The Dying Earth

It may come as a shock to some of you, but there are gaps in my reading list. There are some landmark works and authors that I have not read. Heck, in all honesty, what I haven't read may as well be an ocean with those books I'm familiar with represented as tiny desert islands scattered far and wide. And I'm even less well-read when it comes to recent publications and authors. But that's neither here nor there, it just illustrates how large a disappointment I am to the reading geekdom.

So I have started reading Jack Vance's The Dying Earth series. I got the omnibus volume SFBC put out some years back, but had never managed to get around to reading it. That changed the other night, when I removed the shrink wrap (yup--it stayed in the wrapper all these years) and sat down to read.

It's not what I expected. I'm not entirely getting into it, but that's not necessarily the book's fault. Where I though I'd be reading some sort of odd, far future epic (ala The Einstein Intersection), instead I'm finding a story that's very episodic. My expectations have been confused by reality, and changing my expectations has proven more difficult than one would expect. In many ways Dying Earth reminds me of Simak's City, although the styles are very different. And at the risk of bringing a chorus of "Germans bomb Pearl Harbor" upon my head, I'm mostly struck by how much this work by Vance resonates with Wolfe's Book of the New Sun. Were I a betting man, I wouldn't look too much further to pick a work that heavily influenced Mr. Wolfe.

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