From: tyan at twcny.rr.com (Thomas Yan) >I'm curious. How did you discover Steve's books, and how did you >learn of this mailing list? > >I learned of this mailing list from DDB's announcement on RASF*. Ditto. As for the books, they first impinged on my radar back in the late eighties, when I worked part time at "The Other Change of Hobbit". I think it was _Taltos_ that had just come out, and one of the regular customers, seeing it, exclaimed, "Oh, wow, a new Steven Brust!" If it was _Taltos_, that would have been 1988. Later that summer I was buying books to prepare for a family vacation. So I thought I'd try out this Brust fellow. I bought _To Reign in Hell_, _Brokedown Palace_, _Jhereg_, _Yendi_, _Teckla_, and _Taltos_. (Which in retrospect seems like a lot of books to be buying "on spec", but I was younger then and paperbacks were cheaper.) I read _TRiH_ first and thought it was mildly clever but mostly kind of pointless. (My apologies to those of you who like it, but I have to call them as I see them. I especially disliked how you could tell which side a given character would end up on by their name.) Then I read _Brokedown Palace_, not knowing it had a connection to the series books. It was entertainingly weird, and the characters were enjoyable, and the prose was pleasantly engaging in much the same manner as Heinlein or early Niven -- this is a rare quality in a writer, and one I value. It was rather a brain-twisting experience to reconsider _BP_ in the light of the Vlad books, and realize that mighty wizard Sandor -- was a *Teckla*. _BP_ started making me a fan, and _Jhereg_ finished the job. The witty banter, the clever solution to the problem, the multifarious hints of a rich and complex cosmology; for me these were candy. _Yendi_ was similar; _Teckla_ wasn't, but _Taltos_ was enough of a return to the previous sort of book to ensure that I wasn't turned off. After that I started buying the books as they came out; I can well remember the suspense of waiting for _Phoenix_ to see what was going to happen to Vlad's marriage. David Goldfarb <*>|"I require three things in a man. He must be goldfarb at ocf.berkeley.edu | handsome, ruthless, and stupid." goldfarb at csua.berkeley.edu | -- Dorothy Parker