I’d say that AD&D’s “Vancian” magic is pretty close in terms of its memorization of formulae with a fire & forget mechanic. I’m a bit more partial to DCC’s take on it though as the whole system fits Dying Earth better than the varied editions of D&D.
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One of my favorite authors. Good friends with Terry Dowling (who has his own way with flowery other-worldly prose, his Rynosserus Tom Tyson cycle is awesome fun). I met Jack Vance once down at Borderlands in SF (also once shook hands with Michael Moorcock and thanked him for a lifetime of enjoyment and mind expansion, he seemed touched). The Dying Earth short stories are my fav. Songs of the Dying Earth also a great tribute book as noted elsewhere. Eyes of the Overworld has a somewhat unappealing anti-hero ‘protagonist’ in Cugel… still great.
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The master craftsman of word-smiths … the voice of angels in a world-wise throat … Jack Vance.
He was good from the outset: the style and the substance alike.
Vance is hailed as a stylist, and with good reason.
But the substance is there too, in rich measure: Vance was a natural born story teller who had things to say and reasons to say them, a modern-day Jack London sailing the space-lanes.
Like many, I discovered Vance in my teens (the mid-1970s) via The Dying Earth.
Forty-some years, and many Vance novels and short stories later, the work I like to call out for special attention is his early (1956) novel To Live Forever. It shows great maturity for so early a work, and presages the central concerns that Vance will elaborate in his subsequent work.
I think of it sometimes when I read someone extolling their interpretation of Ayn Rand. (It’s the extolling that I find problematic, not Rand as such.) Neo-Randians need to lighten up and have some fun. Try To Live Forever – it’s got all the extolling of self-reliance that you are hoping for, and the cold pitiless individual-atomizing universe that will be the death of us all in due course which you celebrate in fear and delight … and yet recognizes (the part I like) that No Man Is An Island and that Bad Things Happen when we forget it or try to pretend otherwise.
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The slog will probably continue …Vancian from beginning to end, just the way he liked it. Or maybe the slog will lighten up as the style grows on you … I know it did in my case. (Looking up words is part of the package. I learned “truculent” and “solecism” from Vance.)
You might try short stories … same dense style, but the plot moves along faster. I particularly like “The Moon Moth” and “Sail-25”, also “The Last Castle” although it’s novella length.
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I’m one of those idiots that despite not liking a book I’ll eventually suffer through it, I hate not finishing, it feels like…
Thanks for the other references, maybe I’ll give 'em a go down the line as I’m currently finishing up book 46 of 152 of The Destroyer Series. Those are my go-to pulp to get the taste of a bad book out of my mouth, metaphorically speaking of course. 
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I’ve got that dynamic with Moby fucking Dick on an epic scale.
I like MD, a lot, for various reasons. Yet I can’t seem to finish it – every few years I have another pass at it, get a few chapters deeper … then find myself reading something else. An epic quest … echoes of Ahab’s madness, perhaps.
Gravity’s Rainbow took me three, maybe four tries … mainly I remember the candy-eating scene, worth revisiting every year or two.
The Gulag Archipelago. Of course, I was fifteen when I made my first pass at it. How is a fifteen-year-old supposed to get a grip on Gulag? But a few years later, my mid-late twenties, after a couple of false starts, I was devouring the book whole and picking out favorite chapters (“Arrest”, “Blue Caps”).
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Last word: Why I Love Jack Vance So Much:
A fantasist for certain, he occasionally dabbled in mysteries, but his main concern was the way people behave and the social, political and personal forces that motivate them. He thought of himself as “a speculative anthropologist,” his son said, interested in human beings and their foibles and their ability — or inability — to adapt to strained and bizarre situations.
— “Jack Vance, Novelist of the Fantastical, Is Dead at 96” by Bruce Weber @ New York Times
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