--- Steven Brust <skzb at dreamcafe.com> wrote: > At 02:28 PM 5/22/2003 -0700, Greg Rapawy wrote: [...] >> 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. > *blink* > > Did I say that? > What was I on at the time? This is the language I was remembering: ] It turns out that Teckla was written after a friend of ] Brust's (who was a communist orgainzer) was killed by the ] mafia. This, not suprisingly, set off a lot of soul- ] searching on Brust's part about glamorizing hit-men an was ] behind Vlad's transformation into _ex-_mob boss/hitman ] ending with Phoenix. He mentioned spending a lot of time ] thinking about John Gardner's book On Moral Fiction. This ] also makes the character of the ghost in Teckla a bit more ] compelling. <keshlema-F0B3F0.05305310092000 at news.itd.umich.edu>, quoting <http://www.wam.umd.edu/~weyker/Articles/brust-trivia.html>, which is now a broken link. Of course, it is hearsay, so you may well have said something else that was distorted in transmission. The quote is obviously personal, which is why I tried to phrase the question diffidently; I was curious about whether your thinking on the subject had evolved as the chronology of the series did. I do think _Dragon_, for instance, shows Vlad more concerned with moral issues than _Jhereg_ or _Yendi_ does -- not introspective, perhaps, but beginning to think about why he finds some Dragaeran behavior repellent, and to compare it to his own. -- Greg