Robert Asprin

Life

Robert Lynn Asprin was born on June 28, 1946, in St. Johns, Michigan. He attended the University of Michigan in 1964–65 and served in the U.S. Army in 1965–66. Long before he published fiction he was a figure in fandom. In the early years of the Society for Creative Anachronism he went by the persona "Yang the Nauseating," and in 1971 he co-founded the SCA group known as the Great Dark Horde. He also started the Dorsai Irregulars, a volunteer group that provided security at science fiction conventions. In 1976 a cartoon slide show he wrote and Phil Foglio drew, The Capture, earned a Hugo nomination for Best Dramatic Presentation.

His career had peaks and long troughs. Personal and financial problems, including a dispute with the Internal Revenue Service, kept him largely silent through much of the 1990s; an agreement with the IRS eventually encouraged him to write again, and in the 2000s he worked mostly with collaborators including Jody Lynn Nye, Peter Heck and Linda Evans. He settled in the French Quarter of New Orleans, the setting of his last novels. Asprin died of heart failure at home on May 22, 2008, the weekend he was to be guest of honor at Marcon, reportedly holding an open Terry Pratchett novel.

Work

Asprin's first novel, the corporate-espionage satire The Cold Cash War, appeared in 1977. The following year he began the book that made his comic reputation. Another Fine Myth (1978) pairs Skeeve, a hapless apprentice magician, with Aahz, a scaly, sharp-tongued "demon" (a traveler from the dimension Perv) who has lost his powers. The pun-titled MythAdventures series, illustrated by Frank Kelly Freas and later Phil Foglio, became a staple of 1980s Comic Fantasy, and Foglio adapted early volumes into comics. In the 1990s the Phule's Company books transplanted the same ensemble humor into military science fiction.

His most original act was editorial. At the Boskone convention in Boston in 1978, Asprin, Lynn Abbey and Gordon R. Dickson talked about how every writer of heroic fantasy had to invent a world from scratch, however well Robert E. Howard or Fritz Leiber had already done it. What if favorite Sword & Sorcery characters shared one setting? The result was Thieves' World, published by Ace in 1979: stories by Poul Anderson, John Brunner, Joe Haldeman, Marion Zimmer Bradley and others, all set in Sanctuary, a squalid port on the edge of the Rankan Empire. Asprin and Abbey co-edited twelve anthologies through 1989. As the series grew, authors borrowed each other's characters and plot threads until the volumes became densely interwoven. C. J. Cherryh summed up the experience: "You write your first Thieves' World story for pay, you write your second for revenge."

Legacy

Thieves' World is credited as the prototype of Shared-World & Tie-In Fiction, a form that later carried series such as Wild Cards and the tie-in lines built around game worlds. Its appeal to gamers was immediate. Reviewing the first volume in Ares, Greg Costikyan noted that roleplaying was itself "the group production of a multi-hero fantasy story," so gamers would feel at home in Sanctuary.

Chaosium made the link literal. Its Thieves' World Complete Sanctuary Adventure Pack (1981) was a boxed city setting with maps of Sanctuary and the Maze, and with character statistics for nine systems: AD&D, basic D&D, RuneQuest, Tunnels & Trolls, The Fantasy Trip, Traveller, DragonQuest, Chivalry & Sorcery and Adventures in Fantasy. The novelists wrote essays and stories for it, while designers including Dave Arneson, Ken St. Andre, Steve Perrin and Marc W. Miller translated Sanctuary into their rules. It won the Origins Award for best roleplaying adventure of 1981 at the Origins Game Fair, and White Dwarf gave it 10 out of 10. Mayfair Games issued a Sanctuary board game in 1982, and Green Ronin revisited the setting for the d20 era.

Lynn Abbey relaunched the series with the novel Sanctuary in 2002, and Jody Lynn Nye has continued Asprin's Myth books. His papers are held at Northern Illinois University.