Well, Dying Earth fiction really is more fantasy than sci-fi anyway. Vance's stuff was chock full of magicians and demons and whatnot, Viriconium has knights and monsters and pseudo-elves and actual dwarves (except that I think they're just like, small people not a separate race, which makes it kind of brilliant). With Wolfe, it's a tougher call, but it's still sword fights and monsters (smilodons! alzabos!) and giants and so forth. So I don't think that's quite it. It's more that the settings are crumbling, rotting. Where things are beautiful, it's because they're slicked with oil. If there are huge statues, they have alien proportions and inhuman visages. Etc. One great example of this, which alas I can't find online, is the description of the Metal-Salt Marsh in "The Lamia and Lord Cromis" in Viriconium Nights. Basically it's this weird fantasy swamp full of huge fantasy opponent insects and fantasy strange trees, but the whole thing is in the context of the swamps being polluted with heavy-metal run-off, such that rather than just feeling like a romp through a low-level dungeon, it's another nail in Earth's coffin. Here's a taste from the inferior Pastel City (the first book in the same series):
Later
(And yes -- that decadent prose is as much a staple of the Dying Earth genre as anything else!)
Anyway, that scene, on some level -- a dwarf leading a knight through a magical marsh full of monsters and environmental hazards -- could just as easily be the Fellowship of the Ring detouring through the Dead Marshes. But the environmental details are unsettling; the idea that magic is grounded in a corruption of our natural world through workaday pollutants, the narcotic atmosphere, etc. I just don't get any of that from the second screenshot, while the first does have some of it.
I suppose "Haters gonna hate" applies to me.
[EDIT: Incidentally, I'm positive that Monte Cook will have read all the same books I've read in this genre, and more; his nerdscore is much higher than mine, he's been around longer, and this is his real job. So I'm sure he knows what he's doing in this respect. I hope the Torment team reads them, too, and doesn't just rely on the way they're digested into the Numenera source material because then you have the whole copy-of-a-copy effect. (Not saying Numenera is a copy; only that it is drawing upon a tradition.) I think they should be faithful to the Numenera setting, but capturing its vibe would probably be helped by knowing where that vibe comes from. Or where I imagine it comes from, anyway.]
