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Jack Vance's "Dying Earth" series was somewhat inconsistent, bringing together short stories, novels and other bits and pieces into four books in his alluring far future setting. In the superb "Lyonesse" trilogy, Vance reverts to traditional fantasy tropes. The stories, setting and characters are from long ago, in the Arthurian tradition. In another departure from Vance's other famous work, the trilogy also hangs together compellingly. This time, Vance tightly weaves his epic with multiple strands from different kingdoms and story arcs and even alternative dimensions.

The Arthurian element is almost incidental, as Vance sets out to tell his own stories from a mythical land mentioned only briefly in that more famous tale of knights, wizards and kings. But the echoes ring out: Vance tells of a King Aillas rather than Arthur, a wizard Murgen instead of Merlin, and a quest for the Holy Grail which, if you squint, has a hint of Monty Python as well as T.H. White.

He begins his tale with the story of Suldrun, a Princess rebelling against her father's heartless plans to betroth her and thus further his ruthless quest for power. She secretly weds a rival of her father, the impossibly noble Aillas. The subsequent generations engage in epic contests involving wizards, fairies, magic and great violent battles until the saga reaches a most satisfying conclusion.

After summarising it so blandly I hasten to add that Vance's vivid creations, his moral and emotional set pieces, his marvelous language, and his humour are anything but bland. If King Aillas is almost too noble and pure, it's all right because it allows Vance's more interesting protagonists to shine. They are the female characters: the tragic Suldrun, the brilliantly insolent Madouc, and the detached, mysterious otherworldly villain Melancthe. His wizards are also a compellingly weird mob.

A section where one of his heroines journeys through a parallel dimension is like a fantasy setting from the central and hellish right hand panels of Hieronymous Bosch's "Garden of Earthly Delights". It reminded me of some of the journeys of Michael Moorcock's doomed heroes. Vance also gives a nod to his British contemporary, listing the cross of Saint Elric as one of the relics to be pursued along with the Holy Grail.

I don't read books like this with a view to making an objective assessment. Maybe other readers won't fall for Lyonesse like I did. Fantasy and science fiction are more real and more meaningful to me than dull old mainstream non-genre fiction. I'll never be swayed from that orientation, and the Lyonesse trilogy locks it in even more tightly.

Searching out classics of science fiction and fantasy is a hit-and-miss affair. Some of them haven't aged well, but 'The Dying Earth' is a hit.

Vance's fantasy world is temporally inverted. The standard mode for fantasy is the one Tolkien operates in, using mythology as the template for fictional events which purportedly happened in the distant past. The idea that these are tales from the infancy of humanity gives them a potency. They are like the seed of our culture and thoughts, the DNA of our morals and truths.

In "The Dying Earth", the mythological events take place in the far future instead of the distant past. Their potency come from the idea that this is what is to come. What we might be at the dying of our world sheds light on what we are now. It doesn't quite reach the heights of Gene Wolfe's "The Book of the New Sun" and Michael Moorcock's "The Dancers at the End of Time", but it's a nice addition to this sub-genre.

I began reading an omnibus edition of the four books in the series, but it proved to be a poor-quality uncorrected scanned file. Avoid that one. I later discovered "proper" e-books of the separate volumes, but I will persist here treating them as a single book.

The first book is a collection of short stories detailing the conflicts and quests of various wizards and heroes. The strongest threads linking them are the characters T'sain and T'sais, the result of a stumbling magical experiment to create the perfect human. T'sain has one major flaw - she is unable to perceive beauty or pleasure, and has a bitter hatred of all life and herself. Later, when T'sais is, erm, decanted, that imperfection is ironed out. But her rage-filled sister is the one who must use reason to fight against her bitter instinct.

Vance's philosophical propositions are sumptuously wrapped in marvelous fantastic inventions and alluringly revived archaic prose. His rediscovery of old words is a joy. You can easily get the meaning from the context, but for the lexicographically inclined, having a dictionary on hand could bring added pleasure.

Books two and three shift gears into picaresque mode. They deal with the villainous anti-hero Cugel as he feuds with the avaricious and powerful wizard Iocunnu. Cugel is selfish and vain, but the authorities, the mayors and the holy men he encounters are no better... they are institutionalised versions of Cugel's own sociopathic nature.

Cugel's philosophy, or lack thereof, is beautifully summarised when a scheming wizard offers him a gift, asking:

“Is this the conduct of a ‘sly and unpredictable villain’?” “Decidedly so, if the villain, for the purposes of his joke, thinks to simulate the altruist.” “Then how will you know villain from altruist?” Cugel shrugged. “It is not an important distinction.”

Later Cugel baldly summarises another of his anti-philosophies: "duplicity is valuable for its own sake." Chaotic neutral seems to the the preferred alignment for Vance's characters.

The third book is like a remix of the second. It follows a broadly similar plot as Cugel is banished by Ioconnu and must traverse the perilous lands of the dying earth to find his home and seek revenge. But the diversity and delectable weirdness of the two books is actually emphasised by the recycled plot.

I am normally repelled by cynical amoral curmudgeonly attitudes, but I was won over by Vance for a few reasons: firstly, his writing is (to use the formal term) fucking hilarious. Another review I read said it is whimsical in the manner of Lewis Carroll. Secondly, I think his amoral characters and their doomed world contain an assumption of a moral compass in the mind of the reader. They are bad stories for good people. Maybe badass stories is a better description.

The final volume tells tales from the perspective of the wizards rather than their adversary. The strong start for female characters is in contrast with the men's golf club atmosphere that pervades these yarns. But they have a delectable science fantasy vibe, with wizardly space travel to the edge of the universe, and a new collection of anti-heroes to cheer or to fear, or both at the same time.

I am flinching a bit, half expecting to learn that Vance was some sort of Reagan-esque right-wing culture warrior. It would be a shame, but one would hope the books would rise above such an unsavoury past. So far all the closets have been skeleton-free. Actually I think the Vance I detect from these stories would be above that.

I found the first part of this book to be gripping. It is set on a planet where the majority of people live under the yoke of a small privileged class. It is a totalitarian society where mass production is banned. This includes printing. Everything has to be bespoke. In return, obedient hardworking citizens qualify for a sort of basic income. But they live under strict supervision of the bureaucracy and the church.

The central characters are a father and son who find themselves unable to tolerate this tyranny. They face perils and revelations as their rebellion intensifies. Vance creates compelling characters and the story unfolds through their passions and personalities. His language is rich, you will learn a lot of new words if you stop to look them up... if you don't then the context will define them enough to keep the story rolling.

Perhaps it was just my mood as I read the last section of the book, but towards the end it seemed to be a bit rushed, it was a lot of exposition without the same page-turning pace and character-driven plot. Other readers might be more attuned to the way Vance is unpacking a mythology of the future. Perhaps I should have paid more attention to the otherworldly Punch and Judy show and its puppet master at the start of the book.

Nonetheless I greatly enjoyed this novel. Vance is one of those legends of the genre who haven't quite found mainstream fame, and somehow I'd missed out on reading any of his books. I like playing catchup, even I'm more than 50 years late. As usual, these old books invariably reflect the prejudices and privileges of the time they were written. Vance does a really terrible job with female characters. I have also been re-reading Cordwainer Smith, active in a similar period. He's flawed too, but he proves that it was possible for a male writer to create prominent female characters with vibrancy, power and agency, so the likes of Vance should not be excused.

This is the sort of book I loved to devour when I was nine or ten years old. Authors like John Christopher and Nicholas Fisk had a big influence on me and I still enjoy catching up with their work today.

This one is set in a post-apocalypse future where a privileged minority live in high-tech cities. The underclass (called "savages" by the gentry) are banished to the wildlands beyond the city walls, except for a few who are kept as a servant class, effectively slaves.

The protagonist falls foul of the vicious politics of the city leaders and gradually learns how brutal the system is. He finds that life among the rebellious "savages" is better than the comfortable tyranny within the city walls. It's like an inversion of Christopher's earlier novel "The Guardians", where a working class city kid learns about the elite gentry of the English countryside. Both novels, but "Wild Jack" especially, have a whiff of HG Wells' "The Time Machine", with its Eloi gentry and Morlock underclass. Christopher is following the pattern of his "Tripods" trilogy, which is an acknowledged riff on "The War of the Worlds".

As far as I'm concerned the British class system is a travesty, including the ultimate upper class degenerates, the monarchy. Books like this help erase the base propaganda of arse-licking royalist scum, and they are still relevant today. It just occurred to me that I read "Wild Jack" around the 50th anniversary of its first appearance.

Cordwainer Smith's slim body of work has been packaged and repackaged in many different ways. The first collection I read titled "The Rediscovery of Man" was a paperback, and the first story in it was "Scanners Live in Vain". The SF Masterworks edition seems to be the same as that collection.

A later edition is subtitled "The Complete Short Science Fiction of Cordwainer Smith", and it is this more substantial book which I am reviewing here. It's worth seeking out. There could be some confusion about which one you have, possibly exacerbated by the "incomplete" SF Masterworks cover being used for the "complete" edition in some online entries. You can quickly tell if you have the longer one because the first story in it is "No No, Not Rogov", one of four stories detailing the early stages of Smith's so-called future history of the "Instrumentality of Mankind". It also has some marvelous illustrations from the original magazine publication of his stories.

Once you have the "complete" edition, you only need to get his one published novel "Norstrilia" and you are a Cordwainer Smith completist.

I've just read a short essay by Ursula le Guin, praising, critiquing and analysing Cordwainer Smith's work. She writes: ‘Cordwainer Smith’s stories were an amazement to me when I first read them. Forty years later, they still are…exuberant language, brilliant invention and hallucinatory imagery’.

As usual, le Guin gets it right, but sometimes I love Cordwainer Smith, at other times I find him slightly disturbing. A few of these stories drag, many of them are scintillating page-turners. At their core, they are myths, fantasy, or fairy tales, transposed to varying degrees into a science fiction setting. Occasionally I was put off by his Christian evangelising. It seemed to get worse as Smith became more devout later in his career. Earlier stories had a more nuanced approach to religion. He sexualises his child characters on a couple of occasions, and I couldn't immediately discern any excuse for it, but these were isolated incidents. On the plus side, he has more women characters than probably 10 of his contemporaries combined.

The idea of a closet science fiction nerd leading a double life working for the State Department and Johns Hopkins University adds to the fascination of Cordwainer Smith, whose real name was Paul Linebarger. He'd be a great subject for a biopic. One of his best creations, the underpeople, can be seen as a version of the wild and beautiful parade of minorities fighting for their rights before and after these stories were written. Smith even creates a sort of acid freak musical rebel in the form of Sun-boy, although you get the feeling he's more Charles Manson than Jimi Hendrix. I wanted him to be the latter. Smith mostly writes with nuance. It's hard to say who is a villain and who is a hero most of the time, and the descriptions of the bongo-slapping nuclear-enhanced hipster of the underworld are super cool, even if they were written by a military man who was in another galaxy compared to the beatniks and hippies rising up all around him.

For all his background in warfare and governance; for all his drift into traditional religion - Cordwainer Smith always seems to be seeking for a better way humanity can quest after. Ultimately love and hope are at the heart of his stories. In real life he was part of the establishment, but in his fictional universe he is a rebel, even a revolutionary at the same time.