The Dying Earth Audiobook (Free)

The stories contained in the Dying Earth introduce dozens of seekers of wisdom and beauty, wonderful lost women, wizards of every shade of eccentricity with their runic amulets and spells. We meet up with the melancholy deodands, who feed on human flesh as well as the twk-men, who ride dragonflies and trade info for salt.

You will find monsters and demons. Each being is normally morally ambiguous: The evil are charming, the good are dangerous. All are in the home in Vance’s lyrically defined fantastic scenery like about The Dying Earth Embelyon where, “The sky [was] a mesh of vast ripples and cross-ripples and these refracted a thousand shafts of coloured light, rays which in mid-air wove wondrous laces, rainbow nets, in all the jewel hues….” The dying Earth itself is definitely otherworldly: “A dark blue sky, a historical sun…. Nothing of Earth was uncooked or harsh-the surface, the trees and shrubs, the rock ledge protruding from your meadow; all these had been worked upon, smoothed, aged, mellowed. The light from sunlight, though dim, was wealthy and spent every object from the land … with a sense of lore and ancient recollection.” Welcome.

“The Dying Globe and its sequels comprise probably one of the most powerful fantasy/science-fiction ideas in the history from the genre. They may be packed with adventure but also with ideas, and the eyesight of uncounted human civilizations stacked one atop another like layers within a phyllo pastry thrills even as it induces a sense of awe [at] … the fragility and transience of most items, the nobility of humanity’s struggle against the certainty of an entropic resolution.” – Dean Koontz, writer of the Odd Thomas books. “He gives you glimpses of whole worlds with simply perfectly turned vocabulary. If he’d been blessed south of the border, he’d be up for a Nobel Award.” – Dan Simmons writer of The Hyperion Cantos.