Thieves' World: Turning Points

Afterword. Lynn Abbey

Who says you can't go home again? When home is the city named Sanctuary, anything is possible.

A lot of water has flowed under the bridge since that Boskon dinner in 1978 when Thieves' World was conceived. We had a great run—twelve anthologies, a couple of novels, some graphic adaptations, games, and some great music you never got to hear—and then times were changing, not just in publishing, but in private lives as well. We boarded up Sanctuary in the late 1980s—put it in "freeze-dry mode" with the hope that the great wheel of fortune would spin around again. Without going into great detail, Robert Asprin and I got married not long after Thieves' World began and we separated a few years after it ended. By the time the divorce was final, the great wheel had pretty well come off its axle and, when asked, I'd answer that pigs would fly before there'd be another book with Thieves' World on the cover.

Oops.

I guess I'd started thinking about it a year or so earlier, when I realized I was signing (and resigning) battered copies of Thieves' World and Tales from the Vulgar Unicorn that were older than the readers handing them to me. Maybe a reprint program, I'd thought, but no publisher was interested in reprints only. Frankly, they weren't interested in resurrecting anything that seemed as tightly associated with the 1980s as, oh, Michael Jackson and Ronald Reagan.

Enter Brian Thomsen, editor extraordinaire and proverbial longtime friend of the family, and Tom Doherty, who'd been the man-in-charge at ACE Books when Thieves' World began its run and is now the man-in-charge at TOR. Brian was looking for a project he could sink his fangs into and Tom, in a moment of weakness, agreed that if anyone was going to bring back Thieves' World it should be TOR—but not as a reprint program.

They wanted new material—new anthologies that got back to Sanctuary's grungy roots and a novel (a "James Michener-esque epic novel"—it said so right at the top of the contract) that would recap all twelve previously published anthologies while leveling the playing field for the new stories. I, of course, would write the "Michener-esque epic novel" that we honestly thought Tor would be publishing in the first half of 2001.

Oops.

Thieves' World has always been a lot like an iceberg: What's visible on the surface is only a fraction of what's really there. Contracts had to be written and rewritten. The authors who wrote for the original incarnation had to sign off on the parameters of the new one. New authors had to be selected, invited… persuaded that their professional lives would not be complete until they'd written a story set in the renovated Sanctuary. And there was that little matter of turning more than fifty often contradictory (often deliberately contradictory) stories into that "Michener-esque epic novel."

Little by little, Thieves' World came together. All the first-generation authors signed off on the changes necessary to bring Sanctuary into the twenty-first century world of electronic publishing and multi-media exploitation rights; many of them signed up to write new stories. I read and re-read the old stories, stared at maps, dove into obscure histories until the boundaries blurred and I began to think I knew what had happened in Sanctuary, what was happening, and what needed to happen in the future.

The novel was late… very late. By the time the authors in Turning Points got a chance to read it, their stories were also—technically—very late. I owe them, and everyone else connected with Turning Points, my thanks for their patience. At least this time around we had e-mail. (I think back to the late seventies, when overnight mail was just getting a foothold, and I marvel that Bob ever managed to get the anthologies put together.)

Welcome back—I hope you'll agree it was worth the wait.