Graham Downs reviewed Thieves' World® by Philip José Farmer
Review of "Thieves' World®" on 'Goodreads'
2 stars
That was disappointing.
The concept is really cool: Get a group of authors together and have them write stories in a consistent, central world with an established setting and established rules for magic, religion, etc. Each author would write a different story with original characters, only those characters might incidentally run into characters from other authors’ stories, and they would all centre around that same internally consistent setting.
The thing is, the stories themselves just... aren’t very good. The first four or five of them dragged terribly. Then they started getting interesting, and I thought there was some hope, but after those two or three, they got bad again. I couldn’t even tell you what the last story is even about!
This book is also in need of some serious copy-editing, at least the ebook edition. I think it was originally published long before ebooks, and clearly when they converted …
That was disappointing.
The concept is really cool: Get a group of authors together and have them write stories in a consistent, central world with an established setting and established rules for magic, religion, etc. Each author would write a different story with original characters, only those characters might incidentally run into characters from other authors’ stories, and they would all centre around that same internally consistent setting.
The thing is, the stories themselves just... aren’t very good. The first four or five of them dragged terribly. Then they started getting interesting, and I thought there was some hope, but after those two or three, they got bad again. I couldn’t even tell you what the last story is even about!
This book is also in need of some serious copy-editing, at least the ebook edition. I think it was originally published long before ebooks, and clearly when they converted it, they ran it through OCR software to convert it to a digital file, because you see things like “other” instead of “of her”, “lie” instead of “the”, and other things that OCR software often gets wrong, including commas in the weirdest of places and missing quotation marks.
Unfortunately, these errors are many, and it’s difficult to overlook them. And there’s really no excuse: Optical Character Recognition is wonderful technology, but is no substitute for a human being. All someone had to do was READ the ebook through after scanning it, but it’s obvious nobody did. It seems like they ran it through a scanner, uploading the file, and hit publish.
The reason I’m giving this book two stars instead of one is because, like I said above, I like the concept (it’s an interesting experiment), and because at least a few of the stories actually held my attention.
Mostly, though, the execution fell flat.
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