Songs of the Dying Earth by George R. R. Martin

Author:George R. R. Martin
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Tom Doherty Associates
Published: 2009-06-14T16:00:00+00:00

Afterword:

I first encountered Jack Vance’s work in junior high, when I read a paperback edition of The Dying Earth sheathed in one or another textbook (I hated mathematics, so most often I read it during math class). I was immediately hooked. I searched the newsstands for Mr. Vance’s books—I recall being exhilarated when I stumbled across The Languages of Pao, and later, in college, when I discovered the first three novels of his Demon Princes series, which I also read hidden in textbooks. I think I began to associate the reading of Vance with a certain criminality and, in this particular instance, with an aversion to a certain history professor who spoke with a Southern drawl and pronounced “feudalism” as fee-yood-a-lism.

Of the many books I have read by Jack Vance, and I think I’ve read them all, I suppose it was The Dying Earth that was the biggest influence on my writing simply because it was the first to introduce me to the Vance-ian syntax and formality of language. I was already on a path that would lead to a complicated syntax and formal style, thanks to my father’s pushing me that way, but Vance was my discovery and I accepted the lessons more willingly and more naturally from him than from an authority figure. Aside from the odd movie, Vance was my first exposure to science fiction—my father had forbidden all such reading material—and as such he was a revelation. That one could write stories about a dying sun and the peculiar folk who lived beneath it came as a shock, one from which I never recovered. Most of my stories are set in contemporary times, but were it not for Vance I think I might have been one of those writers who examine the psychological nuances of their failed marriages. Not that there’s anything wrong with that, but this way it’s been so much more fun…

Thanks, JV.

—Lucius Shepard

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