Month 28: The Overworld

Month 28 of 260 (10.77 percent)

Size of list: 85,470 pages (9.8 percent above start)

Pages read: 14,385 (16.83 percent)

H-list: 3,968/23,114 (16.17 percent)

N-list: 5,672/36,694 (15.46 percent)

O-list: 4,745/25,662 (16.33 percent)

Finished: The Eyes of the Overworld
Reading: A Canticle for Leibowitz, The Fires of Heaven

The Eyes of the Overworld is the sequel to Jack Vance's The Dying Earth. Unlike the first book, Eyes of the Overworld is a single story about a single character on a single quest. Caught burglarizing a wizard's treasures, Cugel the Clever is sent to procure a magical item, the Eyes mentioned in the title, and then must find his way back, dreaming of revenge the whole time. Vance is a competent writer, and this would be a perfectly fine D&D adventure, which is one reason why Vance is so important in D&D history. But its real value is in the creativity of the world; the society that uses the Eyes, and all the others Cugel finds on his odyssey. Cugel is not a wizard but a thief, like Bilbo but with more malice and less heart.

One interesting angle is that the Overworld has been adopted by D&D offshoot 13th Age, but there it's the world above us, the cloudscape; Vance's Overworld is the illusory world seen through the Eyes, in which every building is a palace and every food is delicious, despite being hovels and slop in reality.