This is an ongoing sporadic series, in which I explore classic fantasy and science fiction works. Appendix N is the bibliography of Gary Gygax's original Dungeon Masters Guide, and lists a range of classic SF and fantasy authors that influenced his interest in the fantastical. See the first part of this series for more information.
Jack Vance
Vance was born in San Francisco in 1916 and grew up reading authors like Edgar Rice Burroughs. The family suffered during the Great Depression when it coincided with the death of his grandfather (Vance’s father having absconded to Mexico long before). He studied engineering and journalism at UC Berkeley, and was lucky in that he resigned a job at the shipyards in Pearl Harbour about a month before the attack. He didn’t start writing in earnest until the 1940s, and in later life lost his sight, relying on transcription software to continue writing.
He’s got a huge bibliography, and the Appendices only offer two titles – The Dying Earth and Eyes of the Overworld (aka Cugel the Clever). There are two more Dying Earth books – Cugel’s Saga and Rhialto the Marvellous – that are not included, but worth a read (more later).
The Dying Earth
The first book is an anthology of tales set in the Dying Earth setting, where the sun is old and red, and the inhabitants live under a sense of existential dread, awaiting the final days of the world.
The stories are loosely linked – characters mentioned tangentially in one story will get their own story later on. In Mazirian the Magician, Mazirian has a rival magician Turjan held captive – shrunk to a tiny size and placed in a maze with a reptile as a form of torture. Mazirian wants to learn the ways of creating artificial life from Turjan as his own endeavours are deficient. At the same time, Mazirian becomes obsessed by a mysterious woman who eludes him – this turns out to be T’sain, a construct made by Turjan, and part of a plot to rescue him.
In some versions, the story of Turjan of Mir is placed first, since chronologically it tells of how Turjan travels to the otherworldly realm of the mysterious magician Pandalume (who doesn’t permit anyone to view him directly). Turjan encounters T’sais, a woman created by Pandalume who has the flaw that everything is ugly and hateful to her. Turjan creates T’sain as a kinder version of T’sais.
We then get the story of T’sais, of how she meets T’sain, and goes on a quest to learn how to understand beauty and goodness. In the course of here travels she meets the cursed traveller Etarr, and two team up to break their respective curses. They also encounter the “bandit-troubador” Liane the Wanderer.
Liane, like Mazirian, is a thoroughly venal and cruel man, a little like a template for Cugel later on. He is quite happy to kill people that displease him, but meets his just desserts at the hands of Lith the beautiful witch, and the creature Chun the Unavoidable.
Mention is made throughout of Prince Kandive the Golden, who features as the sponsor to the next character, Ulan Dhor. Here we first encounter one of Vance’s themes, where Ulan Dhor is sent on a quest to recover two stone tablets. He finds them in a city inhabited by two groups of people, distinguished by the colour of their clothing, who are unable to see each other and believes the other group to be ghosts and demons. Shades of China Mieville’s The City and The City.
This sense of delusion is revisited in the final, longest, story, that of Guyal of Sfere. Guyal’s only link to the previous stories is geographical, coming from the same region as most of the other characters. Guyal as a young man is obsessed with finding answers, and he is sent on a quest to find an ancient library, perhaps just to get him out of the way. We get the first of Vance’s favourite picaresque adventures, eventually leading to an ancient ruin where the custodian still believes to be a city in its prime. The domain is threatened by a demonic face forcing its way between dimensions and exhaling wraiths from its nostrils; the visuals reminded me of Merritt’s The Face in the Abyss.
Eyes of the Overworld/Cugel The Clever
Unlike the previous Dying Earth anthology, this follows the adventures of a single character, Cugel the Clever. Cugel is a minor thief who gets strongarmed into trying to rob Iouconnou the Laughing Magician. It doesn’t go well for him, and he ends up getting transported far across the Dying Earth to retrieve one of the Eyes of the Overworld for Ioconnou. To stop him from shirking, Iouconnou inflicts Cugel with a spiky demonic creature, Firx, clamped to his internal organs to inflict pain should he try to deviate from the mission.
The story is a series of incidents as Cugel tries to return to Iouconnu. The first episode tells of how he gains one of the “Eyes”, in reality a violet contact lens that allows the wearer to see the Overworld, a fantastic and luxurious place that masks the squalor of the real world. This is a familiar theme for Vance, and for some other Appendix N authors (notably Lin Carter and Edgar Rice Borroughs) wherein inhabitants of squalor believe themselves to be living in magnificent luxury through magical or self-delusion.
Cugel's adventures take him past bandits and the monsters of Dying Earth (grues, deodands, leucomorphs and others), to a city that watches for the return of a giant figure that they believe will destroy them. He joins a group of pilgrims and tricks them into helping across a desert wilderness, and eventually when he gets back to Iouconnu his attempts to wreak revenge go terribly awry.
Cugel is a trickster figure, a Harlequin, driven by his greed and appetites to get into trouble, and then by luck or trickery escape again. He always loses whatever he gains, harms innocents and guilty alike, and utterly fails to learn any lessons. He’s quite a dislikeable character, but even so there is a sense that you want him to succeed. Quite often I read more of an author’s work than the Appendixes give me, and in the past I have read Cugel’s Saga and Rhialto the Marvellous, but frankly I’d had enough of Cugel by the end of this book.
Vance has a very sesquipedalian way of writing that becomes more so as the stories progress. I like his sense of understatement coupled with complex phraseology, but it can get a bit wearing, especially when all characters plus the narrative voice are using it -
"“Perhaps, on the plea of emergency, you might persuade him to vacate the chamber and occupy the pallet in my stead,” suggested Cugel. “I doubt if he is capable of such abnegation,” the innkeeper replied. “But why not put the inquiry yourself? I, frankly, do not wish to broach the matter.”
Cugel, surveying Lodermulch’s strongly-marked features, his muscular arms and the somewhat disdainful manner in which he listened to the talk of the pilgrims, was inclined to join the innkeeper in his assessment of Lodermulch’s character, and made no move to press the request.
Inspirations
The most obvious, and most well-known inspiration from Vance on the Dungeons and Dragons game is the magic system. Magicians of the Dying Earth must imprint spells on their brain, and once cast, the spell is gone; hence the term “Vancian” for the traditional D&D magic system. This is somewhat changed in modern editions of the game, utilising spell slots, but some forms of magic-user still need to prepare spells ahead of time.
Certain of the Dying Earth spells are clearly inspirations for D&D spells as well. The Excellent Prismatic Spray, for example. The effects of Vance's spell Forlorn Encystment is the same as the D&D spell entombment, and Rhialto the Marvellous uses Temporal Stasis. Many are named for Phandaal, bringing to mind the various name spells of D&D. The Ioun stones magic item is another with a clear lift from Vance. It’s also somewhat known that the arch-lich Vecna gets his name from an anagram of Vance, although to my knowledge Jack Vance kept both eyes and both hands throughout his life (even if his eyes stopped bothering to work).
None of the creatures of the Dying Earth – the pelgranes, the deodands, the twk-men and others, seem to have made their way into D&D but could be created easily enough - the dragonfly-riding Twk-men are not dissimilar to Philip Pullman's Gallivespians. One unseen influence, I think, is that Vance’s prose style seems to have influenced Gary Gygax. Not least the somewhat prolix and baroque method of describing things, but also his love of metanyms for colours – neither Vance nor Gygax is satisfied with describing something as purple when lilac, lavender, periwinkle or amethyst are available. It does mean, however, that Vance makes the Dying Earth setting as visually evocative as Dunsany’s or Lovecraft’s dream-like words.
You could go beyond Vance’s Dying Earth works for more inspiration, not least the fantasy trilogy Lyonesse, framed around a very dark tale of suicide and murder, bringing in bits of myth and legend from Lyonesse (obviously), Ys, and Arthurian mythos. There’s a sense that this is the same setting as the Dying Earth, but at an earlier time through the use of alternative worlds and demonic invocations. Other elements of Vance’s works found their way into the pages of White Dwarf, which you can find in my Fiend Factory series – the Phung from the Planet of Adventure series, and the creatures from The Dragon Masters, as well as a mini scenario centred around Chun the Unavoidable. Certainly any of the encounters that Cugel experiences could be used as the basis for a mini-scenario or two.
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