In this week’s Dispatches from The Secret Library, Dr Oliver Tearle enjoys Jack Vance’s inventive quartet of picaresque fantasy novels
I’ll admit that Tales of Dying Earth, the fat bumper edition of Jack Vance’s novels set on an Earth whose sun is about to go out forever, sat on my bookshelf for around fifteen years before I actually got round to reading it. It shouldn’t have taken a self-confessed fantasy fan like me that long: the creators of Dungeons and Dragons cited Vance’s Tales of Dying Earth as an influence on their development of the role-playing fantasy game, and I devoured Weis and Hickman’s early D&D tie-ins, the Dragonlance novels, as a teenager. Pleasingly, there’s even a reference to