Jack Vance is a good choice. This 'dying earth sub-genre', its fantastical or science fiction attributes are a thin veneer on something real.
One major change to my thinking by Wolfe was that I used to assume history and progress were linear. I don't believe that anymore. There are too many glaring inconsistencies. More important than a chronological clock is the tick of the 'cultural clock'.
There are works that give me a, let's call it a dying earth vibe, but they are works of non-fiction such as Joseph Tainter's Collapse of Complex Societies, 1177 by Eric Cline (both are interesting but the first of which I strongly recommend to you), or texts originally written in dead languages like Aramaic or Latin of which I have a few in English. It is a very strange feeling to read a text thousands of years old and realize the author is more, not less comprehensible than a similar text from several centuries ago written in your mother tongue. It is stranger still when you find more examples of this happening. It is as if the newer authors had their thoughts clouded or confused, the way they form their thoughts on the page is less joined up. I have come to believe that society undergoes change in such as way that it is perfectly possible for one to have much more in common with the thoughts of an ancient group of people than a much newer one.
To my eyes, it is clearly the case that different periods in history are recorded at different rates of lucidity or joined-up thinking. That is a hamfisted description but it'll have to do. My suspicion is that when we become altogether non-lucid the writing disappears also. At other times it appears to me that the thinking of some authors is more sophisticated than our own. I cannot account for this, only to suggest that culture controls people's range of reasoning powers and that there are deep cycles we are utterly oblivious to.
On a related note I feel strongly that many books and film media created before the 1980s were more sophisticated than today's interpretations. I wrote something about this recently.
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12941619
Peter Thiel thinks about this in a technological sense but it may also be true culturally with music, art etc.
People will state this is subjective, but I don't think it is. Just because you can point to works of excellence in any age doesn't mean there is no moving average. Perhaps we're hamstrung by access to easy answers that slot into place in our heads in place of difficult, but more original thinking that is our own.