I confess I haven’t been reading much science fiction in recent years. It isn’t that I’ve lost interest in it, exactly. But life is finite, the supply of books to read is well-nigh infinite, and one has to keep that disparity in mind when making one’s reading selections. About a decade ago, as I was entering my sixties, I realized that although I had read an immense number of SF novels, I had never read Gibbon’s Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire or Tolstoy’s War and Peace. Reading science fiction has given me much pleasure over the years, but maybe, I thought, the time has come to clear some space in the reading schedule for Gibbon and Tolstoy instead of reaching for that new Gregory Benford novel.

So I read Gibbon. I read Tolstoy. Those are big books, and gobbled up months of reading time, and very rewarding reading they were, too. And so it has gone ever since—it became time to read or reread Thucydides, or Carlyle’s The French Revolution, or Ovid’s Metamorphoses, and SF kept getting pushed to one side. Suddenly, though, I’m hungry for tales of space and time again. But despite what I said above about finite reading time and infinite numbers of books to choose from, I’ve begun rereading the great science fiction books of my youth, re-experiencing them from the other end of life, and I’m going to talk about those books and my modern-day feelings about them in several columns this year.

* * *

I started with Jack Vance’s The Dying Earth, a book I’ve read and reread any number of times since it first appeared in 1950, and which, apparently, I never tire of reading.

I still have my original copy of the book, and there’s a story connected with it. The fall of 1950 saw the arrival of Worlds Beyond, a new SF magazine edited by Damon Knight. On the back cover of the first issue was an ad for The Dying Earth, a novel by Jack Vance, which was described in these words:

Time had worn out the sun, and Earth was spinning quickly toward eternal darkness. In the forests strange animals hid behind twisted trees, plotting death; in the cities men made constant revel and sought sorcery to cheat the dying world. . . .

 

I had to have it. Not only was I particularly fond of  Vance’s soaring imagination and voluptuous prose, but the novel of the far future had had special appeal to me ever since my discovery of H.G. Wells’s The Time Machine when I was about ten. Finding it, though, was not so simple. This was the era of the Korean War paper shortages, and Hillman Publications, the publishers of Worlds Beyond and the paperback series that included The Dying Earth, had swiftly killed both the magazine and the paperback line. The Dying Earth’s first edition became an instant rarity, and only through luck was I able to find a copy.

I confess my younger self was disappointed at first. It wasn’t a novel, I quickly discovered, just six loosely related tales with a common background and a few overlapping characters. (Mysteriously, the first two chapters were reversed in that edition, so that the central character of the opening section was a woman not created until Chapter Two.) And all the sorcery bothered me, the demons and wizards and other such Arabian Nights filigree. What I wanted then was scientific verisimilitude and technological razzle-dazzle, a literal revelation of time to come, not magic. (Arthur Clarke had not yet coined his famous dictum about how hard it is to tell science and magic apart in a technologically advanced society.)

So at the age of fifteen I failed fully to appreciate The Dying Earth because I had asked it to be that which it was not. Still, I admired the music of the prose and the elegance of the wit, the cunning of the characters and the subtlety of human interaction. And when I read it again, five years or so later, I could forgive it for not being hard-edged SF and I began to love it for its own sake. I’ve reread it every ten or fifteen years since, always with immense pleasure.

 

Now, after a gap of some twenty years, I have read it yet again, and I was delighted to find that it still sings to me. I still love the sly mal-evolent characters, the beautiful prose, the cunning plotting. The sorcery element bothers me not at all: the workings of Vance’s wizards’ spells are inexplicable to me, but so, too, are the workings of the modem that brings me the incredible richness of the Internet every morning.

 

The names of characters, how magical: Pandelume of Embelyon, Prince Kandive the Golden, Thrang the ghoul-bear, Rogol Domedonfors, and—especially—Chun the Unavoidable! The Deodands, the Twk-men, the Gauns. And the place-names: Grand Motholam, the river Scaum, the Ide of Kauchique, the lost city of Ampridatvir!

The names of spells: the Excellent Prismatic Spray, Phandaal’s Gyrator, the Expansible Egg, the Omnipotent Sphere, the Spell of the Slow Hour, the Mantle of Stealth, the Call to the Violent Cloud.

 

An essay by the late scholar of fantasy Lin Carter notes that Sam Merwin, who edited the SF magazines Startling Stories and Thrilling Wonder Stories in the 1940s, read and rejected “fascinating, but, alas, unpublishable pseudo-Cabellian fantasies” by Vance during the war years before purchasing, in 1945, “The World-Thinker,” Vance’s first commercially published story. Carter assumes, correctly, I think, that these “pseudo-Cabellian fantasies” were the six Dying Earth tales that eventually became that ephemeral 1950 Hillman paperback. If so, it means that Vance (who was born in 1916) was in his twenties when he wrote them. This is remarkably accomplished prose for a writer in his twenties—for any writer, indeed.

That there is a strong flavor of James Branch Cabell in Vance’s style is beyond question. Consider this, from Cabell’s Jurgen:

“All this,” said Jurgen, “seems regrettable, but not strikingly explicit. I have a heart and a half to serve you, sir, with not seven-eighths of a notion of what you want of me. Come, put a name to it!”

 

But I see the influence of Lord Dunsany here too, and several critics have convincingly shown the impact of Clark Ashton Smith’s fantasies and John Ruskin’s writings on painting and architecture on Vance’s style. About 1964 I asked Vance about the literary antece-dents of The Dying Earth, specifically citing Dunsany, and he brushed the question aside so effectively that I never raised it again with him.

 

His use of color: how wonderful!

Most strange, however, was the sky, a mesh of vast ripples and cross-ripples, and these refracted a thousand shafts of colored light, rays which in mid-air wove wondrous laces, rainbow nets, in all the jewel hues. So as Turjan watched, there swept over him beams of claret, topaz, rich violent, radiant green. He now perceived that the colors of the flowers and the trees were but fleeting functions of the sky, for now the flowers were of salmon tint, and the trees a dreaming purple. The flowers deepened to copper, then with a suffusion of crimson, warmed through maroon to scarlet, and the trees had become sea-blue.

 

The courtly dialog:

“Willingly will I aid you,” said Pandelume. “There is, however, another aspect involved. The universe is methodized by symmetry and balance; in every aspect of exis- tence is this equipoise observed. Consequently, even in the trivial scope of our dealings, this equivalence must be maintained, thus and thus. I agree to assist you; in return, you perform a service of equal value to me. When you have completed this small work, I will instruct and guide you to your complete satisfaction.”

 

The sardonic wit, as in this passage, which seems a foreshadowing of the sort of answers one gets from computer support lines today:

“I respond to three questions,” stated the augur. “For twenty terces I phrase the answer in clear and actionable language; for ten I use the language of cant, which occasionally admits of ambiguity; for five, I speak to a parable which you must interpret as you will; and for one terce, I babble in an unknown tongue.”

 * * *

The dying Earth itself, so vividly evoked:

A dim place, ancient beyond knowledge. Once it was a tall world of cloudy mountains and bright rivers, and the sun was a white blazing ball. Ages of rain and wind have beaten and rounded the granite, and the sun is feeble and red. The continents have sunk and risen. A million cities have lifted towers, have fallen to dust. In place of the old peoples a few thousand strange souls live. . . .

 

Over six decades it has lost nothing for me; gained in power, perhaps. The characters are sharply delineated. Each section sets forth a challenging plot problem and ingeniously resolves it. Its prose is measured, taut, controlled, mesmeric. One reads carefully, trying not to let the imperatives of the plots rush one forward, because one is fearful of skimming past some passage of wondrous beauty. And the reward is the vision of a complete world of the imagination, irresistible, unforgettable.