Dean Koontz provides the introduction and Jack Vance himself a one page preface in which he describes writing the original stories while crossing the Pacific as a deckhand in the late ‘forties. Each story has a biographical introduction from the editors and is followed by a short note of appreciation from the story author. Robert Silverberg’s ”The True Vintage of Erzuine Thale” begins the collection, while it ends with Neil Gaiman’s “An Invocation of Incuriosity”, which, being both shorter than most others, and in a sense breaking the fourth wall by switching between our own day and the Dying Earth, seems an intentional conclusion.

“Dying Earth”, Vance’s term, has become a genre and a literary term. Much of humanity has departed to the stars, never to return, all contact lost, while humans have kept the forms that you and I have, even while magic is at work in the world, and that world is full of monsters, carnivorous plants, and creatures of other sentience. Vance named some of them in his original books – Twk-men, Deodands, Pelgranes, and named too the changed geography of Earth. Later writers such as Michael Moorcock in Dancers At The End of Time either borrowed or arrived independently at the atmosphere of the books: cynical, abrupt and cruel; while other writers such as Gene Wolfe in The Book of the New Sun adopted their picaresque exploration of cruelty, while as recent an author as China Mieville (in The City and the City) used the idea of individuals not seeing each other, which formed the basis of Vance’s first Dying Earth sequel, The Eyes of the Overworld.

Behind the Dying Earth, the inhabitants have a mythology, if not exactly a mythos. Vance’s emphasis changed from book to book – the first introduced the world; the second and third dealt with trickster Cugel the Clever; while the final book of the four concentrated on magicians who might or might not know spells. The authors of these “Songs” develop those varying interests. If spells work, magicians know only some of them (and several stories here are about the struggle to find Phantaal’s original great book of spells); if there is an escape to another world, that world is likely to prove no better (climbing a barbthorn tree like a future Jack and the Beanstalk in Matthew Hughes’ “Grolion of Almery” proves that, particularly as you might be eaten by the tree on the way to that other dimension). If there are no gods then at least some characters have godlike characteristics; unfortunately they are the characteristics of gods of the underworld. Mike Resnick’s “Inescapable” provides the background by which one of these creatures came into being: Chun The Unavoidable. Chun is one of Vance’s notable characters, but his origins have never appeared before now. Resnick also provides some of the story of Lith The Gold Witch. Lith reappears in several stories because it is her tapestry whose threads cross inaccessibly into the other world, following which leads many a poor fellow to his doom, as Phyllis Eisenstein describes in “The Last Golden Thread”.

One of Vance’s great inventions on the Dying Earth has been Cugel the Clever. Cugel is confident, pleasant, attractive to women and a thief. Whether it is his fate, or mere chance, Cugel also never wins, and his spoils turn to ash (sometimes literally). Kage Baker’s “The Green Bird” and Lucius Shepherd’s “Sylgarmo’s Proclamation” are both tales of Cugel in each of which one wonders if Cugel will come through victorious this time. While Cugel epitomises the spirit of the Dying Earth, George R R Martin brings together a number of its individuals in “A Night At The Tarn House” where Molloqos the Melancholy shows fellow guest Chimwazle that they are sharing the tavern with a malign spirit and ghouls clad in suits of human skin, while they share their dinner table with a demon and a leucomorph, the whole building siting above a pool in which hissing eels are waiting to dine on the visitors who might plunge through the trapdoored floor. Sometimes enemies co-exist, sometimes even find themselves bound together tighter and tighter, such is the case in Tad Williams’ “The Lamentably Comical Tragedy (or the Laughably Tragic Comedy) of Lixal Laqavee”, where Lixal finds himself with a monstrous Deodand as his perpetual travelling companion. Poetic irony seems to rule the Dying Earth.

You can find the Jack Vance’s complete Dying Earth oeuvre collected in the Fantasy Masterworks Tales of the Dying Earth which appeared ten years ago and is still in print. Literary theorists who study the Dying Earth talk of “thinning”, meaning loss as magic fades. (There is an article on this specifically in the Clute/Grant Encyclopedia of Fantasy). Originally published by the specialist Subterranean Press, with an elaborate cover illustration and line drawings within by Tom Kidd accompanying each story, Voyager’s British paperback edition of Songs seems rather more dull in appearance. Those who voyage in the imagination, though, will find that Songs of the Dying Earth takes them far away, even the loss of magic is itself magical. And the theft of it is outrageous!