Songs of the Dying Earth

While he was considering these prospects, he saw amid the crowd the Darkographer Kaiine. Evillo recalled how he had misunderstood the gallant’s warning — not to avoid stepping upon the snail, but simply to avoid the snail altogether.

So easily might one topple into folly. One must have things straight.

He therefore at once asked Kandive, “And is my name Evillo, as I have thought from the age of seven?”

“Not at all,” replied the puzzled Kandive. “By the cyclopaedia, whatever put such an idea in your head?

“What then, sir, is my name?”

“Why, my boy, hear, and thereafter bear with pride your true cognomen, written in the archives of Ascolais. It is Blurkel.”

Evillo staggered. Supposing this due to rapture, Kandive clapped him on the back.

But it was the full weight of the strident three-fold curse of Pendatas Baard, coming home to roost. Vented upon him in the name of Blurkel, the young man felt it attach itself like a swarm of stones.

That very night, as all feasted in the lavish courts of Kandive, the recurrent leucomorph uncharacteristically dropped from a chandelier upon Blurkel. Its attack had been much refined by practice.

Afterword:

For me, Jack Vance is one of the literary gods.

In the earliest ’70’s, when I was in a very unhappy and depressed condition, my magical, wise mother, (who had already turned me on to mythology, history, and SF), bought me Jack Vance’s The Dying Earth. At once I escaped my leaden state and entered the teeming and ironically shining landscape of Vance’s extraordinary, decadently future world.

I still possess this volume — the English Mayflower edition — treasured and often read, though by now its pages are pale brown and many are loose inside the cover. (The spine seems to have been nibbled by a pelgrane).

The Dying Earth novels and stories are picaresque adventures in the truest sense, peripatetic, and express-paced. They carry echoes not only of the Thousand Nights and a Night, but of such other witty sombre epics as Gulliver’s Travels, not to mention the visions of Milton and Blake. Vance seems genuinely, within the fantasy-SF envelope, to access the Mediaeval mind: here the world may end at any moment and fabulous beasts and monsters coexist with sinful, selfish, and (rarely) spiritual man. The narratives range from the screamingly hilarious to the seductively beautiful, to the shockingly — if fastidiously presented — violent. As for black humour, Vance might have invented it.

Such masterworks have fired and — I hope — taught my imagination, ever since the first plunge. Influence is too small a word. What I owe to Vance’s genius, as avid fan and compulsive writer; is beyond calculation.

Every book reasserts its peerless magic on every one of the uncountable times I re-re-read it. In fact, I don’t quite believe Jack Vance invented the Dying Earth. Part of me knows he’s been there. Often.

But then. He takes us there too, doesn’t he?

— Tanith Lee

Dan Simmons The Guiding Nose of Ulfänt Banderōz