A few entries ago I suggested that I'd use my reading as a way to keep up my posting. It's not working as well as I expected, but that hasn't stopped me from doing a lot of reading.
I picked up (most of?) the Thieves' World series. It's unusual in that it's a long series that started off as an experiment. Basically, some relatively young authors were discussing how the writing of various authors kept having to re-invent the worlds every time a new book or series was written. It takes a lot of time and effort to create a coherent and cohesive setting. Re-doing this over and over inevitably leads to both duplication of world attributes, lots of wasted effort, etc.
So, the experiment: design a setting and let lots of authors play in the same space. There were a collection of characters, each author having their own primary character(s) but were allowed to use the other characters in minor roles. The result suprised the authors and he publishers. Anthologies typically don't do well. Scifi anthologies even less well. These were popular.
I've finished the first three:
Thieves' World
Tales from the Vulgar Unicorn
Shadows of Sanctuary
I've just started the fourth:
Storm Season
Sorry, no cover art available, they're old out of print books and amazon doesn't have the images. I was lucky to find a vendor at coastcon that had most of the series, at least the first 9.
Posted by braddr at May 8, 2005 03:15 AM