Back on the Sword & Sorcery Vision Quest

[lemuriapress]

Back in July of last year I engaged in an ambitious project I dubbed The Sword & Sorcery Vision Quest, in which I would read through all of my multi-author sword & sorcery anthologies in an effort to better understand the genre with an eye toward building an entertaining Planet Stories anthology on the subject

Comments

[mouseferatu]

I loved the early Thieves' World books, but I found that as the series progressed, and more and more of the stories focused on the Beysib, I felt that the quality of the stories waned. Or at least my interest did, which, to be fair, isn't necessarily the same thing. But while I've been able to go back and reread the early books multiple times, I've never been able to finish the series even once.

(I also didn't care for the ever-growing involvement of the gods, and the revelations of their relationships to various characters, but that's a personal taste thing. But it did contribute to my dissatisfaction with the latter books.)

I'll be interested to see your thoughts once you go back and reread.

[lemuriapress]

My initial thoughts match up with this. The last Thieves' World book I ever got was Wings of Omen, which I think is the fifth book.

The series definitely got worse as it progressed, and while I don't remember getting to the gods stuff, what I've read of that plot line on the internet fills me with terror.

[justinhowe]

I definitely second this, the love and the dislike as they series continued. The Beysib were fine, but it started to get too weird with gods and terrorist groups (the PFL?) and beggar wars that made it all confusing and less cohesive than the first few books.

[roninevil]

Big fan of Thieves' World (obviously). You just couldn't ask for a better collection of authors. Anderson's stories were excellent, but I think Lynn Abbey's were often the best developed (but I may be biased). In short, if you get around to it, reading the whole series is worthwhile. The Beysib era may be challenging in some respects, but it does interesting stuff with culture clash and the city's slow disintegration is alarming as the books march on.

The newer anthologies are good too, though some folks don't like the timeline jump.

[varianor]

Poul Anderson seemed to have quite the liking for swashbucklers and thinkers. I remember reading that story as a kid and liking it. Thieve's World I always liked, however I thought it got a bit stale and derivative around the 5th or 6th book. The atmosphere was wonderful of course, along with the different characters and styles of magic. (The Blue Star adept story was, I thought, one of the finest.)

As to your memory problems, my wife recently educated me on backup devices. There are new "instant" portable units with huge amounts of memory that you just hook up and poof, there's a backup. I'm sorry to hear that you lost 50,000 words. That is a tragedy.

[lemuriapress]

5,000, not 50,000.

All told I probably lost about 10,000 words of irreplaceable writing. The book review isn't as big a loss as the 5,000-word fantasy story I wrote, the first piece of pure fiction I've managed to produce since college.

That was a tough loss.

[crothian]

The early books I found really good. But since they are collections of short stories I did find good stories in each volume. I've been trying to track down all the novels that were written to accompany the short stories and I am going to be rereading everything later this year. Most of the books bnow are boxed up and need to be found.

[jcfiala]

Yeah, I loved the Theives' World books, but I've got to say, I think the first trilogy of volumes is really where the best of it sits.