You wake up in the gutter, head aching, and realize two things: first, the ship you sailed in on has sailed away with the tide, unable or unwilling to wait for a lowly sailor like you and; second, you are now a cat, a mangy, unwanted cat. You dodge the passing feet, booted, slipped, pattened, and dart behind some barrels, where you will hopefully be safe from passing packs of street dogs, and try to remember how you came to be a cat.
Last night is a blur. You can hardly remember even the name of this god-forbidden town – oh, god-forbidden, that’s right: Sanctuary. You shudder and hiss: not a great place to find yourself under enchantment. From what you’ve heard whispered on other docks, trouble is coming to Sanctuary. The Rankin army, for one, is approaching, has been approaching, for years, but now is poised to strike, with a courage brought on by the strength of their god. But the god of Sanctuary is not willing to give up just yet and is fighting back through its priests and mages. The people of Sanctuary are more philosophical: it doesn’t matter who is in charge, really, the end-result is that they will still profit and suffer the same.
But how did you become a cat? Did you place your hand in the wrong place on a mysterious woman in a pub? Or, with daring derived from drink, accept a bet that you couldn’t steal a particular book from a mage that lived down a dark alley? Or perhaps your captain sent you on an illicit delivery to the back door of the palace, and perhaps what the captain wanted delivered wasn’t what was in the box he gave you, but the bearer of the box: you. Perhaps you escaped the inescapable dungeon, dashed through the courtyard where, if apprehended by the city guard, you risked losing a hand for thievery or parts less easily missed, like your head. From what you heard, such dire consequences didn’t discourage crime in Sanctuary, but everyone agreed that it paid not to get caught doing it there….
As I said recently, I was hunting for a book in my double-stacked collection and, having pulled the front row off the chest-high shelf, and then the face-high shelf, I finally wondered if I had put books behind the top shelf – and I had, though I did not find the book I was looking for. I did, however, find my Thieves World books. I won’t claim to have the whole collection – I somehow skipped a critical volume in the middle, lack the last volume, completely missed the two new volumes that came out in the early 2000s, and eschewed the stand-alone novels, graphic novels, comics, and role-playing games that the original series spawned.
The books take place in a shared world, an Arabian Nights, Casablanca, East Village in the early 80s1 sort of place. There are dark winding streets, a bustling outdoor market, pubs, wizard’s houses with convenient drainpipes and balconies through which a thief could enter if they were bold or stupid enough, a run-down wharf, the aforementioned castle, a pub. All populated by mysterious fortune-tellers, people who had lost their memory, wizards, mages, mercenaries, priests, bartenders and innkeepers, the occasional lost sailor, and – of course – thieves. People grew up on the streets of Sanctuary, trapped there by poverty, its apparent distance from neighboring cities – and the dangerous wilderness that surrounded it – and the approaching army. Or else, they were drawn to Sanctuary, as an escape from other places, from pursuit – or because they had business there, often illicit or for personal vengeance. There was an occasional someone with a heart of gold – and there was inevitably another someone ready to steal it from them.
The Thieves World setting was created by Aspirin and Abbey, who then worked with a group of some of the best Fantasy authors to populate and story it. The core group included Poul Anderson, C.J. Cherryh, John Brunner, and others. Guest participants included Marion Zimmer Bradley, Phillip Jose Farmer, Vonda McIntyre. Aspirin and Abbey laid down some ground rules, the primary one being: no killing each other’s characters – although some characters did get killed off and then resurrected, from what I remember.
These are good stories, fantasy at their most fun. There’s a wild, mysterious, edgy, somewhat dangerous quality to the stories2 and, with some of the top fantasy writers contributing, really well-written. The authors were clearly having fun with this – reading each other’s stuff, playing off each other, competing with each other, transforming each other’s characters… Wikipedia quotes Cherryh as saying, “You write your first Thieves’ World story for pay, you write your second for revenge.” And it shows.
I love this idea: get a writing group together, agree on a shared world, some key shared characters that you pledge not to kill off, and set yourself the goal of writing at least one short story between meetings. Take turns at the meetings reading your work aloud, and then write some more. Great way to make friends and break your writer’s block.
Although you can buy the original Thieves World books in compendium form now, I haven’t seen them in used bookstores or at library book sales – which tells me that, somewhere out there, hidden behind placid rows of Good to Great, 7 Habits and Getting It Done, or lurking in dusty attics or dank basements of GenX SFF fans, are complete collections, neatly lined up, waiting to be rediscovered by trespassing GenY or Alpha.
- Definitely different from the East Village of Rent or of today. The East Village of the 80s was dangerous and dark, with brightly-colored crack vial lids decorating the streets like leftover confetti from a New Year’s long past. Friends who lived there told me that the streets were bustling with illicit activity until someone noticed them, then there would be a signal of some sort – a hissed word, a whistle – and the people melted away, leaving them walking through deserted streets, footsteps echoing, looking back over their shoulders.
I didn’t actually live in the East Village; I did live for awhile in a building on the Lower East Side that was practically under the Williamsburg Bridge. Cab drivers, bringing me home late at night, didn’t believe I lived there. Mice haunted my dreams. Cops, guns ablazing, chased bad guys down the fire escape outside my window. Drug addicts fell asleep with crack pipes alight, burning down the next door building shooting gallery that abutted and shared a courtyard with my building. The food in the bodega on the corner had all expired, as I discovered to my dismay, because they didn’t actually sell food there. (No wonder they looked at me so funny when I tried to return the moldy cream cheese.)
I am sure there were stories aplenty about Santeria and pickpockets and beautiful shopkeepers who sold communion and quinceañera dresses fighting their parents’ edicts by exchanging illicit glances with the cooks at the Cuban-Chinese restaurants next door.
All of that is gone now. Ratner’s, the huge Jewish diner with soaring ceilings and faded art deco decor is gone. The merchants of Orchard Street who, every morning, pushed racks of clothing out onto the sidewalks leaving only a narrow path down the middle of the street for pedestrians, are gone. The liquor store that you entered through what looked like a normal door, and found yourself in a small room made of inches-thick plexiglass, with a tiny drawer where you pushed your money through, before pointing and shouting at what you wanted to buy, which then came to you through a small, bottle-high plexiglass revolving door. This merchant wasn’t getting held up again, oh no.
All gone now. ↩︎ - Like the time my husband and I stayed on-prem at Disneyworld, arrived early at the gates during off-season, and were the first people one morning on the Pirates of the Caribbean ride, back before it bowed down to the movies. The operator must not have had his coffee yet because, on our first time through, the safety lights were off and it was awesome! So much better than we remembered! Eerie! Mysterious! Dangerous! Disembarking, we raced back to the entrance and went through again but a supervisor must have arrived and turned on the lights; it was good but lacked a little… something… something Disney didn’t want to sell… ↩︎
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