Reddit reviews Tales of the Dying Earth

Michael Swanwick, The Iron Dragon's Daughter. Yes it has elves and dragons and whatnot. On the other hand those dragons are massive sentient war machines, made by changeling slave labor. This was "steampunk" before that label ossified into "British colonialism with cool gadgets"; there are Dickensian orphans, student riots, strange Elven politics, and the raw animal lust of being mind-linked to a sleek black death-machine. It's a beautiful book. I also really love Swanwick's "Stations of the Tide", which straddles SF and fantasy in the last days of a planet of islands about to be engulfed by rising tides; a nameless bureaucrat from the Bureau of Technology Transfer chases a mysterious magician through the most lyrical apocalypse ever written.

David Mitchell, The Bone Clocks - a few groups of secret immortals war through the ages. Beautifully written, and delightfully coy in how it dances around the magical happenings for most of its length.

Russel Hoban, The Medusa Frequency, an unsettling little story about a writer looking for inspiration and getting lost.

And perhaps you are ready for Jorge Luis Borges. Short stories that are more about the concepts than the worlds: a near-endless library that contains every text that could ever be written, a cabal of rebel historians creating an alternative history that begins to swallow up the world... very fantastic, very not something a D&D campaign would be based on.

Jack Vance, Tales of the Dying Earth. And here is something that was an explicit influence on D&D - the 'forget a spell the moment you cast it' system comes from Vance. A thief named Cugel steals from the wrong target - a wizard - who sends him halfway across the world. Cugel's quest for vengeance drags him back, twice, and ends horribly, but really what the story's about is the weird people and places he encounters along the way. (Originally a series of short stories.)

And while I am talking about stories of Self-Serving Bastards Who Inspired D&D (and quite possibly Locke Lamora), how about the first of Fritz Lieber's books about Fafhrd and the Grey Mouser? A blonde mountain of a swordsman teams up with a little weasel of a thief (with a few bits of half-remembered cantrips); they wander the mean streets of the rotting city of Lankhmar, getting in and out of trouble. There's a bunch of stories about these two guys, with varied emotional tones. Also I liked his Our Lady Of Darkness a lot; it's about a person who stumbles into a skyscraper built with very particular magical proportions.

Oooh yes, also. Zelazny. Let's go right to the most wild and experimental, Creatures of Light and Darkness. Technomagical Egyptian gods war with each other through time and space. The story is told in a dream-like kaleidoscope of styles, but builds up to a beautifully strange whole. It is broken and difficult and short and rewarding.

Tim Powers. Would you like to read a story about pirates and voodoo magic? (A certain series of Disney movies owes a lot to this, not the other way around.) Or a story about time travel to Dickensian England and a disastrous attempt to resurrect dead gods? Or how about the secret history of how Byron, Shelley, and other consumptive poets were beset by vampires?

(And any mention of Powers should also include his buddy James Blaylock; I recommend "The Last Coin" and "Land of Dreams" in particular. The former is a madcap chase for thirty silver coins; the latter is an elliptical story about a Magical Carnival of Dubious Morality.)

Also if you are bored with traditional fantasy try reading some Lord Dunsanay. His work may rekindle the 'standard' fantasy for you; 'King of Elfland's Daughter' is melancholic, magical, and beautiful to read aloud; 'Idle Days on the Yann' is a wonderfully elliptic bit of world-building.

And finally, an extra-weird one. Larry Marder's Beanworld, an 'ecological romance' that I think is one of the best things to come out of the 80s B&W comics boom. It is gorgeous, alien, and familiar, all at once.

(Spoiler: The fate of the world hangs in the balance in one of these books. The protagonist, however, intends to destroy it. And succeeds. Despite this, there is a sequel to that book.)

Close. Start on PP. 55.

How about some Fantasy and SciFi combined?
If so, Jack Vance's omnibus "Tales of The Dying Earth" is a great one to read. It contains all 4 books (each with its own stories) and is about 750 odd pages long. Some of my very favourite F&SF material. Jack Vance was just such a great storyteller in general.

The Dying Earth series is
>Set in a far distant future, the setting is marked by the presence of unaccountably ancient ruins and other fragments of now-decayed civilizations [....] many people make use of technology or magic which was created long ago, but which they no longer understand.

That seems to meet at least your main criteria?

More info on Wikipedia: http://www.wikiwand.com/en/Dying_Earth

Jack Vance!

Specifically, The Dying Earth.

It's completely different from everything else out there.

A lot of the quotes (particularly the ones illustrating his use of language) in the articles are from the Dying Earth series. There is an omnibus volume with all the stories in it. When I read it -- considerably later than adolescence -- it blew me away. I was further fascinated to find out how much it influenced the creation of D&D (if you're a gaming fan).

So my vote is for the Dying Earth series.

The Dying Earth is probably my first recommendation, but there are many good entry points to Vance's work. He was primarily a scifi writer, but his few fantasy works have received great praise. His writing style is his best quality, and I've always said he wrote literature at a time when scifi and pulp fantasy paid the bills.


Part one of the Dying Earth collection is a series of short stories, grim and wonderous in tonality- depicting adventurers and magicians on an Earth so old the Sun is dying. Gary Gygax of Dungeons and Dragons quoted these stories as part of his inspiration for the original DnD. Ignore the spaceship on the cover, it literally has nothing whatsoever to do with anything inside that book.

Books 2 and 3 of The Dying Earth collection retain the setting, but focuses on the exploits of a singular character, Cugel the Clever. He is a rogue/thief, and the stories are very, very funny, following him from one mishap to the next.

Book 4 is about Rhialto the Marvellous, one of the few Arch-Magicians left alive on the Dying Earth. Nearly omnipotent, with otherworldly demon servants at his command, he and his Arch-Magician cabal of "peers" are likely the inspiration for the Tel'Vanni of Elder Scrolls fame. These last stories (books 3&4) were written when Vance was in his prime, and his comedy here is so good I still laugh when rereading it. His other works retain his style of wit and humor but few large works are comedic in focus.

Edited- clarification and more words

Songs of the dying Earth.

Its a book with a collection of writers writing a story within the Dying Earth universe.

It's really worth the read.

Cugel's Saga is included in this compilation:
http://www.amazon.com/Tales-Dying-Earth-Jack-Vance/dp/0312874561/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&qid=1311963411&sr=8-1

PG Wodehouse is great. Terry Pratchett, IMO, is rubbish compared to the early comedy/adventure stuff by Jack Vance. Check out "The Eyes of the Overworld," which you can get in this omnibus.

Alright. The other rec is Tales of the Dying Earth by Jack Vance. It's not technical or complex at all in terms of how science-y it gets. There's really no science in it all and is actually probably closer to fantasy than it is science fiction. Science-fantasy maybe.

It's weird though. The writing is wordy and formal, the dialogue is strangely unnatural (though awesome and the biggest reason I read it) and "mannered," and the characters are jerks. It has a very subtle and dry humour. Sometimes not so easily picked up on, but the way the characters interact give it a certain tone I haven't found in any other book. It can be kind of a dark sometimes cynical humour, but witty and ironic.

I don't know if you can find an audio version of it though so here is a link to a paperback with all his Dying Earth stories in case you wanted to look for it somewhere. Actually, because of how wordy the prose is it might be better to read it rather than listen.

Sorry for the long reply for such a simple question. I just like to rec Vance wherever I go because many people don't know him and it's one of my favourites.

Hope you enjoy Hitchhikers Guide by the way!

That plus some others in one volume