Guyal of Sfere is a young, wealthy man who is famous among his people for endlessly asking questions, due to a "void" in his mind which compels him to seek knowledge.

Sometimes at the edges of the Reach, or in the lawless "Beyond", a planet is menaced or craftily exploited, though more extensive battles are described in The Dragon Masters, "The Miracle Workers", and the Lyonesse trilogy, in which medieval-style combat abounds. These stories are set in and around his native San Francisco, except for one set in Italy and another in Africa. The point in case is imagination - it is like a muscle that needs to be exercised regularly and given proper, wholesome food or it will shrivel and grow cynical and bitter.With my busy schedule (graduating law school Saturday, studying for the bar, my wife was just put on bed rest and we have a two-year-old, and twins in August. The ambiguous nature of the main characters, none of them clear cut good or bad, gives the book a modern feel by moving away from the 'knight in shining armor' or 'evil overlord' stereotypes often associated with classic fantasy. Since all art takes its inspiration from earlier works, it’s not a knock on Jack Vance that he shows his influences quite clearly. I kept putting it off not out of reservations about it being dated or overrated, but like a collector who keeps a good bottle of wine for a special occasion or for a rainy day, when the blues gets to you and you start to wonder what's the point of all this reading. It includes stories of an earth millions or billions of years in the future, one where the planet is running down, often with the sun also near the end of its life.

Ever since first reading Jack Vance’s Dying Earth stories many years ago, I’ve been interested in the Dying Earth genre. I heard about the Bear book, and the description for it sounded mind bendingly cool, but the reviews for it were negative, a lot of them citing the confusion. Every few centuries there are massive geological upheavals which kill most of the population, resulting in a long line of fallen civilizations. Other pen names (each used only once) included Alan Wade, Peter Held, John van See, and Jay Kavanse.In 1946, Vance met and married the late Norma Genevieve Ingold (died March 25, 2008), another Cal student. It is particularly unforgiving because Tales of the Dying Earth uses a larger vocabulary than your average novel.

I've known for quite a while that George RR Martin thinks highly of Jack Vance and The Dying Earth and last year I had the opportunity to read his anthology, Songs of the Dying Earth, where a number of authors wrote short stories set in The Dying Earth. This account of a metropolis where two different peoples live side by side, completely unable to perceive each others existence, bears striking similarities to China Mieville's The City and the City,. Yet the men are also often fools and simply swayed, as is the nature of a Fairy Tale, so there is some more equality there. Turjan is a magician, hoarding the last known spells preserved from the vast knowledge of his forebears. Michael Shea's first publication, the novel A Quest for Simbilis ( DAW Books, 1974, OCLC 2128177), was an authorized sequel to Eyes.Once it was a tall world of cloudy mountains and bright rivers, and the sun was a white blazing ball. Again, the seeker travels into strange lands, encountering strange customs and cultures, in a story that is, at first, less about the magic (though magic does play a part) and more about the men and women Guyal meets in his journey. Seriously, it's good sword and sorcery in a SF backdrop, and if you're in the mood for something like that, you really can't go wrong with picking this classic up.