The past few days I’ve been obsessively keeping tabs on the search term “Robert Asprin” on Google blog search. (Which means I’ve now read the gag “He will be mythed” a whole lot of times.) Since I was a kid, it’s been a mystery to me why my favorite author suddenly stopped writing. Back then there was no internet, so there was really no way for me to find out any information about something like that. Once they got around to inventing the internet, I was able to turn up a few details — there were vague reports of writer’s block, personal problems, and disputes with the IRS. I guess I always figured that Asprin would get back to writing someday, so I didn’t obsess over it, but now that he’s gone I suddenly feel much more strongly a need to know what happened.
If you haven’t read the Myth series, the basic premise is that there’s a good-natured young magician’s apprentice named Skeeve who gets teamed up with a tough, cynical, fast-talking demon named Aahz, and the two of them keep getting into huge messes, but they always manage to scrape by, though not without the aid of an ever-growing cast of oddball allies. With Aahz as a manager/promoter, Skeeve eventually acquires a completely unearned reputation as the greatest magician anywhere, which only gets him into yet more trouble. That’s basically the arc of the first six books.
Then things change. In Book 7, M.Y.T.H. Inc. Link, Skeeve starts acting like a jerk, and his friendship with Aahz disintegrates. (Even Gleep, Skeeve’s lovable pet dragon, is suddenly revealed to be vaguely sinister and actually kind of a dick.) In Book 8, Skeeve develops a drinking problem. In Book 10, Skeeve has sex (his first time) during an alcohol-fueled blackout. As a kid, I was aghast at these events, but Asprin had stated in his introduction to Book 7 that he wanted Skeeve to grow and develop, so it was possible for me to rationalize these events as part of an arc from which Skeeve would emerge older and wiser but still recognizably himself. Alas, no new Myth books came out for over a decade, which essentially ended the series for me. (In my mind, the series still ends with Book 8, which is pretty good despite being a departure from the earlier books.)
I just came across this remembrance of Robert Asprin that was posted by his ex-wife, Lynn Abbey. This piece really startled me, and it gives me a whole new and awfully depressing perspective on Skeeve’s downward spiral of alcohol problems and personal estrangement, and it makes those problems seem like less a part of a carefully planned-out character arc and more an act of personal need or desperation on the part of the author. Makes me sad. I don’t think that as a kid I ever really imagined authors as having lives in that kind of a way. Abbey’s piece also casts something of a melancholy pall over my heretofore lighthearted memories of the character Aahz — hard-drinking, miserly, and often reckless. (Aahz: “You got anything in this dump to drink?” Skeeve: “We have water.” Aahz: “I said something to drink, not wash in.” Skeeve: “Oh, yessir!” And later: Skeeve: “Will this [alcohol] give you back your powers?” Aahz: “No, but it might make me feel better.”)
It was also somewhat weird for me to randomly come across this blog entry, which reveals that the character Edvik (the cabbie on the dimension Perv who becomes Skeeve’s ally), a character I remember vividly from my childhood, is based on actual person Edd Vick, who won a charity auction to appear as a character in the book.
One last observation about the Myth books that occurred to me during my recent reread. In Book 2, Myth Conceptions, Aahz has bluffed his way into getting Skeeve hired as a court magician. Skeeve has been reluctant, but Aahz has promised that court magicians are just kept around for show and that no one will expect Skeeve to actually do anything. But Aahz is wrong. Skeeve soon learns that the kingdom is hiring a magician as a last-ditch effort to halt a massive invading army (a parody of the Roman army, right down to their supreme commander, “Big Julie”). This seems like a suicide mission, and Skeeve is all for taking the money and running, but Aahz, very uncharacteristically, disagrees. It turns out that there’s one thing that Aahz values above his own skin, and that’s magic itself. Aahz explains that while magicians may often squabble among themselves, that each of them owes a responsibility to magic — to see to it that magical knowledge is valued and disseminated. Aahz explains that, for better or worse, he and Skeeve have found themselves in the position of being the public face of magic, and that now it’s up to the two of them to win with magic or die trying. This may have simply been a plot device to explain why Aahz and Skeeve couldn’t just run away, but it seemed to me as I read it — having spent some years in the community of fantasy writers — that if you take that scene and replace the word “magic” with “fantasy” and the word “magicians” with “fantasy writers,” it all still holds true. I don’t know, maybe I’m reading too much into it, but that’s how the scene struck me at the time, and that’s how it still strikes me.
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