The stories included in The Dying Earth introduce a large number of seekers of wisdom and beauty, lovely lost women, wizards of every shade of eccentricity with their runic amulets and spells. We meet up with the melancholy deodands, who feed on individual flesh as well as the twk-men, who ride dragonflies and trade info for salt.

A couple of monsters and demons. Each getting is certainly morally ambiguous: The bad are charming, the nice are dangerous. Each is in the home in Vance’s lyrically referred to fantastic scenery like about The Dying Globe Embelyon where, “The sky [was] a mesh of vast ripples and cross-ripples and these refracted one thousand shafts of coloured light, rays which in mid-air wove wondrous laces, rainbow nets, in all the jewel hues….” The dying Globe itself is otherworldly: “A dark blue sky, a historical sun…. Nothing at all of Globe was organic or harsh-the surface, the trees, the rock and roll ledge protruding through the meadow; all these had been proved helpful upon, smoothed, aged, mellowed. The light from the sun, though dim, was wealthy and spent every object of the property … with a sense of lore and ancient recollection.” Welcome.

“The Dying Earth and its sequels comprise perhaps one of the most powerful illusion/science-fiction principles in the history of the genre. They may be packed with adventure but also with ideas, and the vision of uncounted human civilizations stacked one atop another like levels within a phyllo pastry thrills even while it induces a feeling of awe [at] … the fragility and transience of most issues, the nobility of humanity’s struggle against the certainty of the entropic resolution.” – Dean Koontz, author of the Odd Thomas novels. “He gives you glimpses of whole worlds with just perfectly turned language. If he’d been created south from the border, he’d end up being up for a Nobel Reward.” – Dan Simmons author of The Hyperion Cantos.