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Title: Great Landscapes...uhmm, that's about it.
Review: A couple of exquisite stories in the original bunch of "Tales" ("Mazirian the Magician" is my favourite) lose their lustre in the subsequent "novels" -- actually a poor cobbling together of loosely linked incidents -- in the other three quarters of this collection. Vance has a colourful eye; his vision of an Earth at the end of time is wistful, poignant, strange, memorable. However, when he moves his brush away from composition to the banal mechanics of narrative and character development, Vance loses interest. EYES OF THE OVERWORLD and CUGEL'S SAGA, for example, are basically the same novel lumbered with the same obnoxious hero and EXACTLY the same (slim) premise.A better buy would be a slim volume the "Tales"; the rest is just paper weight.
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