A (thoughtful) pundit once described Jack Vance's fiction as fruitcake-like, with big, juicy bits floating in a sweet, tasty, and thoroughly durable base. Nowhere is this more in evidence than in his The Dying Earth (Hillman Periodicals, 1950), a lush, chewy fantasy series of linked stories taking place at the End of Time. Earth is a dying place, as the Sun is a dying star. Most of the population is gone, either off into space or swallowed up in the inconceivable vastness of Earth's history. All is forgotten. Those remaining live by sorcery and magic, which have become Earth's sciences. Time seems to palpably be slowing, as it winds down to the final setting of a sun grown brick-red and cool.
The stories themselves read like fairy tales, or the myths of the last survivors of a dying culture. The Earth and Sun are the two common characters in these tales, the first in its last lush greening and the latter battling for lordship of the skies with the light of noontime stars. There is a languid decadence to the world, whose people are "like fruit ready to fall from the tree". Magicians attempt to retrieve long-forgotten spells from Earth's lost knowledge, sorcerers duel for one last time, and colorful brigands are deceived by witches as deep as the Well of Time.
The tales range from adequate to exceptional, but it is the atmosphere that sets The Dying Earth apart. A pervasive nostalgia hangs over everything, in a world that has known so much, and in which so much has been forgotten. It is almost Eden-like, except that it is at the wrong end of time. Vance plays with this anti-Eden idea in his last story, as the last Adam and Eve journey to the Museum of Man to seek answers from the last repository of ancient knowledge. They find it besieged by Evil, beset by a dark Magic that wishes to consume the last vestiges of humanity's legacy. In the final irony, the two seekers find that the final magic is science, and the final sorcery the scientific method. As they sit in the Museum, with access to what had been Man's lost knowledge, they ask "What shall we do?". And perhaps, the cycle begins again.
Vance is an often amazing writer. This book is the milestone of the merging of science fiction and fantasy, a difficult trick to pull off, and Vance has succeeded in creating an enjoyable and sophisticated series of tales. His creation of setting is poignant, driven by simple but powerful images and archetypical events. The abandoned and crumbling cities, the weird, fossil cultures, and the sense that everything is permitted in the slow winding down of history, are moving examples of what is possible within "genre" writing. Vance's road to fantasy is the quiet one, a meditation, that allows the reader to ponder Time as a thing with a life, and gaze back on the countless millennia which are its years.
en opt laatste wanneer er ne kerel is met een paraplu met een ingebouwde revolver
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