I was a high-school kid. First or second year—I’m not sure which. Since grade school I’d been feasting on the fantastic and bizarre stories of Ray Bradbury, Robert Bloch, and Robert E. Howard. Arthur Conan Doyle’s The Lost World and H.G. Wells’s The Time Machine were the twin pillars in my pantheon of treasured books. Casting around for something new to read, I chanced upon Jack Vance’s The Dying Earth.

Hooked by the sixth paragraph—Turjan the Magician’s musings on the failed lifeforms he had created in his vats: “the thing all eyes, the boneless creature with the pulsing surface of its brain exposed, the beautiful female body whose intestines trailed out into the nutrient solution like seeking fibrils…”—I devoured page after page and came at last to the Museum of Man, where in my imagination I stood with young Guyal of Sfere and Shierl, his lovely companion, gazing with horror upon a gigantic, hideous face that protruded from a wall. It was the demon Blikdak, and his intentions were dire.

By this time I was in a state of bliss, having thrilled to Jack Vance’s roller coaster fairytale of the struggle between good and evil, presented in language the like of which I had only encountered in classic texts forced upon me in high school English classes, or much earlier in my childhood, when a well-meaning aunt insisted I read Gulliver’s Travels, thinking it a children’s book because it was populated by giants and imps and talking horses. I may have read all of twenty pages before tossing it aside. Some of the Bradbury stories had moments of poetic flight, and Wells and Conan Doyle wrote standard yet often elegant prose that kept the action going. The aforementioned classic texts certainly contained complex, interesting sentences designed to convey insights about human nature and affairs, but the plots were tedious, at least to my teenage mind. (I suspect that these days high school students are spared the torture of reading Silas Marner.) I was therefore generally unprepared for the coruscating, latinate brilliance that leaped from the pages of The Dying Earth.

Charles Angoff, an editor of Thomas Wolfe’s work, claimed that there are “two basic styles in writing: the opulent and the parsimonious.” Consider the following, in which Kerlin, the curator of the Museum of Man, describes the provenance of demons, including Blikdak:

“He is nothing else but anthropoid, and such is his origin, together with all the demons, frits, and winged, glowing-eyed creatures that infest latter-day Earth. Blikdak, like the others, is from the mind of man. The sweaty condensation, the stench and vileness, the cloacal humors, the brutal delights, the rapes and sodomies, the scatophilic whims, the manifold tittering lubricities that have drained through humanity formed a vast tumor; so Blikdak assumed his being, so now this is he.”

Opulent indeed, for there is a richness here suggesting a person of great wealth eager to share his luxuriant possessions with others. In this case it is a literary artist sharing the riches of imagination and language. James Joyce wrote with opulence; Hemingway’s style is a good example of parsimony. One’s preference is a matter of taste. At approximately the same time that I discovered Vance I was also working my way through the short stories of Hemingway and Joyce, and I much preferred the latter. For me the most luxuriant of all styles belongs to Vladimir Nabokov, and sometimes when I read Vance I think of him as the Nabokov of the Fantasy genre.

But I don’t wish to give the impression that a full appreciation of Jack Vance begins and ends in the splendor of his style, for he is a weaver of tales, and like all great storytellers conveys a depth of feeling for his characters. Amid the dry humor and satire (the primary target being hierarchical societies—and especially the religious orders) grief and heartache burst forth, with an effect that is often jarring. While immersed in The Pnume, the final book in his Planet of Adventure series, I was suddenly plunged into a well of sadness over the plight of Zap 210, girl who has spent all of her young life as a slave to aliens in a subterranean realm. Having been fed chemicals to prevent her maturation, she blossoms into womanhood after being rescued by Adam Reith, the book’s handsome hero, and her confusion and anxiety are touching. The two become lovers, and there is a happy ending. Despite the darkness and casual cruelty that ripple through Vance’s work, primary characters who are good and kind usually prevail at the end. At the close of The Dying Earth, Guyal and Shierl vanquish the demon and look forward to a conjoined destiny.

The face of Blikdak—“ugly and vile, of a gut-wrenching silly obscenity”—appearing like a prolapse squeezed through an aperture in the demon world, stayed with me long after I finished The Dying Earth series. Vance created so many remarkable entities and images that one wishes they were displayed in a wax museum. He also devised an array of unforgettable charms and ensorcellments, such as The Excellent Prismatic Spray and Lugwiler's Dismal Itch. If anyone is indeed preparing a Jack Vance wax museum, I hope the person will include a representation of my favorite ensorcellment: The Spell of the Macroid Toe, in which the afflicted member swells to the size of a house.

Like the flesh and blood paragons who become our first loves, the books we cherished in youth are with us always. I still read The Dying Earth series every other year or so. And always I am delighted and mesmerized and moved, even though I know what is coming in the next paragraph. The romantic in me will never stop yearning to be transported twenty-million years into the future, to stand, like Guyal and Shierl, gazing up at the stars.

Gael DeRoane is a writer and tennis coach who lives in Williamsport, PA. He is the author of The Road to Infinity, a fantasy novel written in the Jack Vance tradition.