Any of you read The Dying Earth series by Jack Vance? I hear a lot of good things about it. Some people go as far as to say it's one of their favorite books. But I read the opening and it just seems absolutely uninteresting. What's so good about the series? How is it distinguishable from all the pre-new wave sci-fi crap that was published?
>>7843836
haven't read it, but:
- not all pre-new wave sci-fi is crap, and
- a lot of new wave/post-new wave sci-fi is crap, and
- 90% of sci-fi is crap anyway
>>7843836
Its a collection of tales, so it builds a world up very slowly with a mythic/folk tale feel. The earth is dying and there are all these ruins and stories half buried. That's what I see in it. I think other people like the rogue character who has a few stories, or are fantasy geeks in general. It's not really comparable to scifi new wave or not, it can be compared to or be classified as sword and sorcery
I love 'Eyes of the Overworld' and 'Cudgel's Saga' but Rhialto just bored me to tears.
Its value lies more in the influence it has had on the genre and the inspiration for later, greater works. It doesn't hold up under serious study.
It's a ton of fucking fun mate. Give it a go. Take your time with it though. It's not meant for marathoning.
It's not Vance's best though. That's The Dragon Masters. If you got a Kindle pick up The Jack Vance Treasury. Great, great collection.
>>7844328
In the 1960s a bunch of leftists got butthurt about the lack of class struggle against white supremacy etc in SF and wrote a bunch of edg/angsty stories in an attempt to make SF hip and relevant. This is called the "New Wave". The era before the New Wave is the "Golden Age" or "Campbell Era" but the OP avoided using those terms out of either ignorance or a childish desire to avoid using positive terms to refer to the white cisheteropatriarchs of the 1940s-60s.
