Jack Vance has 7 audiobooks on Listento.it, narrated by 3 narrators, with an average listener rating of 4.8★ across 31 ratings. The most-rated is The Dying Earth.
The Dying Earth
Summary
The stories in The Dying Earth introduce dozens of seekers of wisom and beauty - lovely lost women, wizards of every shade of eccentricity with their runic amulets and spells. We meet the melancholy deodands, who feed on human flesh and the twk-men, who ride dragonflies and trade information for salt. There are monsters and demons. Each being is morally ambiguous: The evil are charming, the good are dangerous. All are at home in Vance’s lyrically described fantastic landscapes, like Embelyon, where, “The sky [was] a mesh of vast ripples and cross-ripples and these refracted a thousand shafts of colored light, rays which in mid-air wove wondrous laces, rainbow nets, in all the jewel hues....” The dying Earth itself is otherworldly: “A dark blue sky, an ancient sun.... Nothing of Earth was raw or harsh—the ground, the trees, the rock ledge protruding from the meadow; all these had been worked upon, smoothed, aged, mellowed. The light from the sun, though dim, was rich and invested every object of the land ... with a sense of lore and ancient recollection.” Welcome.
©2010 Jack Vance (P)2010 Brilliance Audio, Inc.
The Eyes of the Overworld
Summary
The Eyes of the Overworld is the first of Vance’s picaresque novels about the scoundrel Cugel. Here he is sent by a magician he has wronged to a distant unknown country to retrieve magical lenses that reveal the Overworld. Conniving to steal the lenses, he escapes and, goaded by a homesick monster magically attached to his liver, starts to find his way home to Almery. The journey takes him across trackless mountains, wastelands, and seas. Through cunning and dumb luck, the relentless Cugel survives one catastrophe after another, fighting off bandits, ghosts, and ghouls—stealing, lying, and cheating without insight or remorse leaving only wreckage behind. Betrayed and betraying, he joins a cult group on a pilgrimage, crosses the Silver Desert as his comrades die one by one and, escaping the Rat People, obtains a spell that returns him home. There, thanks to incompetence and arrogance he misspeaks the words of a purloined spell and transports himself back to the same dismal place he began his journey.
©2010 Brilliance Audio, Inc.; 1980 Jack Vance
Planet of Adventure
Summary
Stranded on the distant planet Tschai, young Adam Reith is the sole survivor of a space mission who discovers the world is inhabited - not only by warring alien cultures but by human slaves as well, taken early in Earth's history. Reith must find a way off the planet to warn Earth of Tschai's deadly existence. Against a backdrop of baroque cities and haunted wastelands, sumptuous palaces and riotous inns, Reith will encounter deadly wastrels and murderous aliens, dastardly villains and conniving scoundrels - and always the random beauty in need of rescue.
©1968, 1969, 1970 City of the Chasch © 1968 by Jack Vance. Servants of the Wankh © 1969 by Jack Vance. The Dirdir © 1969 by Jack Vance. The Pnume © 1970 by Jack Vance (P)2015 Blackstone Audio, Inc.
Rhialto the Marvellous
Summary
In the interlocking Tales of the Dying Earth Vance explores the world at the end of time when sun is guttering. Light itself is different and Vance’s landscapes —described in language that is lyrical, seductive, and partly self-invented —are wild and surreal, full of opportunity and danger. On the Dying Earth, the rules of physics as we know them have been amended and replaced by magic. The laws of evolution have spun out creatures that are humanoid, hybrid, and often terrifying. The interpenetrating world of ghosts is equally fantastic. Religion and philosophy are diversified and rewoven into myriad theories, creeds, and dogmas. Human culture is archaic, vaguely medieval European or feudal Japanese. There is nothing quaint or allegorical about the Dying Earth stories. We’re not in Oz anymore, nor Narnia either. Voldemar is a harmless grouch compared to Chun the Unavoidable. Yet, at the same time, these works are as weirdly funny as the poetry and journals of Edward Lear or the fantastic yarns of Dr. Seuss.
©2010 Jack Vance (P)2010 Brilliance Audio, Inc.
Madouc
Summary
The World Fantasy Award-winning third volume of the Lyonesse trilogy brings attention to the faerie changeling Madouc. Where princess Suldrun once meekly endured the proprieties of Castle Haidion, Madouc defends herself with rotten fruit. Vexed, King Casmir arranges a contest to marry her off, but Madouc has other ideas, and enlists the stableboy "Sir Pom-pom" on an impromptu quest to find her father. During their travels, they encounter swindlers, faeries, trolls, ogres, a knight in search of his youth, and a relatively pedestrian item known as the Holy Grail. As the sorcerers Shimrod and Murgen investigate portents of cataclysm in the world of magic, Casmir plans a murder that will bring all the lands under his iron rule; however, his ambitions will be complicated by one small but important oversight-he's failed to allow for Madouc!
©1991 Jack Vance (P)2010 Audible, Inc.
The Green Pearl
Summary
In The Green Pearl, King Aillas of Troicinet defends the peace of the Elder Isles against both the Ska marauders who once enslaved him and the wicked King Casmir. While organizing the unruly barons in the frontiers of his land, Aillas goes out of his way to capture the lovely Ska noblewoman who once stung him with her disregard. When he gets separated from his men, his dream of forcing the lady's recognition becomes the toil of dragging a defiant captive across lands governed by Casmir's henchmen. Meanwhile, the world of magic has gone on the move. The concentrated malice of the witch Desmëi has manifested as a green pearl, breeding lust and envy and death; and a sorcerer in Casmir's employ abducts the princess Glyneth, in a bid to draw Aillas and friends on a hopeless rescue mission across a bizarre and deadly alternate world. A masterpiece of romantic, picaresque adventure, The Green Pearl extends the epic founded with Lyonesse: Suldrun's Garden and concluded in the World Fantasy Award-winning Madouc
©1986 Jack Vance (P)2010 Audible, Inc.
Servants of the Wankh
Summary
Marooned on the strange planet Tschai, Adam Reith agreed to lead an expedition to return the princess Ylin Ylan, the Flower of Cath, to her homeland halfway around the globe. Monsters of land and sea lay before them as well as beings both human and alien who might rob, kill, or enslave them. Tschai was a large planet - an ancient planet - where four powerful alien races struggled for mastery while humans were treated as pawns; nothing would be easy for Reith on this journey. But the girl's father was enormously wealthy and her homeland technologically sophisticated. If Reith was ever to obtain human aid in returning to Earth, where better than Cath? If only he could get there... Servants of the Wankh, complete in itself, is the second volume of Jack Vance's masterwork interplanetary saga.
©1979 Jack Vance (P)2015 Blackstone Audio, Inc.