Some have also noted Vance's ironic style of writing, as well as a tendency to formalism in language, though, in my opinion, at times the latter is overdone, particularly in the first section that here forms the novel "The Dying Earth." Additionally, in the character of Cugel, the protagonist in two of the four "novels" included here, the author has created a delightful scoundrel, in many ways reminiscent of Leiber's Grey Mouser, and written with a similar sense of humor. Vance's strengths are in his descriptive detail and the imagination in which he invests the world that he creates. And in many ways this collection does justice to the fertile ground it lays. This setting has since been mined successfully by a number of authors, effectively creating a subgenre of fantasy and science fiction, most notably by Gene Wolfe in his critically acclaimed "The Book of the New Sun" and its successors. I’m not on social media.This collection of short stories, originally published over the period of 1950 to 1983, are loosely linked through the setting attributed to Vance of a dying earth, existing far in the future yet evidencing many of the characteristics associated with fantasy rather than science fiction (the sci-fi depiction on the cover is misleading). “A lusciously scenic quest for the past in an artificial post-human world, resulting in revelations 10 millions years deep.” Pursued by enemies who want to make use of his powers, Yama voyages down the length of the world to search for answers to the mysteries of his origin, and to discover if he is to be the savior of his world, or its nemesis. For Yama appears to be the last remaining scion of the Builders, closest of all races to the revered architects of Confluence, able to awaken and control the secret machineries of the world. This is the home of Yama, found as an infant in a white boat on the world’s Great River, raised by an obscure bureaucrat in an obscure town in the middle of a ruined necropolis, destined to become a clerk-until the discovery of his singular ancestry.
A world beyond the end of human history, served by countless machines, inhabited by 10,000 bloodlines who worship their absent creators, riven by a vast war against heretics. Confluence-a long, narrow, artificial world, half fertile river valley, half crater-strewn desert.
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