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A review by leifalreadyexists
The Dying Earth by Jack Vance
5.0
Few bookish experiences are akin to reading the whispersilk elegance of Jack Vance's cruel, unsparingly despairing and interlocking stories about the various individual journeys taken by the proud, the greedy, and the curious at the end of the death of the world. Marked by the immense transformation of the post-modern world, when the euphoria of industrialization had been burnt, blackened, and blown to pieces by two world wars, two atomic bombs, and the disarray of the imagination that followed revelations of concentration camps and human cruelty, not to mention the domestic violence of the nuclear family at empowered masculinity's hands as an American response to societal transformation, Vance's composite image is a distillation of the pessimistic end-point of all of this historic change. His focus on intertwining individuals foretells the rise of the neoliberal paradigm that reduces society to individuals, but with the difference that, for Vance and unlike contemporary powers that be (and the array of role-playing games that Vance helped to spawn, that focus on individual empowerment above all else!), it is undesirable.
But what a vision he builds: iridescent colours, unimaginable splendours, and unparalleled cruelties. Travels with fantastical dangers; a magic built of genre-altering ease; characters with outlandish names and outsized personalities.
The mistake is to think that this will be an easy read, and that these will be kind and sympathetic people whose moralities are those of neoliberal's socially-conscious hangover, with lip-service to a disappearing safety net and piety garbing the soft cloth that wraps hard societal power. Vance trains his eyes on the behaviour of the deeply unpleasant, especially those who wield misogynistic violence, as he recognizes that their power in his own world is as destructive. However, there is an allowance here at the death of the world: dramatic irony. No-one comes out well, but the evil and the cruel are saved an especially vicious fate, with the wilfully ignorant committing acts of clear atrocity and the pleasant and curious finding their way to small mercies and survivals. This is not to say that Vance escapes unscathed or his stories unmarred, and there are plenty of gendered assumptions structuring his narrative armature of desire and personality. In this, too, the mistake is to think this will be an easy read.
The Dying Earth does something only infrequently found: it viscerally responds to its historical moment, and in doing so lays the foundation for an immense flourishing of genre literature that follows, from Dungeons and Dragons to the tropes and trails of contemporary fantasy. I was disturbed, discomforted, enthralled.
But what a vision he builds: iridescent colours, unimaginable splendours, and unparalleled cruelties. Travels with fantastical dangers; a magic built of genre-altering ease; characters with outlandish names and outsized personalities.
The mistake is to think that this will be an easy read, and that these will be kind and sympathetic people whose moralities are those of neoliberal's socially-conscious hangover, with lip-service to a disappearing safety net and piety garbing the soft cloth that wraps hard societal power. Vance trains his eyes on the behaviour of the deeply unpleasant, especially those who wield misogynistic violence, as he recognizes that their power in his own world is as destructive. However, there is an allowance here at the death of the world: dramatic irony. No-one comes out well, but the evil and the cruel are saved an especially vicious fate, with the wilfully ignorant committing acts of clear atrocity and the pleasant and curious finding their way to small mercies and survivals. This is not to say that Vance escapes unscathed or his stories unmarred, and there are plenty of gendered assumptions structuring his narrative armature of desire and personality. In this, too, the mistake is to think this will be an easy read.
The Dying Earth does something only infrequently found: it viscerally responds to its historical moment, and in doing so lays the foundation for an immense flourishing of genre literature that follows, from Dungeons and Dragons to the tropes and trails of contemporary fantasy. I was disturbed, discomforted, enthralled.