Countries have strange names, such as Kauchique, the Cape of Sad Remembrance, and the Land of the Falling Wall. They were gay, these people of waning Earth, feverishly merry, for infinite night was close at hand, when the red sun should finally flicker and go black. In the shadow of a balcony a girl barbarian of East Almery embraced a man blackened and in leather harness as a Deodand of the forest. In a little cleared space a garlanded courtesan of the Kauchique littoral danced the Dance of the Fourteen Silken Movements to the music of flutes. Here was a Melantine bargeman, here a warrior of Valdaran's Green Legion, here another of ancient times wearing one of the old helmets. The streets surged with the wine-flushed populace, costumed in a multitude of bizarre modes. From the balconies dangled flower chains and cages of blue fireflies. Orange lanterns floated in the air, moving as the breeze took them.

It was night in white-walled Kaiin, and festival time. Vance's language invokes that same sense of the legendary and mythopoeic that Tolkien, Dunsany, and Howard possessed, although instead of dwelling in some mythic past when the world was young, he places his era of legend in a dreamlike future full of nostalgia and misty exoticism. However, through her old age, the Earth has regained a shred of her own innocence, as magic and myth have resurfaced, albeit mixed with science and technology. Through these tales, Vance explores the theme of innocence-an ironic topic considering the setting is a far distant future where everything is slowly dying.

Within are six stories set on an unnamed continent in a far, far distant future when the sun has grown dim and the inhabitants of the weary Earth imagine that it will one day gutter and flicker out like an exhausted flame. I recently reread my 1960s Lancer SF Library edition of this seminal work of its eponymous genre during school vacation. It is this sort of energy death that Jack Vance explores in The Dying Earth. When elements within a system bleed energy off to form that equilibrium, those elements seem to die. The imbalance of energy permits action, transfer and conversion of energy convey motion and collision. But something is lost when energy is equilibrated. When we think of entropy, we usually imagine loss of energy, not necessarily energy equalization. Sometimes, this is referred to as entropy. All of the energy tends to even out throughout the system. Newton's Second Law of Thermodynamics states that in a closed, isolated system temperature, pressure, and chemical potential will eventually achieve equilibrium.

The dying earth book