Hey Asprin fans
pervect_...@yahoo.com
internet. As usual I might have arrived as the party is cleaning up,
but hey, not the first time, and I am one of those "Let's see what we
can do at four in the morning" kinda partiers anyway.
Or maybe it is already dawn. Oh well... as long as the shades are
drawn we don't need to care what time it is. :P
So how many Myth fans are out there?
Since our chairman of the party, Mr. Asprin, has left for other seas,
I have been more interested than ever in his books. It was the only
books I was reading on a regular basis, and now I am trying to collect
all the books in a particular height. Just got like four to go. The
only book I don't actually have a copy of yet is Myth-Fortunes, which
is apparently out already.
And I'm sooooo glad Aahz has a bigger role in the later books. Man
there for a while I would read books and write on the bookmarks "Well
all 10 pages of Aahz were good." :)
So anyone else out there? What do you like about the Myth books? Who
are your favorite characters? How long have you been on this
newsgroup?
Show me around in other words. Let me get to know you.
Pervect Stranger.
Charles Whitney
ontopic post we've had this year, a response four and a half months later
shouldn't be that out of line.
<pervect_...@yahoo.com> wrote in message
news:3c8a054b-c49a-4cdd...@m19g2000yqk.googlegroups.com...
>I am glad to find this. I am looking for some Myth fandom on the
> internet. As usual I might have arrived as the party is cleaning up,
> but hey, not the first time, and I am one of those "Let's see what we
> can do at four in the morning" kinda partiers anyway.
>
> Or maybe it is already dawn. Oh well... as long as the shades are
> drawn we don't need to care what time it is. :P
>
> So how many Myth fans are out there?
I think there's a minimum threshold that we would need in order to have
conversations here, and sadly, we don't really have that. Now that RLA has
gone into the great beyond, it's unlikely that we'll ever have it again,
unless his heirs agree to sell movie rights or something. But that's
increasingly unlikely these days.
> And I'm sooooo glad Aahz has a bigger role in the later books. Man
> there for a while I would read books and write on the bookmarks "Well
> all 10 pages of Aahz were good." :)
I just reread Hit or Myth while sitting at my computer waiting for load
times and downloads, (at 172 pages, it's not hard, especially with the
shortish chapters) and was impressed with how well it's held up in the 15
years or so it's been since I last read it. I do think you've hit on a
problem with the, I was going to call them later books, but I guess they
were more the middle novels now, which is specifically the loss of Aahz as a
major character, but more generally a significant change in how the books
were plotted. I haven't read the most recent books. I read a review of
Mythtaken Identity (? Was that the lost credit card one?) and decided I
wasn't really terribly interested. The subsequent books after that never
recaptured my interest, so I never got back into them.
But before I digress too far, the problem after Hit or Myth is that Aahz
became an equal to Skeeve, and his role, and Tanda's and Chumly's roles,
were increasingly being supplanted by Guido, Nunzio, Massha and Bunny. Aahz
was really the only guy among all the characters who would insult Skeeve and
deflate his confidence or ego, and that effectively stopped after Aahz
became Skeeve's partner. What little leverage Aahz had left over Skeeve
after that was mostly eliminated in the long discussion scene toward the end
of Mything Persons, and finally finished off completely with Markie's
confession at the end of Little Myth Marker.
Instead, Aahz's role was replaced by Guido, who was not only a much more
shallow character, but also was Skeeve's subordinate. So he had a view of
Skeeve that was quite respectful, almost worshipful, which wiped out the
common conflict that made the four earliest books so entertaining. Nunzio
and Massha also had these shortcomings as characters. I found it quite
disheartening in Myth Inc Link when every character who narrated, even Aahz,
although his was not as bad, had a long extended monologue about how
wonderful they thought Skeeve was. And because Guido, Nunzio, Massha and
Bunny were all working for Skeeve, they couldn't realistically look down on
him or doubt his competency, certainly not the same way Aahz could.
But Tanda as well was supplanted, although she didn't play the same role as
Aahz in supplying conflict with Skeeve. Massha and Bunny both picked up the
roles Tanda had been playing prior to their arrival, and again, both of them
had a much more vested interest in keeping Skeeve happy and pleased with
them than Tanda did. I don't think it's a coincidence that the nastier
comments that Skeeve would make about Massha (which were pretty amusing in
Hit or Myth) mostly disappeared after Hit or Myth and were almost completely
absent after Little Myth Marker. So again, the relationship between them
was dulled, and since it had diminished Tanda's role, a relationship that
might have more dramatically interesting turns also diminished.
And Bunny was probably the worst, who supplanted Tanda, and later the poorly
realized Luanna, as the love interest, and replaced Aahz as the guy who gets
his hands dirty coming up with a solution to a novel's big conflict. The
first problem simply was that there was really no romantic conflict there
beyond whenever Skeeve was going to wake up and realize that this
wonderfully perfect woman was in love with him and was willing to do
anything he wanted for him. The other is that Bunny's solutions weren't as
interesting as Aahz's were. Heck, in Sweet Myth-tery of Life, her solution
for Possiltum's finances, one of the major conflicts of that book, was done
out of sight. (And the only other major conflict in that book became
irrelevant by the end) Whereas we'd see Aahz's plans from their planning
stages, to being implemented, to their complications, to their resolutions,
with Bunny we'd just digress for a few chapters on some other issue and then
learn that it was all resolved. Perhaps Bunny's negotiations with Grimble
wouldn't have been terribly interesting, but it was even less interesting
the way it did play out.
Speaking of digressing...
> So anyone else out there? What do you like about the Myth books? Who
> are your favorite characters? How long have you been on this
> newsgroup?
I've been here off and on for over 13 years now. I've had many extended
periods where I didn't post, but I usually monitored the newsgroup during
them nonetheless.
I do have to give RLA credit for one thing which I realized when I was
reading Hit or Myth. I started reading the books when I was a young
teenager, and I was amazed reading it again, at just how many colloquial
expressions I learned from these books. It's quite amusing looking at it.
As for my favorite characters, I too liked Aahz, and I also liked Gus, and I
liked Skeeve when he was dealing with Aahz, but when he was dealing with
most of the other MYTH Inc characters, I found him dreadfully dull. The
Myth books I enjoyed the most were the ones where most of the pages were
devoted to things happening, rather than extended conversations between the
characters. Unsurprisingly, those were the earlier books in the series.
Hope this spurs some discussion,
Charles