When I’m stressed I turn to the genre I’m most comfortable with, fantasy. The particular area of fantasy depends on so many factors I’m not going to discuss here, but this time I turned to Robert Asprin and have been re-reading the M.Y.T.H Inc stories.
It’s a fabulous series of books and this excerpt from Wikipedia explains it much better than I can. “MythAdventures is the collective name for a series of humorous fantasy novels written by Robert Lynn Asprin that are popular for their whimsical nature, myriad characters, and liberal use of puns. Each novel’s title makes a pun on the similarity between the word “myth” and either the prefix “mis-” or the word “miss”, with the exception of the first, which puns on the phrase “Another fine mess” (which was, incidentally, almost the novel’s title due to a misunderstanding with book’s publisher).”
What Wikipedia doesn’t say is how I feel about them. I just love them. They are wonderful, they have very cute characters and I just wish I had some of their gadgets. I would absolutely love to be able to rent out a bit of extra-dimensional space, it’d be fabulous to have more room for my books.
I sometimes get a bit confused with all the action, but I suspect it would be the same with any action movie. Keeping track of the characters and what magical disguise they are currently wearing is a little hard.
This series seems to have engendered a similar following to the Discworld series written by Sir Terry Pratchett. A quick google of ‘m.y.t.h. inc robert asprin’ will bring up a number of fan pages including a reference to the alt.fan.asprin newsgroup.
In my eagerness to buy all the books in the series I have managed to buy doubles of some of these books and when I’ve finished checking them all out I’ll be listing the doubles on Suz’s Space they are now gone, as is the shop part of this website.