Rating: 
Summary: A must read! The perfect introduction to Vance's Mastery
Review: Jack Vance excels at the picaresque adventure. Most of his best work takes this form of episodic adventures, which allow Vance to display his incredible imagination, and his anthroplogical fascination about how diverse human cultures can become. The Dying Earth particularly shines in the second and third novels, Eyes of the Overworld and Cugel's Saga. Cugel is a terrific anti-hero; he's completely immoral, while still managing to elicit the reader's loyalty. However, for every despicable, selfish act that Cugel perpetrates, there are an equal number of brutish acts by almost all the other characters in the book. It's a world where stepping outdoors (especially after dark) will lead to a quick death at the hands of any number of monsters that have taken over the uncivilized earth. The humans are routinely roguish, and Cugel's acts of revenge are a delight to read.The first set of stories are less connected, and show a little bit of age. They are still very good, however. The last set of stories about Rhialto the Marvelous are also great. Rhialto shares a little of the dark, smug quality of Cugel without being quite such a jackass. A previous reviewer remarked upon the misogynistic tone, especially in the Murthe in Rhialto the Marvelous. This story is pretty ridiculous; Vance is definitley not known for his treatment of women. However, it's not too difficult to move past these attitudes. This same reviewer only wanted to award it 3 stars for being too slight a work. I disagree. These stories are very well written, very enjoyable, and have an unusual style. I like that Vance has embraced the episodic approach. This book is ten times better than most of the stuff out there with grander visions. I kept thinking what a great movie this would make.
Rating:
Summary: A timeless classic
Review: Jack Vance has created an engaging and enticing world set in the last days of Earth, when our sun has all but sputtered out. In this dying age, madmen, magicians and otherworldly fiends strive for dominance in a world of Machiavellian sorcery and science, where a person's every act is viewed with suspicion - and an act of generosity even more so!
Rating:
Summary: Jack Vance's Masterpiece
Review: Jack Vance is one of the finest stylists writing today. He is among the most inventive, clever, even seductive, makers of alien worlds ever to grace the genres of science fiction and fantasy; and THE DYING EARTH, his first novel, is his most evocative, haunting, and powerful work. Long out of print, that short book is one of the central influences on modern science fiction, and the favorite book of many readers. In his BOOK OF THE NEW SUN, Gene Wolfe writes of a "Book of Gold" used by librarians to lure children to their calling; Wolfe states that for him, the "Book of Gold" that captivated him forever in the world of letters was THE DYING EARTH. Elegaic, rich, and filled with wonders and visions you will never forget, THE DYING EARTH along justifies purchasing this collection. The volume, however, contains not just one indescribably good book, but three other novels set in the same impossibly distant and strange future. THE EYES OF THE OVERWORLD is highly entertaining and contains some of Vance's best dialogue (and one of the best endings in recent literature). CUGEL'S SAGA further follows the rogue Cugel, and RHIALTO THE MARVELOUS is the (presumably) final story set on Vance's red-sunned future Earth. Taken together, these four books are as good a reading value as you're likely to find anywhere this year, or for many years to come. Every serious reader of science fiction should own these books, of course, but everyone who enjoys wonder, mystery, and beauty should read them.
Rating:
Summary: Fantastic Stories Take You to New Worlds of Wonder
Review: Jack Vance must be the best kept secret of the science fiction/fantasy, spec fiction genre. He is simply so different, and at times strange, in his approach, that his stories never bore and always create a sense of wonder which, sadly, is mostly lacking in today's spec fiction market. A wonderful read, but don't stop with this book. Any Vance work is worthwhile.
Rating: 
Summary: Pretty Good, But Uneven
Review: Jack Vance's compilation around the Dying Earth, a world where any quest, any deed has a greatness limited by the fact that the world has only a limited amount of time left is, all in all worth reading. The best part of the compilation is the beginning section, a series of short stories. These combine the hopeless ennui of this dying world with a modicum of moral lessons and violence. One finds in the early stories that no matter how evil and nefarious one is there is someone around the corner even more evil, nefarious and powerful.
The two books based on the exploits of Cugel the Clever are a little weaker, in particular the second-Cugel's Saga. There is a disjointed effect to this section, it is as if one could completely re-order the chapters, with minimal editing and the story would be the same.
Rhialto the magnificent also is a disappointment, though there is some good humor in this sector, characterization is very weak. Rhialto in particular is weak; he comes across as a suit of empty clothes. His lady-love is a cookie-cutter 1950's style fawning heroine whose only apparent purpose is existing is the be the love interest of Rhialto.
There is a fairly high level of violence, some of it sexual in the story. I would hesitate to call this misogyny as much of the violence is directed against males. Still, it is all in all a good read when one wants a different kind of fantasy story with a different kind of hero.
Rating: 
Summary: Adventures in Abendland
Review: Jack Vance, who is possibly a nonagenarian, began writing for the pulps in the 1940s, just after the war -- mostly science fiction, but other genres as well. He is plausibly the successor of Leigh Brackett, one of the supreme practitioners of the subgenre known as planetary romance. But Vance is a bigger talent. Brackett's forte was the long short-story or novella, sometimes in cycles, adding up to an episodic longer tale. Vance used a bigger canvass than Brackett. The title of one of his early significant tales is, indeed, "Big Planet." Vance created not only whoe societies, but whole world jostling with distinc societies. "Tales of Dying Earth" are set, as the title suggests, on a far-futural earth in the sidereal decadence of the solar system. The sun has cooled; the human race has aged -- into a kind of senility. The whole planet has lapsed into a new feudalism and magic, perhaps the remnants of a previous superscience, is once again part of the technical repertory of mankind. The main character is a picaroon, in the mold of the protagonists in Quevedo and the Spanish Sevententh Century writers. He is a would-be master magician whose spells generally go disastrously wrong. The plot, such as it is, is not very important. What holds the reader's interest is the richly imagined background of weird, end-of-time societies. The action is semi-comic, but the atmosphere is eery, and this makes for a pquant mixture. Call it Lazarillo de Torres meets Oswald Spengler. Recommended.
Rating:
Summary: Funny!
Review: The best parts are in the middle: the two Cugel novels. I really enjoyed the humor in the Cugel novels; there were several times when I laughed out loud. The scene where Cugel grills, then eats TOTALITY is hilarious. As is the sequence where Cugel is employed as a "worminger". The Dying Earth stories are wonderful and evocative. I particularly enjoyed Liane the Wayfarer. Liane is a bit like Cugel, but a lot more cruel and a lot less funny. Haven't reread Rhialto the Marvelous yet, but I remember enjoying it several years ago, but I remember being disappointed that Cugel didn't make an appearance. Long live Cugel the Clever!
Rating:
Summary: maybe the best fantasy of all time!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!
Review: The blockbuster all-time best fantasy/scifi novel "DyingEarth" by Jack Vance is back ....! For some reason, Jack Vance's, fantasy is much better, more clever, more beautiful than his scifi (and this IS fantasy, despite the sci/fi cover). When I read his potboiler scifi, I scratch my head and say why did he write this? But Dying Earth is the greatest. Actually the Complete Dying Earth is four books in one. This book inspired 40 years of writers, Gene Wolfe, Roger Zelazny, Michael Shea to name a few. It's hysterically funny. Set in the far, far distant future. The purple sun is old and feeble and getting ready to go out all the time (fun & games). In fact it blinks out form time to time - everyone looks up - then it comes back on. Well, as the sun has become weak, science and scientific inventions no longer work. Only magic. This may not sound funny but it's full of satire and social comment. The spiteful wizards are full of wacky magic spells like "Forelorn Encystment" where object or their ire is transported to a very small hole (cyst) deep inside the earth! "Eyes of the Overworld", is set in a Dying Earth place full religious fanatics and , well, waste, and the inhabitants are up to their necks in poop, but if they are good and stay in line and follow the rules of their society (for 30 years or so) they get to wear these glasses which give them visions of paradise. (While still living in waste), the owner of the glasses see themselves surrounded by luxurious exotic food, dancing girls, castles, riches, etc etc. It is the rogue hero Cugel's task to get some Overworld glasses, by any means necessary, and bring the Grinning Magician, Iioconnu. The Grinning Magician caught Cugel trying to steal from his manse, and has , by magic, affixed an angry star creature inside Cugel on his liver. If Cugel strays from his task, the star creature gives his liver a hard squeeze.... this gives you an idea of the wackyness here! Yes, the dialogue is arch, but that adds to the charm! This is the one of, if not the greatest fantasy series ever written, I do not exaggerate. Ranks with Alice in Wonderland. If something EVER deserved 5 stars this is it!! Cannot be too highly recommended! Buy it, it will cheer you.
Rating:
Summary: Jack Vance -- The Best
Review: There is no wordsmith active today that can write a better sentance that Jack Vance. Any aspiring author that does not spend hours reading Vance is doing his or her own readers huge disservice. Jack Vance's fantasy works are him at his best. The character Cugel that features in two of the works collected in Tales of the Dying Earth is a unique anti-hero that readers will love. Rhialto is another facinating creation of Vance's fertile mind.
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Summary: Optimism at the end of time
Review: There is something unusual about Jack Vance which reminds me of two of my other favorite writers, Philip K Dick and Stanislaw Lem. That is the conceit of hiding subtle, and nuanced social commentary beneath a veneer of light escapism. Lem, writing from behind the iron curtain, wrote brilliantly clever Robot fairy tales with sly underlying critiques of power and human folly. Those who know Philip K Dick's work also know how much biting wit he hid behind what seem superficially goofy sci fi tales. I'm starting to realise Vance was doing much the same thing. The first time I read the Dying Earth (the original anthology of short stories) was when I found it on a bookshelf as a young teenager. I found the stories entertaining at the time, with hints of genius, but ultimately they seemed like nothing more or less than escapism, of the kind of fantasy found in the dungeons and dragons games I was into back then (no coincidence, Vance was a key inspiration for that game, for better or worse), albiet perhaps the best possible example of the genre I had encountered. As I ran into the other Dying Earth novels over the years, and read them again and again, I think I originally had the same reaction many other people did. I was a little put off at first by the grandiose words and odd use of language (I had to read the books with a dictoinary by my side) the flowery dialogue, the 'thin' unlikely plot. But early on I recognized something about it that was unique. Over the years, as I vorcaciously absorbed basically everything written in the Fantasy and Sci Fi Genres, it was Vance and one or two others that stuck with me. Returning again and again to the Dying Earth books in particular, it was the small things about them which increasingly struck me as more than merely clever and amusing... the ironic prose, the delightful come-uppances, the ruthless turn-abouts, the put downs and verbal contests. As so much else fell by the wayside, the words of Jack Vance stayed with me. As I grew older and began to experience people from all walks of life, some of these characters and situations resonated still more. It struck me, that what had seemed like haphazard or almost random human situations in those stories were actually archetypes of many dilemmas in the human condition, some of which I had never seen expressed as clearly anywhere else. The self serving morality, the technical obfuscation, the distorted spirituality... the facility of man to delude himself. These traits shine through from the characters in the books, and I recognized them more and more often in real life. How many times have I encountered the rationaization of the "laws of Equivalency" in real life, or felt the pang of self doubt that cugel does just as he realises he's been duped yet again... Of couse, while amusing, cugel is a fairly awful person, (though he seems to evolve ethically somewhat by the end of the second novel, finally learning something about the futility of revenge) . I think in general thinking of cugel as any kind of literal moral guide is silly. Similarly, those reviewers who thought the Murthe novella was 'mysogynisitc' miss the point. It is a swiftian parody of mans failure to understand, or even be willing to try to understand women. There is one hilarious passage where the learned Wizards discuss a profound tome purported to explain everything understood about the nature of woman at the very end of history, wherin the female genius is compared to a river which occasionally overflows it's banks. The only reccomended solution is to ride it out with 'stout boat of high freeboard'. My girlfriend found this hilarious. Yes, cugel is a lout and a bufoon. In a sense, he reminds me of an anti-heroic variation of Don Quixote. While Don Quixote's grandiose schemes of glory and noble chivalry fall through, Cugel's equally grandiose schemes of revenge and domination over his enemies also invariably fail, in both cases causing great chaos for those around them. Cugel of course lives in an even more cynical time at the very end of the world. A time where there ARE wizards and dragons and giants, but they are as petty and manipulative as the peasants and bandits faced by Quixote. As cugel travels from one scene to another, we are treated to a lurid landscape of all the myriad forms that human self delusion and inspired stupidity can take. Even as Cervantes uses the backdrop of Don Quixote's travels to lampoon 16th century Spain, Vance uses cugel's travels across the Dying Earth to do the same thing to all of humanity, from the very beginning of time to the day the sun winks out of existence. Ultimately, not just the protagonist cugel, but all of the characters in the Dying earth novels have one thing in common: they are all fools. Even at the very end of history, we have learned nothing except perhaps, a better vocabulary. I think this is something Vance is telling us about ourselves. One thing I can promise you about the Dying Earth, the laughs do come harder and longer with every read, even if you feel to some degree as if you are laughing at yourself. DB
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