Books like The Dying Earth

I did not like this book much the first time I read it, but after reading it a second time while visualizing its characters as puppets, I found I liked it much more.This book—particularly the first three stories—irritated me. I found its wizards to be contemptible creatures, morally inferior products of a degenerate age, capable only of memorizing a few detailed spells and casting them by rote (“Vancian Magic,” which later became a key element of “Dungeons and Dragons”). I was also appalled by their sexism: even the best try to fashion ideal women from scratch, while the majority desire only to catch women, cage them and rape them—the real reason for all their pathetic little spells. In addition, the book's prose—particularly the wizards' speeches—is grandiloquent and eccentric, harsh and grating, and crammed full of hard words. Such words—I remember thinking to myself—remind me of what Shakespeare's Angus says of Macbeth's titles: they “hang loose about him, like a giant's robe/ Upon a dwarfish thief.”This Renaissance reference must have unearthed old memories, for soon I was transported back to grad school at Ohio State, some forty years ago. At the time I was studying John Marston, and I was having a good deal of trouble enjoying his tragedies (Antonio and Mellida, Antonio's Revenge) because the speeches were so pompous, so ridiculously passionate, the plots so elaborate and absurd. Then I discovered a fact that changed my reaction completely. Whereas Shakespeare wrote for a general audience at an open air theater featuring adult actors, Marston wrote for an elite audience in a candlelit indoor theater featuring an acting company of children. Each of these passionate, pompous speeches—filled with mammoth emotions and murderous intent—had been declaimed in chiaroscuro by a costumed child. Knowing this, I could now appreciate Marston's mix of humor and biting satire. He was using grand speeches in the mouths of children to show us the littleness of man, a poor paltry creature of monumental passions trapped in a flickering world.So I read The Dying Earth again, as if it were a Punch and Judy show mounted with magnificent sets. Puppet wizards and puppet women now moved through a muted landscape, in a world of distilled evil dominated by a decadent sun. Sometimes they seem like mischievous children, sometimes like degenerate dwarfs, but at other times they seem like creatures of some new myth, a promise of stories to come beyond this dying world.So my advice is: stick with it. Imagine the characters as puppets or children or mice if you have to, but read this book all the way through until you get to the end. These stories—which are among Vance's first—get better as they go along, and the last three are very good indeed. The most interesting, at least as a literary influence, is “Ulan Dhor Ends a Dream.” This account of a metropolis where two different peoples live side by side, completely unable to perceive each others existence, bears striking similarities to China Mieville's The City and the City,. My favorite is “Liane the Wayfarer,” about a quest for a tapestry possessed by “Chun the Unavoidable,” but equally as good is the novella about the inquisitive “Guyal of Sfere,” who has many questions to ask the Curator of “The Museum of Man.”