George Martin - Songs of the Dying Earth

I expect I was about ten or eleven years old the first time I encountered the work of Jack Vance, when I grabbed one of those Ace Doubles with the colorful red-and-blue spines off the spinner rack in the candy store at First Street and Kelly Parkway in Bayonne, New Jersey. Most of the Doubles featured “two complete novels” (today we would call them novellas) by two different writers, published back-to-back, but this one had the same byline on both sides, pairing Slaves of the Klau with an abridged version of Big Planet .

Slaves of the Klau was pretty good, my eleven year old self decided after reading it. Big Planet blew me away, even in its abridged state. Thereafter I looked for Vance’s name whenever I set one of those spinner racks to spinning. And so it was that a few years later, I stumbled on the Lancer paperback of The Dying Earth .

Half a century has passed since then, and that slim little collection remains one of my all-time favorites. Scarcely a year goes by that I do not take it down and dip into it again. The world that Vance created ranks with Tolkien’s Middle Earth and Robert E. Howard’s Hyborian Age as one of fantasy’s most unforgettable and influential settings. The poetry of Vance’s language also moved me (not to mention expanding my vocabulary!). His dialogue in particular was so arch and dry and witty that I could not read enough of it, then or now. But it was the characters that I loved best. T’sain and T’sais, Guyal of Sfere, Turjan of Miir…and of course Liane the Wayfarer, whose encounter with Chun the Unavoidable remains perhaps my single favorite fantasy short story.

Vance made us wait sixteen years between the first Dying Earth book and the second, but by the time Eyes of the Overworld was published, I was accustomed to snatching up every book that had his name on it as soon as it hit the bookshops. To my surprise, this new one was nothing at all like the original. This time, Jack showed us an entirely different side of the world he had created, while introducing us to Cugel the Clever, a rogue so venal and unscrupulous that he makes Harry Flashman look like Dudley Doright. How could you not love a guy like that? Other readers shared my enthusiasm, plainly, to judge from the number of times that Cugel has come back. You can’t keep a bad man down.

By now I have read every book Jack Vance ever wrote; the science fiction, the fantasies, the mystery novels (yes, even the ones he wrote as Ellery Queen). All of them are good, but of course, I have my favorites. The Demon Princes series, the Planet of Adventure quartet, Emphyrio , the Lyonesse trilogy, the Hugo-winning novellas “The Dragon Masters” and “The Last Castle,” the unforgettable “Moon Moth”…but The Dying Earth and its three sequels still rank up at the top.

It has been a real privilege for me to co-edit this tribute anthology with my friend Gardner Dozois, and (even more so) to write a Dying Earth story of my own. No one writes like Jack Vance but Jack Vance, of course, but I cherish the hope that Molloqos, Lirianne, and Chimwazle may prove not entirely unworthy companions for Rhialto, T’sais, Liane, Cugel, and the rest of Jack’s unforgettable cast, and that all Jack’s myriad readers will have enjoyed their brief stay at the Tarn House, famous for its hissing eels.

At some point, no matter how many millions of years from now it is, the Last Day will arrive, and the sun will go out, cold and dead as a burnt-out ember.

What happens then …?

One of the hottest stars in science fiction, fantasy, and horror today, Neil Gaiman has won three Hugo Awards, two Nebula Awards, one World Fantasy Award, six Locus Awards, four Stoker Awards, three Geffens, and one Mythopoeic Fantasy Award. Gaiman first came to wide public attention as the creator of the graphic novel series The Sandman , still one of the most acclaimed graphic novel series of all time. Gaiman remains a superstar in the graphic novel field; his graphic novels include Breakthrough, Death Talks About Life, Legend of the Green Flame, The Last Temptation, Only the End of the World Again, Mirrormask , and a slew of books in collaboration with Dave McKean, including Black Orchid, Violent Cases, Signal To Noise, The Tragical Comedy or Comical Tragedy of Mr. Punch, The Wolves in the Walls , and The Day I Swapped My Dad For Two Goldfish .

In recent years he’s enjoyed equal success in the science fiction and fantasy fields as well, with his bestselling novel American Gods winning the 2002 Hugo, Nebula, and Bram Stoker Awards, Coraline winning both Hugo and Nebula in 2003, and his story “A Study in Emerald” winning the Hugo in 2004. He also won the World Fantasy Award for his story with Charles Vess, “A Midsummer Night’s Dream,” and won the International Horror Critics Guild Award for his collection Angels & Visitations: A Miscellany . Gaiman’s other novels include Good Omens (written with Terry Prachett), Neverwhere, Stardust , and, most recently, Anansi Boys . In addition to Angels & Visitations , his short fiction has been collected in Smoke & Mirrors: Short Fictions & Illusions, Midnight Days, Warning: Contains Language, Creatures of the Night, Two Plays For Voices , and Adventures in the Dream Trade , and Fragile Things He’s also written Don’t Panic: The Official Hitchikers Guide to the Galaxy Companion, A Walking Tour of the Shambles (with Gene Wolfe), Batman and Babylon 5 novelizations, and edited Ghastly Beyond Belief (with Kim Newman), Book of Dreams (with Edward Kramer), and Now We Are Sick: An Anthology of Nasty Verse (with Stephen Jones). His most recent books are a new novel, The Graveyard Book , and two YA novels, Odd and the Frost Giants , and, with Gris Grimly, The Dangerous Alphabet . A movie based on his novel Stardust was in theaters worldwide in 2007.

There are flea-markets all across Florida, and this was not the worst of them. It had once been an aircraft hangar, but the local airport had closed. There were a hundred traders there, behind their metal tables, most of them selling counterfeit merchandise: sunglasses or watches or bags or belts. There was an African family selling carved wooden animals and behind them a loud, blowsy woman named (I cannot forget the name) Charity Parrot sold coverless paperback books, and old pulp magazines, the paper browned and crumbling, and beside her, in the corner, a Mexican woman whose name I never knew sold film posters and curling film stills.

I bought books from Charity Parrot, sometimes.

Soon enough the woman with the film posters went away and was replaced by a small man in sunglasses, his grey tablecloth spread over the metal table and covered with small carvings. I stopped and examined them — a strange set of creatures, made of grey bone and stone and dark wood — and then I examined him. I wondered if he had been in a ghastly accident, the kind it takes plastic surgery to repair: his face was wrong, the way it sloped, the shape of it. His skin was too pale. His dark hair looked like it had to be a wig, made, perhaps of dog-fur. His glasses were so dark as to hide his eyes completely. He did not look in any way out of place in a Florida flea market: the tables were all manned by strange people, and strange people shopped there.