<span class="gmail_quote">On 6/4/07, <b class="gmail_sendername">aaron</b> <<a href="mailto:aaronsingleton@gmail.com">aaronsingleton@gmail.com</a>> wrote:</span><br><div><blockquote class="gmail_quote" style="border-left: 1px solid rgb(204, 204, 204); margin: 0pt 0pt 0pt 0.8ex; padding-left: 1ex;">
<div>Any other Vance fans subscribe to the list? </div></blockquote><div><br>Learned about Vance a few years ago from this list, but just started Tales of the Dying Earth. It's fun so far. It doesn't have the complexity of Wolfe's writing, but the language and descriptions are just as rich and flavorful, if not more so. When I envision the world Vance describes, it is super-saturated with color and ornamented with strange debris. I like it.
<br><br>One observation.... I've heard that Tolkien's work was a large inspiration for the Dungeon and Dragons tabletop games. Just after reading about 100 pages of Tales of the Dying Earth, I'd say that it looks like the D&D creators took a LOT of inspiration for their magic systems from it, much more than anything they would have gotten from Tolkien. Gandalf's magic was much more organic, subtle, and undefined than the mechanisms and descriptions (including spell names) I've seen in the book I'm currently reading.
<br></div><br>--Joel<br></div>