Timp, Gangue and Pust
Aug. 18th, 2015 11:52 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
mtvesselDec 2014
Tales of the Dying Earth - Jack Vance - Gollancz, 2002
* *
The four books of the Dying Earth series form one of the great fantasy sequences of the twentieth century. They have been hugely influential, not least in the bizarre magic system of the Dungeons and Dragons role-playing game which steals the idea of a spell erasing itself from your memory once spoken, forcing a magician to re-learn it before it can be used again (a handy way to stop magic from becoming overpowered, but frustrating for the player who ends up with nothing to do once they have used all their spells for the day. My magic-user character used to carry a set of cheerleader pom-poms that he would get out and wave to encourage the other players when there was nothing more he could do in a fight.)
So I wanted to like them. I really did. Jack Vance is a great stylist with a wonderful vocabulary and one of the most inventive imaginations in SF. But his characters, oh dear.
The Dying Earth, Vance's first book written in 1950, introduces the setting. The sun is huge and old and red and everyone knows that it will go out some time in the next few years or decades. A few pockets of civilisation remain, separated by large tracts of land full of dangerous creatures. The tech level is mostly mediaeval, as are the people. But some, by dint of long study of ancient books, have learned to cast certain great magicks, such as the Excellent Prismatic Spray, Phandaal's Mantle of Stealth or the dread Spell of Forlorn Encystment, which immures the victim in a pore some 45 miles below the surface of the earth. It would be nice to say that the magicians of the Dying Earth used their powers for the benefit of humanity, but nothing could be further from the truth; they perform experiments and seek new powers to further their own selfish ends.
There are six linked stories with different protagonists, only one of whom, Tsais, is a woman. I enjoyed the fabulously rich and (literally) colourful descriptions of the world and its inhabitants, and although all the characters (with the exception of Tsais) are fairly unpleasant, those who show glimmers of humanity generally end well and those who don't, don’t, so the stories are satisfying.
Not so the next two books, The Eyes of the Overworld (1966) and Cugel's Saga (1983), which have a protagonist whom I intensely disliked within a page of meeting him. Cugel the Clever is anything but. He is a small-time thief whose one skill is his ready and persuasive tongue. After getting caught attempting to burgle the manse of Iucounu the Laughing Magician, he is flung to a far corner of the world and has to find his way back home through myriad dangers and strange societies, picking up a magical artifact en route. This he does by lying, cheating, violence and generally being despicable, the only saving grace being that the people he defrauds and murders are generally even worse than him. Cugel's Saga has an identical plot with a slightly different setup. I couldn't stand the character and I found being forced to spend almost 500 pages with him a form of torture.
Rhialto the Marvellous (1984) returns to the society of magicians concept of The Dying Earth and is rather better - Rhialto is still an arrogant and annoying character, but at least the unpleasant machinations of the other magicians make one feel slightly sorry for him.
What's so frustrating is that the writing and the world-building are good. Vance's style is terrific, mannered in a way that isn't annoying, wonderfully rich in vocabulary and linguistically inventive. Take, for example, the scene in which Cugel lies his way on to a ship as a worminger, a wrangler of the giant sea slugs that power it. He has to learn how to deal with their frequent ailments: "Timp, fluke-mites, gangue and pust became his hated enemies; impactions of the clote were a major annoyance, requiring the sub-surface use of reamer, drench-bar and hose, in a position which, when the impaction was eased, became subject to the full force of the efluxion." Nowhere does Vance explain what timp, gangue and pust actually are, but with his evocative and funny prose, he doesn't need to.
Similarly, he has a real talent for creating societies by following a mad idea through to its logical conclusion. I particularly liked the village of Tustvold, which takes the concept of one-upmanship literally - the men spend all day reposing on white stone columns "absorbing a healthful flux from the sunlight" while their over-ambitious wives slave to earn enough terces to commission the next section that will raise their husbands' column above those of their neighbours. The fierce competition between the local dames for the services of Nisbet the stone-hewer, and the sly way in which Nisbet sets them against each other, make for a delightful, if short, satire of social climbing, very much like the societies in Gulliver's Travels.
But, ultimately, the lack of sympathetic characters are these novels' undoing. Vance's female characterisation is even worse than Gene Wolfe's (which is saying something), and all the inventiveness in the world is not going to make me like or want to spend time with Cugel. To some extent the background justifies the characters' selfish behaviour - I can see that the knowledge that the world could end at any moment would tend to put a damper on social enterprise and consideration for others - but the fact that they all to a man have the same arch, ironic and amoral insouciance suggests that they may reflect their author rather more than intended. Vance is an amazingly consistent writer - these books were written over a thirty-four year period - but in this case that is definitely a weakness rather than a strength.
Tales of the Dying Earth - Jack Vance - Gollancz, 2002
* *
The four books of the Dying Earth series form one of the great fantasy sequences of the twentieth century. They have been hugely influential, not least in the bizarre magic system of the Dungeons and Dragons role-playing game which steals the idea of a spell erasing itself from your memory once spoken, forcing a magician to re-learn it before it can be used again (a handy way to stop magic from becoming overpowered, but frustrating for the player who ends up with nothing to do once they have used all their spells for the day. My magic-user character used to carry a set of cheerleader pom-poms that he would get out and wave to encourage the other players when there was nothing more he could do in a fight.)
So I wanted to like them. I really did. Jack Vance is a great stylist with a wonderful vocabulary and one of the most inventive imaginations in SF. But his characters, oh dear.
The Dying Earth, Vance's first book written in 1950, introduces the setting. The sun is huge and old and red and everyone knows that it will go out some time in the next few years or decades. A few pockets of civilisation remain, separated by large tracts of land full of dangerous creatures. The tech level is mostly mediaeval, as are the people. But some, by dint of long study of ancient books, have learned to cast certain great magicks, such as the Excellent Prismatic Spray, Phandaal's Mantle of Stealth or the dread Spell of Forlorn Encystment, which immures the victim in a pore some 45 miles below the surface of the earth. It would be nice to say that the magicians of the Dying Earth used their powers for the benefit of humanity, but nothing could be further from the truth; they perform experiments and seek new powers to further their own selfish ends.
There are six linked stories with different protagonists, only one of whom, Tsais, is a woman. I enjoyed the fabulously rich and (literally) colourful descriptions of the world and its inhabitants, and although all the characters (with the exception of Tsais) are fairly unpleasant, those who show glimmers of humanity generally end well and those who don't, don’t, so the stories are satisfying.
Not so the next two books, The Eyes of the Overworld (1966) and Cugel's Saga (1983), which have a protagonist whom I intensely disliked within a page of meeting him. Cugel the Clever is anything but. He is a small-time thief whose one skill is his ready and persuasive tongue. After getting caught attempting to burgle the manse of Iucounu the Laughing Magician, he is flung to a far corner of the world and has to find his way back home through myriad dangers and strange societies, picking up a magical artifact en route. This he does by lying, cheating, violence and generally being despicable, the only saving grace being that the people he defrauds and murders are generally even worse than him. Cugel's Saga has an identical plot with a slightly different setup. I couldn't stand the character and I found being forced to spend almost 500 pages with him a form of torture.
Rhialto the Marvellous (1984) returns to the society of magicians concept of The Dying Earth and is rather better - Rhialto is still an arrogant and annoying character, but at least the unpleasant machinations of the other magicians make one feel slightly sorry for him.
What's so frustrating is that the writing and the world-building are good. Vance's style is terrific, mannered in a way that isn't annoying, wonderfully rich in vocabulary and linguistically inventive. Take, for example, the scene in which Cugel lies his way on to a ship as a worminger, a wrangler of the giant sea slugs that power it. He has to learn how to deal with their frequent ailments: "Timp, fluke-mites, gangue and pust became his hated enemies; impactions of the clote were a major annoyance, requiring the sub-surface use of reamer, drench-bar and hose, in a position which, when the impaction was eased, became subject to the full force of the efluxion." Nowhere does Vance explain what timp, gangue and pust actually are, but with his evocative and funny prose, he doesn't need to.
Similarly, he has a real talent for creating societies by following a mad idea through to its logical conclusion. I particularly liked the village of Tustvold, which takes the concept of one-upmanship literally - the men spend all day reposing on white stone columns "absorbing a healthful flux from the sunlight" while their over-ambitious wives slave to earn enough terces to commission the next section that will raise their husbands' column above those of their neighbours. The fierce competition between the local dames for the services of Nisbet the stone-hewer, and the sly way in which Nisbet sets them against each other, make for a delightful, if short, satire of social climbing, very much like the societies in Gulliver's Travels.
But, ultimately, the lack of sympathetic characters are these novels' undoing. Vance's female characterisation is even worse than Gene Wolfe's (which is saying something), and all the inventiveness in the world is not going to make me like or want to spend time with Cugel. To some extent the background justifies the characters' selfish behaviour - I can see that the knowledge that the world could end at any moment would tend to put a damper on social enterprise and consideration for others - but the fact that they all to a man have the same arch, ironic and amoral insouciance suggests that they may reflect their author rather more than intended. Vance is an amazingly consistent writer - these books were written over a thirty-four year period - but in this case that is definitely a weakness rather than a strength.