Soul of the City

Robert Lynn Asprin grew up in the college town of Ann Arbor, Michigan. After serving in the army, he got a job as a cost accountant and saw nothing wrong with making a career out of arranging numbers, until he and a few friends wandered into a Society for Creative Anachronism event, where he quickly realized he had a perfect trifecta of talent: disruption, organization, and storytelling. Asprin put these talents to work to found the Great Dark Horde within the SCA, and the Dorsai Irregulars within the science-fiction fandom. The life of a cost accountant had lost its allure, but he had a family to support, so he decided to tell stories for money. Asprin’s first two books, The Cold Cash War and Another Fine Myth, demonstrated that he could write tragedy or comedy, science fiction or fantasy, with equal finesse. Then he got the idea for Thieves’ World® and changed the way authors, publishers, and readers thought about anthologies. Though Asprin died in 2008, the Great Dark Horde, the Dorsai Irregulars, and Thieves’ World® continue to this day.
 

Lynn Abbey, ex–New Yorker, ex-Michigander, and ex-Oklahoman, moved to Florida in 1997, which she says is nice, but she misses snow. Her first novel, Daughter of the Bright Moon, was published in 1978. Since then, she has published more than two dozen novels, most of them fantasies. She has been called the “Godmother of Shared Universes” for her part in creating, editing, and writing the Thieves’ World® series of anthologies, novels, and games. Abbey says she writes fantasies because when her imagination gets going, it is full of magic, intrigue, and the colors of a stained-glass window. If science fiction is the fiction of possible futures, then fantasy is the fiction of possible histories.