4thace reviewed Thieves' World (Thieves World) by Robert Asprin
A vintage volume of urban swords and sorcery stories
3 stars
This anthology dates back to 1979. It is a shared-world fantasy, one of the first, set in the city of Sanctuary where swordplay and sorcery are not unknown. this first book in the series has stories written by eight prominent fantasy writers with overlapping settings and characters, though quite different styles. There was no attempt to construct a single narrative arc from these, so it reads as an anthology of related short stories. The conflict is interpersonal, not human vs. nature or human vs. monster.
Like many tales from the 1970s, there are alements that take a modern reader aback because of changes in societal norms. There is a lot of violence, but not as much as a person raised on rough videogames might expect. There are allusions to gender roles which were acceptable then that many might find offensive or demeaning now. In particular the last story in …
This anthology dates back to 1979. It is a shared-world fantasy, one of the first, set in the city of Sanctuary where swordplay and sorcery are not unknown. this first book in the series has stories written by eight prominent fantasy writers with overlapping settings and characters, though quite different styles. There was no attempt to construct a single narrative arc from these, so it reads as an anthology of related short stories. The conflict is interpersonal, not human vs. nature or human vs. monster.
Like many tales from the 1970s, there are alements that take a modern reader aback because of changes in societal norms. There is a lot of violence, but not as much as a person raised on rough videogames might expect. There are allusions to gender roles which were acceptable then that many might find offensive or demeaning now. In particular the last story in the book aged poorly because of the objectification of underage female characters and by the posthumous revelations concerning child abuse on the part of its author, Marion Zimmer Bradley. That one really put me off, but there were glimpses of similar treatment in a couple of the others too. Still the grittiness probably wouldn't come as a total surprise to any reader coming this collection simply because of the title and introduction. This is no high fantasy romance, pretty obviously. the writing was generally rather well executed by professionals, constrained necessarily by word-length limitations.
There are another elven books in the series. I don't think I will be soon tackling any others. I think they might be interesting to a reader interested in the fantasy noir genre's origins or nostalgic for the time before, when conventions were established.
