>From: "Scott Schultz" <scott at cjhunter.com> >To: <dragaera at dragaera.info> >Subject: RE: Possibly of interest to folks here... >Date: Mon, 12 Jul 2004 08:36:24 -0700 > >At the risk of appearing a Philistine, I'll ask which book on page 40 is >the >one exciting interest? A book featuring a short story by Steven Brust, an author who rarely writes short stories, does excite attention. Steven Brust was a contributor to a previous shared world anthology series... >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 my humble opinion, The Thieves' World series started off with a decent couple of books and then the main core of contributing writers settled in to the concept and things really started happening. The only real rule was you could not "kill off" someone elses character... (But nobody said anything about bringing back someone elses character after the original creator had killed them off). The first couple of books were collections of individual stories, then the series became more of a continuing story with multiple authors all contributing to the plot. Theives' World was one of the few series which I was overjoyed to see new releases for and was sorry to see end... None of the other shared universe series (not counting Dragon Lance and Forgotten Realms) came close to what it achieved. _________________________________________________________________ Is your PC infected? Get a FREE online computer virus scan from McAfee® Security. http://clinic.mcafee.com/clinic/ibuy/campaign.asp?cid=3963