Dragaera

Possibly of interest to folks here...

Mon Jul 12 08:36:24 PDT 2004

At the risk of appearing a Philistine, I'll ask which book on page 40 is the
one exciting interest?

I'm supposing it must be the Thieve's World book. I take it that someone
(Lynne Abbey?) has ressurected the series, seeing as how Thieve's World as a
concept is hardly what one could call "All New". 

The idea of the shared world is interesting and was actually decently done
in the very first book. It was the following two books where things went
downhill. For me, the concept fell apart due to the inconsistencies of
having a dozen different "takes" on the same characters. After a while, you
couldn't tell just what any particular character was really like or was
capable of. By the third book, there was no single true objective reality
grounding the series. I got the feeling that Aspirin spent a lot of time
coordinating the first book but that he just didn't care much any more by
the time the third book rolled around.

I suppose that if Thieve's World has been ressurected that someone might
take it into their head to ressurect Wild Cards as well. (Actually, a quick
scan of the web shows that Wild Cards apparently never died. The sixteenth
voume was published last year and it looks like there's even been a novel or
two. I guess that superheroes never go out of fashion.)