The Eyes of the Overworld by Jack Vance

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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. Travel into the future: to an earth with a dwindling red sun that meekly fills a dark blue sky; an earth that is on the brink of dying out; an earth where science and magic mean the same thing; an earth populated with vibrant, interesting people and creatures that are unaware of the fate their planet has in store for them. A dim place, ancient beyond knowledge. Once it was a tall world of cloudy mountains and bright rivers, and the sun was a white blazing ball. Ages of rain and wind have beaten and rounded the granite, and the sun is feeble and red. The continents have sunk and risen. A million cities have lifted towers, have fallen to dust. In place of the old peoples a few thousand strange sould live. There is evil on Earth, evil distilled by time...Earth is dying...-From The Dying Earth

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The Eyes of the Overworld by Jack Vance