitants overcome with a fatalistic outlook. The Earth is mostly barren and cold, and has become infested with various predatory monsters (possibly created by a magician in a former age).
Vance wrote the stories of the first book while he served in the United States Merchant Marine during World War II. In the late 1940s several of his other stories were published in magazines.
According to pulp editor Sam Merwin, Vance's earliest magazine submissions in the 1940s were heavily influenced by the style of James Branch Cabell. Fantasy historian Lin Carter has noted several probable lasting influences of Cabell on Vance's work, and suggests that the early "pseudo-Cabell" experiments bore fruit in The Dying Earth (1950).
The series comprises four books by Vance and some sequels by other authors that may be or may have been canonical.
One 741-page omnibus has been issued as The Compleat Dying Earth (SF Book Club, 1999) and in both the US and UK as Tales of the Dying Earth (2000).
All four books were published with Tables of Contents, the first and fourth as collections. The second and third contained mostly material previously published in short story form but were marketed as novels, the second as a fix-up and the third without acknowledging any previous publication.
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Wikipedia