It’s been way longer than I expected. A very simple mistake was made: I kept going after I finished the first book. I thought I’d do the same as with Arthur C. Clarke’s Against the Fall of Night and The City and the Stars, but I should’ve stopped and reasoned that this time around it would be four books instead of two. Also, Clarke’s books were the same story expanded upon and revised, so the going was somewhat quicker when I knew its main points. In any case, I didn’t have the will to stop and write down my thoughts when I finished any one of the four books in this series, so here I am. Vance’s work deserves to be revisited anyways, so I think I’ll make a few points based on my highlights and expand upon them at a later date. For now, I’ll start with little bits that I found noteworthy. Spoilers ahead!
Liane the Wayfarer appears to die at the hands of T’sais, the madwoman from Embelyon who comes to Earth to become a real girl. Granted, Liane may have been under the protection of some spell, or have had a miraculous natural recovery, but despite what anime would have you believe, coughing up blood is not a trivial occurrence. Magic notwithstanding, it stands to reason that a man run through with a sword and losing consciousness after coughing up blood is rapidly approaching death. It comes as a surprise, then, to see Liane presumably die at the end of his own self-titled story, at the hands of Chun the Unavoidable. Even if we assume that the stories are out of order, as they have been so far, with Turjan of Miir chronologically preceding Mazirian the Magician, the issue remains that Liane meets certain death in both stories, and mutilation at the end of his own, so whichever story happens first, explanations are in order. Perhaps Liane is regenerated by a spell he carries, making him effectively immortal, or maybe there is more than one Liane. Maybe someone lost a bunch of clones that all decided to become highwaymen and go by the same name and title.
I can’t find anything confirming this from a cursory search on the web, but I think the ancient city of Ampridatvir in the story Ulan Dhor Ends a Dream, from the first book in the series, Mazirian the Magician, is a reference to the city of Diaspar in Arthur C. Clarke’s The City and the Stars. Or at least some elements of it are. I’m thinking specifically of the moving roads by which the citizens of Ampridatvir move about, which are described almost identically to the moving roads in Clarke’s Diaspar.
But Ampridatvir still moved with a weird unending life where the builders had used ageless substance, eternal energies. Strips of a dark glistening material flowed like water at each side of the street — slowly at the edges, rapidly at the center.
In the story Guyal of Sfere, from the first book, the titular character asks about a desolate field, and is answered:
It is one of the ancient places; so much is known, no more. Death lingers here, and no creature may venture across the place without succumbing to a most malicious magic which raises virulence and angry sores.
From this we can infer that the town of Saponce, through which Guyal is passing, was once the site (or was built on the site) of a nuclear incident. This may have been a Chernobyl-like event, or it may be hinting at the use a nuclear weapon. So there was some nuclear event in the unimaginably distant past, of a scale large enough for the radiation to still be a considerable hazard at a time when people have forgotten the science behind it, and call it magic.
I love how the magicians of the Dying Earth are basically 4chan chuds. We get this bit of gold for one of them in the foreword to /Rhialto the Marvelous/:
TCHAMAST, morose of mood, an avowed ascetic, whose distrust of the female race runs so deep that he will allow only male insects into the precincts of his manse.