The Three Quests of the Wizard Sarnod

by Jeff Vandermeer

The Wizard Sarnod has lived in isolation on an island in the middle of a lake for centuries. But one day, the Nose of Memory arrives to destroy his calm by dredging up the past, and he must send three of his familiars to the subterranean Underhinds on a quest to find two people, long his brother and a former lover. In the Underhinds, they will encounter living dirigibles, fire dragons, the Bloat Toad, unimaginable perils, and long buried secrets... Based on Jack Vance's Dying Earth series, "The Three Quests of the Wizard Sarnod" is a longer and very different version of a story published in the Dozois-Martin edited Songs from the Dying Earth.

Genres: Fantasy, Dying Earth

86 pages, Hardcover

First published January 1, 2010

About the author

NYT bestselling writer Jeff VanderMeer has been called “the weird Thoreau” by the New Yorker for his engagement with ecological issues. His most recent novel, the national bestseller Borne, received wide-spread critical acclaim and his prior novels include the Southern Reach trilogy (Annihilation, Authority, and Acceptance). Annihilation won the Nebula and Shirley Jackson Awards, has been translated into 35 languages, and was made into a film from Paramount Pictures directed by Alex Garland. His nonfiction has appeared in New York Times, the Los Angeles Times, the Atlantic, Slate, Salon, and the Washington Post. He has coedited several iconic anthologies with his wife, the Hugo Award winning editor. Other titles include Wonderbook, the world’s first fully illustrated creative writing guide. VanderMeer served as the 2016-2017 Trias Writer in Residence at Hobart and William Smith Colleges. He has spoken at the Guggenheim, the Library of Congress, and the Arthur C. Clarke Center for the Human Imagination.

VanderMeer was born in Bellefonte, Pennsylvania, but spent much of his childhood in the Fiji Islands, where his parents worked for the Peace Corps. This experience, and the resulting trip back to the United States through Asia, Africa, and Europe, deeply influenced him.

Jeff is married to Ann VanderMeer, who is currently an acquiring editor at Tor.com and has won the Hugo Award and World Fantasy Award for her editing of magazines and anthologies. They live in Tallahassee, Florida, with two cats and thousands of books.

Reviews

[William Gerke · Rating 5 out of 5]

Vandermeer spins a delicate Vancian tale set in the Dying Earth in which the titular wizard is more the fulcrum around which the stories of all those he has affected are wrapped. This slim volume is a miracle of economy, as Vandermeer uses some strange literary compression algorithm to pack it with rich characterization, eloquent language, and more epic fantasy than most thousand page tomes.

This is an extended version of the one published in a collection of Dying Earth stories by other authors. I picked up the limited edition at ReaderCon after meeting Vandermeer himself. Costing more than most hardcovers and weighing in at a hundred pages, it remains one of the best purchases and reads of the year.

[Aaron · Rating 5 out of 5]

I have one and only one complaint for this novella. It's not a novel. I'd read this if it were over 1,000 pages long.
Poetry put into prose, with whimsical names, plot twists, far-fetched and fantastical landscapes.
This recaptures The Dying Earth voice so well my mind swirls with wondering if VanderMeer isn't really Vance in disguise.
LOVE this story.

[MB Taylor · Rating 2 out of 5]

I finished reading The Three Quests of the Wizard Sarnod this evening on the bus ride home. With less than 75 pages of story, it’s another novella published as a separate book. The story is set in Jack Vance’s “Dying Earth” universe.

I confess I’ve never really gotten into Vance’s Dying Earth, although I think enjoyed Michael Shea's Quest for Simbilis when I read it many years ago.

The story line of The Three Quests of the Wizard Sarnod is interesting; three separate characters are all sent off separately on a single errand by the wizard. I found two of the quest characters interesting; Whisper Bird in particular had interesting back stories that I wish had been fleshed out more, and it seemed like there was more to know about T’sais Prime. But I couldn’t work up much interest for the third quest character, Grod the Lump, or for his quest.

Part of the problem was likely the length of the work, 75 pages isn’t much space in which to develop four characters (the questers and the wizard) and a whole new world.

One thing that distracted me was the way characters and things were named: The Seeing Hall, The Mouth, the Nose of Memory, the Bloat Toad, the underhind, the land of Maddening Glass. Names in fantasy are tricky things, and a couple of names like those might be ok; but there were too many for me. It felt like they were supposed to convey some deep or possibly hidden meaning to me, but they didn’t.

Also the world of the story itself never quite jelled for me. Perhaps if I were a Dying Earth aficionado, I would have had some necessary background to help me recognize common themes and situations.

I’ve been reading fantasy for a fairly long time and science fiction for even longer and I think I am very willing to suspend disbelief. But I couldn’t here. When I read The Three Quests of the Wizard Sarnod I felt that it was supposed to be clever, rather than entertaining.