I’m currently reading a book called Tales of the Dying Earth by Jack Vance, which is actually four novels, although you could make the case that that’s not technically accurate, either. Ah, sweet familiar allure of the needlessly complicated.
It’s been a long time since I walked through a book store, picked up a book I knew nothing about written by someone I had never heard of, and made a purchase based on some combination of the persuasiveness of the blurb on the back cover or the kewlness of the artwork on the front. I made some interesting discoveries that way but I got stuck with a lot of dreck, too. The last thing I want is to be stuck on the bus or the Metro with a bad book, so nowadays I tend to stick with series or authors I’m already familiar with, or pick things up based on reviews or other recommendations. Tales of the Dying Earth came to my attention in a slightly roundabout way, as I was reading the blog of George R.R. Martin (who writes a series I’m in the middle of reading, waiting for him to put out the next volume, which he is taking his sweet time about, but that’s neither here nor there …) and Martin mentioned a book he had edited would soon be released. That book is Songs of the Dying Earth which is an homage to Tales. I trust Martin’s taste and the mere concept evoked by the title alone seemed intriguing, so I put Tales of the Dying Earth on my wishlist and my father got it for me for my birthday. So before I cracked it open, all I knew about it is what I’ve relayed so far.
So it turns out the Vance was a pulp sci-fi short story author and the Tales are all short stories, many of which were originally published independent of one another in various magazines. Then they were published again as novels, rather than short story collections, and I assume that was a decision based largely on the fact that novels generally sell better than anthologies. And novel isn’t entirely a misnomer here because there is a lot of connective tissue between the stories, as they take place in the same world and often feature the same characters. This is one of the things I love about sci-fi, the fact that it lends itself so well to a long series format. In addition to characters and plots, sci-fi (and fantasy) writers come up with entirely new worlds, or at least worlds markedly different from our own, and those worlds beg to be revisited and explored more deeply once they are introduced. And on the slightly more cynical flipside, once an author manages to sell a story with a compelling lead character and interesting setting, why exert the effort of coming up with new characters and new settings when a return to the well will be just as profitable? So Vance re-used his Dying Earth for story after story, and publishers re-used the stories to crank out paperback novels.
Why sell them all in one paperback now, rather than as the four separate volumes? I think the answer lies somewhere along the beam of “They’re not very good.” I really like the idea of the pulp era, for two reasons. One, so many huge touchstones of my geek obsessions, from Star Wars to Green Lantern to Cthulhu to Buffy, have their roots more or less directly in the pulps. Two, I’m drawn to them as a writer who has dabbled in short speculative fiction, with a combination of curiosity to see how it was originally done and jealousy because I wasn’t alive back then to get paid by the word before all the good ideas were taken. But, again, that’s the idea of the pulp era. The actual products of the era often leave me cold, and I’d rather spend time with the modern descendents. Playing in the Call of Cthulhu roleplaying system is a lot more fun than reading H.P. Lovecraft, for example.
And Jack Vance, who I’m sure has influenced many a geek I know and love … hoo boy, does he write some turgid prose. And he comes up with some wild ideas, but they very often show the stitches and seams of making-it-up-as-you-go-along. He invents races of people with, for example, black teeth or expressive articulated ears and noses or hallucinatory amethyst eyewear, but never provides any context for why the people would have such features. It’s just craziness for its own sake, a primitive exultation in the freedoms of the emerging science-fiction genre. I’m still fairly jealous of people who used to be able to get away with this, but at the same time I’m grateful that sci-fi has evolved since then, both for the sake of my fandom and whatever I may contribute to it creatively in my lifetime.
The most disappointing aspect of the series so far (I’m a couple chapters into the third novel) is that it doesn’t mesh with my expectations for a dying Earth setting. What might those expectations be?
You’re damn right. I want some Thundarr the Barbarian, Roland the Gunslinger type post-apocalyptic set dressing, and Vance just doesn’t provide it. In the first book, which is the one with the least through-story, there are a few moments that get close to what I’m looking for. The basic premise for the world is that civilization long ago rose to its highest heights and has been in steady decline for millennia, and now science is mostly forgotten and magic is resurgent, along with demons and monsters and such. The sun is cooling off and has become red, and people generally believe the end of the world is near. In one story, the main character travels to a city where there was once a great library, and he fights some cannibal creatures in the ruins of skyscrapers, escapes in a somehow-still-working flying car, and then defeats the demon who has taken root in the library. I would have loved a whole series of books like that. But for whatever reason, Vance fell into a pattern of telling stories about men and monsters vying for power that would not be out of place in a straight-up sword and sorcery setting. There’s no more references to lost technology like cars and computers, and even references to the red sun and the end of the world become infrequent. Vance invents geography that matches nothing on Earth, with cities and races and societies that could just as easily be from Hyperborea or Eternia. Which doesn’t make for bad sci-fi per se, it’s just not what I was expecting.
But, in every bit of exploration of the deepest geek roots there’s bound to be at least one or two interesting revelations. In this case it was a piece of the origin story of Dungeons & Dragons that I never knew before. D&D owes the vast majority of its look and feel to the Lord of the Rings. You play a human, elf, dwarf or halfling and you fight goblins and orcs. Identifying as a thief is just as valid an occupation as ranger, cleric, wizard or fighter. The whole milieu is a pseudo-medieval wilderness overlaying ruins of past glories. D&D makes that Tolkiennian experience into a game by making every swing of an axe or twang of the bowstring into a roll of the dice. But there’s one thing in the Lord of the Rings that doesn’t quite translate to D&D. In the books, Gandalf pretty much does whatever he wants whenever he wants. He’s an inscrutable old bastard, but when he needs to escape a tower, he knows how to send a moth to fetch a giant eagle. He’s a walking plot device. The D&D world would feel incomplete if you couldn’t play a wizard, but if you give a player whatever-whenever power, you are giving them the ability to ruin the game at a whim. D&D gets around this by saying that wizards can do certain very specific things whenever they want, but only a limited number of times per day. In the world of the game this is explained by saying that knowing how to cast a spell is a slippery bit of knowledge that can be learned by memorizing passages in a spellbook, but casting the spell erases the knowledge. It’s the mystical equivalent of giving a character in a story a gun but a realistic amount of ammunition, and once a bullet is spent, it’s spent, unless the character can reload. Which is great for maintaining a fun yet challenging gaming experience, but couldn’t be further from the spirit of Tolkien. So if D&D is a LOTR ripoff, where did this spells-as-memorized-ammo idea come from?
Jack Vance. Not only did Vance come up with the idea of a mental quiver of spells, he also came up with the idea of spells being invented by dedicated magic researchers, who sometimes named specific effects after themselves. D&D totally ripped off that idea in the broad sense, not to mention some specific spell names (Prismatic Spray). The borrowing of LOTR for D&D is pretty obvious if you’ve had exposure to both (and post-Peter Jackson, who hasn’t been exposed to LOTR?) but Tales of the Dying Earth is way more obscure, so there’s no way I ever would have known about that influence if I hadn’t bumbled into reading the novels and then looked them up on Wikipedia to see if I was the first person to make the D&D connection. (Obviously I was not. I don’t know why that thought even occurs to me anymore.) Anyway, that’s your bit of pulp-sci-fi-to-roleplaying trivia for today.
No comments:
Post a Comment