Thieves' World Book Club! Tales from the Vulgar Unicorn

 All views in this blog are my own and represent the views of no other person, organization, or institution.

For a few years I have been the admin/moderator of the Thieves' World Facebook discussion group. I started a "book club" last year, hoping to spark more discussion about the series. It has been a mixed success. I think in some ways my posts starting the discussion of each anthology have been a bit too big. I also realized, these posts were disappearing into ether after a short short while. In order to give the posts more permanence and so I can more easily refer folks to them, I decided to start putting the "opening" post for each anthology here on my blog. The post for the first anthology in the series, Thieves' World, can be found here.  

The original Valdez cover.

Now we are on to the second anthology, published in 1980.

Contents

"Introduction" by Robert Lynn Asprin

"Spiders of the Purple Mage" by Philip José Farmer

"Goddess" by David Drake

"The Fruit of Enlibar" by Lynn Abbey

"The Dream of the Sorceress" by A.E. van Vogt

"Vashanka's Minion" by Janet Morris

"Shadow's Pawn" by Andrew J. Offutt

"To Guard the Guardians" by Robert Lynn Asprin

Essay: "The Lighter Side of Sanctuary" by Robert Lynn Asprin

Later cover by Gary Ruddell.

So, four of the seven authors in this anthology are new to the series. Of those four, only two contributed to later anthologies. Notably, all four of the new authors were established authors. Farmer and Vogt were old school legends, like Poul Anderson. Of course, Morris would go on to have perhaps the greatest influence on the series, possibly greater than Asprin himself, and probably only second to Lynn Abbey.

The tone begins to change somewhat. Vogt, Farmer, and Drake are writing fairly standard sword & sorcery tales – though Farmer does have unconventional protagonists. But many of the rest of the tales have started to focus on the real star of the series: Sanctuary itself.

The original cover by Walter Valdez is nice, but not quite a striking, in my opinion, as the original cover of the first anthology.

The Ruddell cover is "Tempus battles a hawk-mask." I don't have a caption for the third cover, it seems to be the Maze, and the Vulgar Unicorn, imagined as a medieval European city.

I've also included the cover from the Book Club edition, a compilation titled Sanctuary which contained Thieves' World, Tales from the Vulgar Unicorn & Shadows of Sanctuary. Noteworthy that it resembles the Tales from the Vulgar Unicorn cover in composition.

You can find this volume in many used book stores online. Also, it is available for Kindle on Amazon here. 

An audiobook of this work is available here on Audible. 

All views in this blog are my own and represent the views of no other person, organization, or institution.

Science Fiction Book Club edition.