--- Philip Hart <philiph at SLAC.Stanford.EDU> wrote: [...] > I'm glad there's no such thing as a last book (in the > author's lifetime). I was counting on 17 Vlad novels, but > even if Vlad dies or becomes a god after #10, there's always > the past to mine (a demon takes over Blackwand, the fight for > the Necromancer's soul, ...) You know, this made me think of a question for the author, which he may or may not want to answer: Mr. Brust, you've said in the past that you felt it was important in _Teckla_ and subsequent books to move Vlad away >from being an assassin because you felt that the first two Vlad books came too close to glorifying, or endorsing, or failing to condemn, his conduct. _Taltos_ and _Dragon_, written after Teckla, tell stories from earlier in Vlad's career, when he was still an assassin. When you wrote those books, having dealt with the issues in _Teckla_ that you had, did you then feel a continuing obligation to infuse them with some degree of moral judgment about what Vlad was doing? Or did you feel that the presence of the chronologically-later, earlier-published _Teckla_ (and, in the case of _Dragon_, the other intervening books as well) was enough? Did you think about it consciously, or did you feel that the conclusions you had drawn about the responsibilities of an author naturally informed your later work? I'm asking because I think the creative process is interesting, and the relationship of art to morality is interesting, and both together are really interesting. If I've misunderstood your earlier comments on the subject, or if I've drawn unwarranted inferences, I of course apologize. -- Greg