Rhialto the Marvellous by Jack Vance

I see past-me has been tagging these posts about the Dying Earth books as Science Fiction as well as Fantasy. So I'm doing that here, to be consistent. And I hate to cast aspersions at that guy - I was that guy, obviously - but I don't know what he was thinking. The Dying Earth is set in a universe that has tipped, for one last time, from science to magic, and any stories set there are clearly fantasy.

This is the fourth of those books, 1984's Rhialto the Marvellous. It's currently available in a big omnibus from Tor, which conveniently gives me an excuse to list and link those three previous books: 1950's The Dying Earth, 1966's The Eyes of the Overworld, and 1983's Cugel the Clever.

As the series title implies, it is very late in the history of the world. The sun is red and tired, and characters have a reasonable belief that it may gutter out before too long - tomorrow, or a hundred years from tomorrow. Magic rules, and it's the kind of magic that involves memorizing complicated formulae and invoking often-recalcitrant beings from other dimensions. Life goes on, as cruel and random and self-centered as in any other era.

All of the Dying Earth tales are short, and most were originally published separately; it's an episodic series. Cugel and Eyes are the most novel-like, built up of episodes that are in a clear, obvious sequence. The original Dying Earth was the most various, and Rhialto falls in the middle: it has three long stories (one was a decade old when the book came out; the other two were new to the book) that are all about the same central character, but are very separate.

Rhialto is a magician, one of a loose association in the 21st Aeon, closely allied to the Preceptor of that group, Ildefonse, who is both first-among-equals and the arbitrator of disputes among the group. (And they are a group that disputes a lot, we think.)

So he's not quite as much of an adventurer or rogue as Cugel and some of the characters of the first book were: he's settled and rich and powerful in this world. That just means his stories are about other things - in a Vance world, there are always schemes and plots and stratagems, and a protagonist is either trying to advance his own schemes or trying to understand and extricate himself from the schemes of others.

I could detail those three plots, but why? Rhialto gets into complicated situations, mostly due to malice of others, and then gets out of them. The details are in the reading.

I like Cugel a bit better than Rhialto; the magician is not as colorful or thrown into situations quite as difficult and amusing as the rogue is. But Rhialto the Marvellous is still a prime-period Vance book, full of wonderful sentences and amusing moments and convoluted plots (both Vance's stories and those of his characters).

So I wouldn't start here with Vance, but it's a fine capstone to the Dying Earth stories.