Cugel's Saga

Tales of the Dying Earth, Book 3

By: Jack Vance

Narrated by: Arthur Morey

In Cugel’s Saga, published 17 years after Eyes of the Overworld, the novel that first featured the scoundrel, Cugel again tests wits with Iucounu and acquires rudimentary powers. Though Vance puts himself in the tradition of popular fantasy writers, one might assume that he had also grown up with Ovid and Herodotus, Homer’s Odyssey, Don Quixote, and Candide. The Cugel tales lack some of the scope and pathos of the great adventure yarns, but, in the 21st century, they may be as close as one gets to the celebration of epic human perseverance.

©1984 Jack Vance (P)2010 Brilliance Audio, Inc.

Critic reviews

"Probably the least attractive hero it would be possible to find, struggling through a universe like a Hieronymus Bosch painting, a hero only in that nearly everybody else he encounters in that universe is on the make too, and yet the Cugel stories are howlingly funny.” (Kage Baker, author of Empress of Mars)

"Cugel the Clever [is] a rogue so venal and unscrupulous that that he makes Harry Flashman look like Dudley Doright. How could you not love a guy like that?" (George R. R. Martin, author of A Song of Ice and Fire)

not bad

it starts off really slow then picks up. Vance had an incredible imagination sometimes the book gets a little too wierd.

Cugle is a character

Cugel is quite the character, and on forgettable mix of scoundrel, unwilling hero, explorer, and entrepreneur. Jack Vance doesn’t miss a beat a sequel, 17 years later, of Cugel, the clover. The role-playing game, dungeons and dragons from Gary Gygax enjoys no small amount of inspiration from Jack Vances works concerning the dying earth.

Filled with humor and mirth, tongue and cheek an unexpected this adventure story, although meandering reaches quite the satisfactory climax.

Highly recommended with lots of fun and enjoyment.

Timeless and clever!

Rarely have I laughed so much reading a book. Glorious story and fantastic narration! Do yourself a favor, and read all the books in the series.

Not as good as book 2

As per the title. There didn't seem to be as many mini-stories in this book, compared to the second.

The narration was wonderful again, however, and the words were a delight as always.

Witty, refreshingly different

Like its companion novel, Eyes of the Overworld, Cugel's Saga is an odd duck of a book, nominally fantasy, but different from most popular fantasy in setting and style. It takes place on a far future Earth, where magic exists, the Sun is about to go out (or so the inhabitants of the world believe), and all manner of odd people, weird creatures, and bizarre societies occupy their own corners of the world. The writing is very tongue-in-cheek, mixing high-minded language and ideas with low humor, and the hero of the story, Cugel, is about as much of a vain, swindling, self-serving rogue as can be imagined. Exiled to a distant beach by a magician that he failed to rob in the previous book, Cugel wanders through a wholly different series of misadventures than before, each time coming up with some clever scheme to enrich himself, and almost (but not quite) pulling it off.

Despite the overt silliness of affairs, Vance is a smart, literate writer, and the clever exchanges between characters can be a hoot. Everyone on the Dying Earth, it seems, from cart boys to sorcerers, is an amateur philosopher, theologian, legal scholar, or student of etiquette, though many are as amusingly corrupt as Cugel himself. A number of the situations he gets implicated in have a parable-like meaning, if one reads between the lines. And the background world seems full of half-forgotten myth and history, which, while never explored in much depth, gives the story's details a tapestry-like richness. (Speaking of which, if you're interested in a more serious-minded cycle of books set on a similar end-of-Earth world, I highly recommend Gene Wolfe's Book of the New Sun series, which was directly inspired by Vance's Dying Earth, and takes it to a whole new level.)

As with Eyes of the Overworld, the episodic nature of the story and lack of recurring characters limits its depth, but if you're in the mood for something imaginatively *different*, either or both novels are worth a read. I thought this one had a bit more continuity than its predecessor and made Cugel a little more sympathetic, so I liked it more. I also enjoyed the audiobook narrator's inspired choice of making Cugel sound like Richard Nixon.