Robert Asprin died yesterday, suddenly and unexpectedly at the age of 61. Asprin’s work was a major part of my childhood, and when I was in grade school he was my absolute idol. I read all his books multiple times, many of them dozens of times, and my earliest (and so far last) serious attempt at a novel — when I was about 12 — was a Robert Asprin pastiche. As I’ve mentioned here before, in the days before the internet Asprin’s essays on how he developed his Myth and Thieves’ World series were among the few glimpses I ever got into the world of a working writer, and I studied those essays religiously. I gather that Asprin had been away from the writing world for a while, but had recently returned, and I’d figured I’d get to chance to meet him sooner or later. Damn it.
From my Bio page: “When I was in first grade, my best friend handed me a book and said, ‘You’ve got to read this.’ The book was Myth Conceptions by Robert Asprin (Book 2 in his Myth series). As class began, I glanced at the opening line, which went: ‘Of all the various unpleasant ways to be aroused from a sound sleep, one of the worst is the noise of a dragon and a unicorn playing tag.’ I was captivated. The teacher yelled at me several times to put the book away, and finally threatened to confiscate it, so I had to wait the entire school day before I could run home and finish the book.”
I recently re-read my old collection of Myth books. I no longer find them to be the pinnacle of Western civilization the way I did when I was in grade school, but the books do have their virtues — instantly engaging, fast-paced, and genuinely laugh-out-loud funny. There are also some sections of the later books that I still find pretty moving, such as Aahz on parenthood in Little Myth Marker or Skeeve learning about Aahz’s past in Myth-Nomers and Im-Perv-ections. The thing that really struck me on this reread that I’d never consciously noticed before is how resolutely the books are on the side of the misfits and outcasts. When I was a kid I just thought the heroes were all really cool, but as an adult I’m a lot more aware of how marginalized and mistrusted they are by the wider world, and how they find acceptance within their own tight-knit band.
When I was in grade school, my class divided into four tables in the lunchroom: The cool boys table, the cool girls table, the uncool girls table, and the uncool boys table. You can probably guess where I sat. Anyway, one day a new student named Sergio joined our class. His family had just moved from Mexico, and he spoke virtually no English. The first day at lunch he went and sat by himself. I tried to convince the kids at my table that we should invite him to sit with us. They were aghast at the thought that they would be seen as even more uncool if they associated with the weird foreign kid, but I was resolute, and finally they relented. I went over and invited Sergio to come join us, and you could just see on his face how happy and relieved he was. He eventually became my best friend for several years until his family moved back to Mexico. Reaching out to Sergio is one of the events in my life that I look back on and am really proud of. In the Myth books, over and over again characters who appear to be weird and different turn out to be people who’ll make great friends and allies if you’ll just give them a chance. Rereading the Myth books this past year, I thought of Sergio in the lunchroom, and I wondered how much my response to that situation had been conditioned by my favorite books at the time. It’s hard to say, but personally I think those books played a major role, which is about the best compliment to a literary work that I can think to give.
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