Cugel's Saga

Cugel's Saga is a picaresque fantasy novel by American writer Jack Vance, published in 1983. It is the third book in the Dying Earth series, whose first volume appeared in 1950, and it picks up directly where The Eyes of the Overworld (1966) left off. At the end of that book the protagonist, Cugel the Clever, is abandoned on a desolate beach far from his native Almery. His goal remains the same: to return home and take revenge on Iucounu the Laughing Magician, whom he holds indirectly responsible for his exile. Although the book is built from episodes that have a degree of independence, the Internet Speculative Fiction Database describes it as twice as long as its predecessor and less episodic, and catalogs it as a novel, though some of its parts had been published earlier on their own.

The plot revolves around the Pectoral Skybreak Spatterlight, a scale of great value that forms the central node of force of the Overworld entity Sadlark. Cugel acquires it almost by chance while working for the avaricious Master Twango, and from there a chain of misadventures follows. He passes himself off as a wormminger aboard a ship propelled by marine worms, which he ends up hijacking together with the captain's wife; he deals with the inhabitants of a village that raises columns for its idle husbands; and he faces the hostility of a magician, a caravan of maidens whose chastity proves less secure than expected, and a demon sealed in a temple. The story moves with the rhythm of the picaresque: the protagonist drifts from trade to trade and from deception to deception, and his cleverness usually saves him, though it rarely saves him from himself. Cugel remains an ambiguous figure, more skillful than virtuous, whose appeal depends on the reader.

The ending gathers the threads of the story: Cugel gets Iucounu to touch the scale with his forehead, which annihilates him, and he takes possession of Iucounu's manse. The book was included in the complete cycle collection, Tales of the Dying Earth, and in Vance's complete works it is volume 35. The second edition, published by Underwood–Miller, had a special run of 550 signed and numbered copies, issued eight months after the regular hardcover edition.