What I'm reading

[prog]

I borrowed Charlie Stross's Halting State from radiotelescope a few weeks ago, but am still only halfway through it. A police procedural about the game industry, even a lightly SFnal one (set in a newly independent Scotland circa 201X), is not really what I wanna read right now. Deciding that I was more in the mood for a totally whack fantasy, and recalling that ahkond brought up Jack Vance's Dying Earth series in recent conversation, I sought that out. The Harvard Bookstore had a new paperback collection of all four novels for $20 - sold.

So far, I love them. The metagame hook for a modern fantasy fan is how they define a great deal of what would decades later become much of D&D's basic ruleset and milieu, particularly the notion of spells that vanish from your mind after you cast them, and sorcerors capable of holding more, and more difficult, spells in their brains as they gain wizardly experience. My enjoyment of the stories goes beyond this novelty (though I do get a kick out of it). They're smooth reading and, for half-century-old stuff, hardly dated.

So where am I with Brust? I have read through the first two Taltos collections (which cover Jhereg through Phoenix) and also picked up Dragon separately. I don't feel like reading the most recent two novels, both readily obtainable as new paperbacks, until go back to I fill in the holes.

Comments

[ahkond.livejournal.com]

Yay Vance. I'm slowly working my way through his complete works and right now I'm in the middle of a strange whodunit called the House on Lily Street. The set is roughly in the order that they were written, which means that the Dying Earth stuff is scattered around. The original Dying Earth was one of the first things he wrote, and the others came much later in his bibliography.

The spell system underlying so much "standard" fantasy game-playing and fiction reminds me a bit of how much Lovecraft's ideas have become part and parcel of modern fantasy and horror. I guess it's true of any influential writer but these two cases seem very particular and largely unread by the general public. I've been reading some Hellboy/BPRD lately so I guess that's why Lovecraft is on my mind.