Robert Asprin was a fantasy and science fiction writer greatest recognized for his humorous Myth Adventures novels, and for co-editing the groundbreaking Thieves’ World collection of shared-world anthologies. Author and editor Bill Fawcett first met Asprin at a tabletop gaming conference in 1980.

“He became quite a significant figure on the fan scene,” Fawcett says in Episode 542 of the Geek’s Guide to the Galaxy podcast. “Bob was probably the most brilliant person for seating people at his table in the bar and hosting it for hours and hours, and everyone was entertained.”

Asprin owed a lot of his success to the community of followers and colleagues he cultivated over years of attending science fiction conventions. “He took all of the money he’d made from the Myth books, and some of the money he’d made from Thieves’ World, and he went to anywhere from 15-25 conventions a year, for five or six years,” Fawcett says. “He held court and entertained everybody, and became so well known that people were just out buying his books.”

After years as a prolific writer and editor, Asprin’s output slowed within the ’90s as a consequence of an array of private and monetary issues. Fawcett says that Asprin’s fiction mirrored the complete vary of his difficult persona. “Humor doesn’t work without pathos, and it doesn’t work without emotional depth, because then it’s slapstick,” Fawcett says. “And Bob wrote humor, and it came from him. There was pathos in his life and humor, good things and bad, romance and divorce, and romance, and romance, and romance.”

Asprin handed away in 2008, however his Myth Adventures collection has been continued by his pal and collaborator Jody Lynn Nye, and his affect lives on within the many authors and musicians he mentored. “Someone like him doesn’t come along very often,” Fawcett says. “It was shown in his books and it was shown in the friends, and we all still remember him very fondly—even those he died owing money, we remember him fondly.”

Listen to the entire interview with Bill Fawcett in Episode 542 of Geek’s Guide to the Galaxy (above). And try some highlights from the dialogue beneath.

Bill Fawcett on Asprin’s childhood:

His father was a martial artist as effectively—Bob was a fencer—and his greatest weapon was the machete. Filipinos study the machete. His father needed to flee the Philippines due to an incident with the son of any individual essential, who tried to tug a weapon on him, and his father took the man’s hand off with a machete, and it turned a good suggestion to go to a different nation after that. So he got here to Chicago, and he spent a complete lot of time when he was younger attempting to persuade the mob he didn’t wish to be an enforcer and to simply depart him alone. And Bob distinctly remembered these conversations. He used to recount them with some bitterness.

Bill Fawcett on tuckerization:

In Mything Persons, the “Woof Writers” are Richard and Wendy Pini. And there’s a fellow in it, Wilhelm the vampire agent, who has a telephone completely hooked up to his head. That was me. Everybody in that guide, each single individual, is somebody from the group that we have been round at the moment. And it was enjoyable to select them out, and resolve, “OK, that is so-and-so.” And he’d inform the individual, and get permission, however they requested you to not inform anybody else, not less than till the guide was out, so that everybody may kind of uncover it for themselves.

Bill Fawcett on the Myth Adventures collection:

They’re optimistic books, they’re joyful books. Not solely do the great guys win, however typically the unhealthy guys flip round—like Big Julie—and change into one of many heroes as a substitute. Because Bob was at all times one who thought that, with a couple of exceptions, villains have been misunderstood, and for those who understood that they thought they have been the heroes, you would flip them into actual heroes. … I must speculate as to why he thought that means. Possibly as a result of he had just a bit of the con in himself, however he considered himself as, and was, a hero. And so he wished that to be the world.

Bill Fawcett on Thieves’ World:

They would maintain an annual assembly, and everybody would resolve what they’re going to do. There have been a whole lot of persona conflicts in it, and it was mirrored within the tales. Janet Morris and one other writer couldn’t stand one another, and their characters escalated wiping one another out—or virtually wiping one another out—within the first six books, each time, in order that they began as a thief and a soldier they usually ended up as demigods combating over the town, as a result of every was attempting to one-up the opposite always. In truth, so as to shield his character, one writer made his character immortal.

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