Following Jack Vance’s recent death, I decided to re-read the Cugel novels, The Eyes of the Overworld and Cugel’s Saga. (Both books I had read over two decades ago, but only minimally remembered.) I also finally read the original Dying Earth collection of stories. I’ve read Vance’s Lyonesse trilogy twice previously – in fact, it’s one of my favourite fantasy series of all time – but strangely had largely neglected his Dying Earth writings until now.
After
reading these tales of the Dying Earth, and enjoying them enormously, I had two
thoughts that I decided to share here.
First,
the influence of Clark Ashton Smith’s Zothique
on Vance is manifest. This
especially is the case with the Dying
Earth collection, which strikes me as almost an homage to CAS. Like those chronicled by CAS, Vance’s
protagonists are often hapless and arrogant, but occasionally sympathetic. Both CAS and Vance enjoy skewering
religious and political authorities, especially by showing the hypocrisy and
vanity of such individuals. And of
course, both authors vividly depict a temporally distant earth that is
simultaneously familiar and exotic, mundane and magical.
Second,
it is hard to overstate the influence that Vance had on Gary Gygax and his
version of Dungeons and Dragons and,
even more so, Advanced Dungeons and
Dragons. There are, of course,
the obvious influences – most notably, the entire D&D spell-casting
(‘Vancian’ or ‘fire-and-forget’) system, but also magic items like ‘ioun stons’
(which Gygax used with permission from Vance), and the horrible lich ‘Vecna’,
whose left hand and eye are described as artifacts on page 124 of the Dungeon Master’s Guide.
These
influences are well known, and hardly worth mentioning. But what struck me upon reading these
books is the extent to which the magic-user class
clearly is modelled almost directly on Vance’s magicians, such as Turjan,
Mazirian, and Iucounu.
Many AD&D classes have direct literary influences. The ranger class clearly is based upon
Tolkien’s Aragorn, and the monk class purportedly is based upon the character of
Kwai Chang Caine (from the 1970s television show ‘Kung Fu’). I had always assumed that magic-users as
a class were somewhat generic, meant to accommodate characters as diverse as Merlin and
Thoth-Amon. But I now think that
Vance’s magicians are the direct source of the D&D and AD&D magic-user
class. This seems obvious to me
now, but it only occurred to me upon reading these books over the past few
weeks. (Similarly, I think that
the ability of thieves to use scrolls – with a chance of such attempts going
horribly wrong – was inspired, at least in part, by the character Cugel.)
Anyhow,
I highly recommend Vance’s Dying Earth stories to anyone who enjoys fantasy
literature with a sharp sardonic bite.
I very much look forward to reading Rhialto
the Marvellous in the near future.
