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The Dying Earth by Jack Vance6/28/2023 The people that remain have mostly sunk into physical indolence and moral turpitude, but there are hints that justice has not yet been utterly vanquished. The Earth is largely depopulated, full of ruins and terrible monsters that roam at will. The melodramatic names, the overly complicated vocabulary, the slightly stilted presentation, all of that is in The Dying Earth.Īlso, the post-apocalyptic mood of D&D and AD&D comes from here. Reading the book, the influence is obvious, but I also feel like Gary’s peculiar style in his TSR products come from here too. The Dying Earth is famous, or infamous, as the source of Vancian magic, the system of magic used in D&D. However, I wanted to stop and review The Dying Earth because it was specifically cited in Gygax’s Appendix N. The volume I read was an omnibus edition, Tales of the Dying Earth, which contains the 1950 Tales of Dying Earth, along with the much later The Eyes of the Overworld (1966), Cugel’s Saga (1983), and Rhialto the Marvellous (1984). What I got was a collection of loosely connected short stories and novellas about searching for knowledge, love, and hope in a world of cruelty and despair. I knew that Jack Vance had written about a decaying and declining Earth of the far future, when the Sun has swollen with ruddy light. The Dying Earth is not at all what I expected.
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