Songs of the Dying Earth

The Dying Earth novels and stories are picaresque adventures in the truest sense, peripatetic, and express-paced. They carry echoes not only of the Thousand Nights and a Night, but of such other witty sombre epics as Gulliver’s Travels, not to mention the visions of Milton and Blake. Vance seems genuinely, within the fantasy-SF envelope, to access the Mediaeval mind: here the world may end at any moment and fabulous beasts and monsters coexist with sinful, selfish, and (rarely) spiritual man. The narratives range from the screamingly hilarious to the seductively beautiful, to the shockingly — if fastidiously presented — violent. As for black humour, Vance might have invented it.

Such masterworks have fired and — I hope — taught my imagination, ever since the first plunge. Influence is too small a word. What I owe to Vance’s genius, as avid fan and compulsive writer; is beyond calculation.

Every book reasserts its peerless magic on every one of the uncountable times I re-re-read it. In fact, I don’t quite believe Jack Vance invented the Dying Earth. Part of me knows he’s been there. Often.

But then. He takes us there too, doesn’t he?

— Tanith Lee

Dan Simmons THE GUIDING NOSE OF ULFANT BANDEROZ

A writer of considerable power, range, and ambition, an eclectic talent not willing to be restricted to any one genre, Dan Simmons sold his first story to The Twilight Zone Magazine in 1982. By the end of that decade, he had become one of the most popular and bestselling authors in both the horror and the science fiction genres, winning, for instance, both the Hugo Award for his epic science fiction novel Hyperion and the Bram Stoker Award for his huge horror novel Carrion Comfort in the same year, 1990. He’s gone on to win two more Bram Stoker Awards and two World Fantasy Awards (for Song of Kali and “This Year’s Class Picture”). He has continued to split his output since between science fiction (The Fall of Hyperion, The Hollow Man, Endymion, The Rise of Endymion, Ilium, Olympos) and horror (Song of Kali, Summer of Night, Children of the Night…although a few of his novels are downright unclassifiable (Phases of Gravity, for instance, which is a straight literary novel, although it was published as part of a science fiction line), and some (like Children of the Night) could be legitimately considered to be either science fiction or horror, depending on how you squint at them. Similarly, his first collection, Prayers to Broken Stones, contains a mix of science fiction, fantasy, horror, and “mainstream” stories, as do his more recent collections, Lovedeath and Worlds Enough and Time: Five Tales of Speculative Fiction. Many of his recent books confirm his reputation for unpredictability, including The Crook Factory, a spy thriller set in World War II and starring Ernest Hemingway, Darwin’s Blade, a “statistical thriller” halfway between mystery and dark comedy, Hardcase, Hard Freeze, and Hard As Nails, hardboiled detective novels, and, A Winter Haunting, a ghost story. His most recent books are the bestselling novel, halfway between historical and horror, The Terror, the chapbook novella, Muse of Fire, and a major new novel about Charles Dickens, Drood. Born in Peoria, Illinois, Simmons now lives with his family in Colorado.

In the complex and richly imagined story that follows, he takes us on a race across unknown territory to the very ends of the Dying Earth, with terrible enemies in close pursuit and the fate of all who live at stake, and everything depending on the guidance of…a nose?

In the waning millennia of the 21^st Aeon, during one of the countless unnamed and chaotic latter eras of the Dying Earth, all the usual signs of imminent doom suddenly went from bad to worse.

The great red sun, always slow to rise, became more sluggish than ever. Like an old man loathe to get out of bed, the bloated sun on some mornings shook, quivered, staggered, and rippled forth earthquakes of protesting rumbles that radiated west from the eastern horizons across the ancient continents, shaking even the low mountain ranges worn down by time and gravity until they resembled old molars. Black spots poxed and repoxed the slowly rising sun’s dim face until entire days were all but lost to a dull, maroon twilight.

During the usually self-indulgent and festival-filled month of Spoorn, there were five days of near total darkness, and crops failed from Ascolais through Almery to the far fen borders of the Ide of Kauchique. River Scaum in Ascolais turned to ice on the morn of MidSummer’s Eve, freezing the holy aspirations off thousands who had immersed themselves for the Scaumish Rites of Multiple Erotic Connections. What few ancient upright stones and wall-slabs that were still standing at the Land of the Falling Wall rattled like bones in a cup and fell, killing countless lazy peasants who had foolishly built their hovels in its lee over the millennia just to save the cost of a fourth wall. In the holy city of Erze Damath, thousands of pelgranes — arriving in flocks the size of which had never been seen before in the memory of man and non-men — circled for three days and then swooped down, carrying off more than six hundred of the most pious pilgrims and befouling the Black Obelisk with their bone-filled droppings.

In the west, the setting sun appeared to pulse larger and closer until the forests of the Great Erm burned. Tidal waves washed away all cities and vestiges of life from the Cape of Sad Remembrance, and the ancient market town of Xeexees, only forty leagues south of the city of Azenomei, disappeared completely one night at three minutes after midnight during the height of its crowded Summer Fair; some say the town was swallowed whole in a great earthly convulsion, some say it shifted in an eyeblink to one of the unbreathable-air worlds of the dodge-star Achernar, but whichever was the case, the many residents of the metropolis of nearby Azenomei huddled in their homes in fear. And during all these individual tragedies, more than half the surrounding region once known in better days as the Grand Motholam suffered floods, droughts, pestilence, devaluation of the terce, and frequent darknesses.

The people, both human and otherwise, reacted as people always have during such hard times in the immemorial history of the Dying Earth and the Earth of the Yellow Sun before it; they sought out scapegoats to hound and pound and kill. In this case, the heaviest opprobrium fell upon magicians, sorcerers, wizards, warlocks, the few witches still suffered to live by the smug male majority, and other practitioners of the thaumaturgical trade. Mobs attacked the magicians’ manses and conclaves; the servants of sorcerers were torn limb from limb when they went into town to buy vegetables or wine; to utter a spell in public brought instant pursuit by peasants armed with torches, pitchforks, and charmless swords and pikes left over from old wars and earlier pogroms.

Such a downturn in popularity was nothing new for the weary world’s makers of magic, all of whom had managed to exist for many normal human lifetimes and longer, so at first they reacted much as they had in earlier times of persecution: they shielded their manses with spells and walls and moats, replaced their murdered servants with less-fragile demons and entities from the Overworld and Underworld, brought up jarred foods from their vast basement stores and catacombs (while having their servants plant vegetable gardens within their spell-walled grounds), and generally laid low, some laying so low as to become literally invisible.

But this time the prejudice did not quickly fade. The sun continued to flicker, vibrate, cause convulsions below, and generally offer almost as many dark days as light. The scores of human species on the Dying Earth made common cause with the thousands of no-longer-human sort — the ubiquitous pelgranes and Deodands and prowling erbs and lizard folk and ghosts and stone-ghouls and Saponids and necrophages and visps and burrowing dolorants who were merely the tip of this truly terrible nonhuman icespike — and that common cause was to kill magicians.

When the unpleasant realities of this particular wizard-pogrom began to sink in, the various magicians of