Cugel's Saga is a picaresque fantasy novel by American writer Jack Vance, published by Timescape in 1983, the third book in the Dying Earth series, the first volume of which appeared in 1950.
The Internet Speculative Fiction Database calls Cugel's Saga "[t]wice as large and less episodic than Eyes of the Overworld", and catalogs it as a novel rather than a fix-up, but also qualifies that label.
"[1] The story begins on Shanglestone Strand, a desolate beach far to the north of Almery, where Cugel had been dumped at the end of The Eyes of the Overworld by a winged demon after he mispronounced the spell intended to inflict the same fate on his nemesis, Iucounu the Laughing Magician.
Taking employment at Flutic, through sheer luck Cugel obtains the Pectoral Skybreak Spatterlight, the most valuable of all the scales, as it constitutes Sadlark's central node of force, or "protonastic centrum".
At the nearby port of Saskervoy he takes employment as a lowly worminger (a crew member responsible for the maintenance of huge marine worms) aboard the worm-propelled Galante, a merchant ship owned by Soldinck and Mercantides, hoping to reach Almery by sea.
To evade retribution at the hands of Master Soldinck, who is pursuing the Galante in a lubberly cog, Cugel runs the ship aground on the Tustvold mud flats and wades ashore.
The caravan, towing the Avventura and its "premium" passengers through the air, arrives, after various adventures, in Kaspara Vitatus, the City of Monuments, where the vessel's original owner, Captain Wiskich, and his crew finally catch up with it.
The dream crystals, contaminated with the alien stuff of the otherworld, cause Duke Orbal violently unpleasant visions when he samples them in order to judge the winner of the Grand Exposition.
In "The Bagful of Dreams" (chapter V.2) a magical blue egg worn by a pelgrane around its neck shatters on the ground creating a portal into an otherworld, which turns out to be an interminable region of undulating "black spongy stuff" whose sole inhabitant is an irascible, gelatinous, tentacular hulk named Uthaw.
Twitten's Almanack, part of Vance's Lyonesse mythos, describes a number of such otherworlds, of which only Tanjecterly will support human life: Paador, Nith, and Woon; Hidmarth and Skurre, which are "purulent places infested with demons"; Cheng, which might be home to the sandestins; Pthopus, which is a "single torpid soul", and Underwood, which is "empty save for a moaning sound."
In "The Seventeen Virgins" (chapter V.1), Cugel enters a subworld, or "demon-realm", inhabited by the photophobic demonic deity Phampoun, who communicates via a homuncular excrescence on the end of his tongue.
At the beginning of Cugel's Saga the eponymous hero takes employment at Flutic, a manse in the land of Cutz, where an archaeological operation is underway to recover the constituent scales of an Overworld entity named Sadlark.
During the Eighteenth Aeon, a demon by the name of Underherd is said to have "interfered with the overworld", and Sadlark, in trying to set matters right, plunged into the miry pit now found at the back of Flutic, where he became "disassociated".
Examples of specials are Clover-leaf Femurials, Dorsal Double Luminants, Interlocking Sequalions, Lateral Flashers, Juncture Spikes, the Turret Frontal Lapidative and the Malar Astrangal, which fits over the elbow part of Sadlark's third arm.
The Skybreak Spatterlight lends an overarching unity to the separate picaresque episodes of Cugel's Saga, with the exception of the chapters "The Seventeen Virgins" and "The Bagful of Dreams", which were written and published earlier than the rest of the book and in which Sadlark's protonastic centrum is not mentioned.
One of the defining features of Jack Vance's work is his invention of fictional ethnologies, which encompass culinary, sartorial, marital, economic, architectural, musical, jurisprudential, social etc.
4: Barbarians and Black Magicians (Nelson Doubleday, 1977[5]), edited by Lin Carter, a fantasy collection that also featured work by Poul Anderson, Rik Bryant, John Jakes, Katherine Kurtz and Michael Moorcock.
In the earlier version of the text, Cugel is said to have "made a hasty departure" from a place called Julle, where he suffered "indignities" at the hands of his enemies, but also managed to cause them "confusion."
In the later version, Cugel has fled from Kaspara Vitatus, at the end of the preceding chapter ("The Caravan"), and the opening two paragraphs cursorily narrate how he baffles the pursuit and then, emerging from hiding, shakes his fist and shouts curses after the distant figures of the angry mob as they return to town.
Where the later version briefly narrates Cugel's journey across the wilderness known as the Pale Rugates without any indication as to his inner state - he is described merely as marching for an unspecified number of days, eating "ramp, burdock, squallix and an occasional newt" to fend off starvation - the earlier version explores Cugel's affective reactions to his environment and situation, for example: "The breadth of the sky exalted his soul; the emptiness of the far distances caused him fatigue and despondency."
"A comparison of the following paragraph in its two variants will serve to show how in the later version Vance has honed his prose style, paring away redundant adverbs, descriptive language and psychological details: On the afternoon of the seventh day Cugel limped down a slope into an ancient orchard, long abandoned.