The Review of the Dying Earth
Aug. 31st, 2009 10:33 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
bluegargantuaHi,
So last night I polished off Songs of the Dying Earth, a tribute anthology of stories set in the Jack Vance Dying Earth universe (home to Cugel the Clever, Rhialto the Magnificent and others. Some 23 short stories by a wide range of authors some very well known and others less so. We have stories that cover the darker Dying Earth style, the more comic style of Cugel and the baroque magic of Rhialto.
Anthologies are always a pretty dicey thing for me. It doesn't take too many bad or even mediocre stories before I decide that I've wasted my money. Further, the Dying Earth stories have a style that's easy to mimic but hard to do well. At 600+ pages of stories, I was a little nervous. I was happily surprised to find that pretty much every story is well done and a fair number of them go from good to great.
We have at least one story where Cugel is the protagonist and a couple involving Lianne and Chun the Unavoidable and Rhialto and Illdefonse make guest star appearances from time to time. Most stories simply use the setting to introduce their own characters and these are often the better stories in the collection.
If you're a fan of Vance, this collection of stories is worth looking into. If you haven't read Vance or his Dying Earth stuff, you should probably go pick that up instead and see what all the fuss is about.
later
Tom
So last night I polished off Songs of the Dying Earth, a tribute anthology of stories set in the Jack Vance Dying Earth universe (home to Cugel the Clever, Rhialto the Magnificent and others. Some 23 short stories by a wide range of authors some very well known and others less so. We have stories that cover the darker Dying Earth style, the more comic style of Cugel and the baroque magic of Rhialto.
Anthologies are always a pretty dicey thing for me. It doesn't take too many bad or even mediocre stories before I decide that I've wasted my money. Further, the Dying Earth stories have a style that's easy to mimic but hard to do well. At 600+ pages of stories, I was a little nervous. I was happily surprised to find that pretty much every story is well done and a fair number of them go from good to great.
We have at least one story where Cugel is the protagonist and a couple involving Lianne and Chun the Unavoidable and Rhialto and Illdefonse make guest star appearances from time to time. Most stories simply use the setting to introduce their own characters and these are often the better stories in the collection.
If you're a fan of Vance, this collection of stories is worth looking into. If you haven't read Vance or his Dying Earth stuff, you should probably go pick that up instead and see what all the fuss is about.
later
Tom
