Books like Thieves' World

Interesting factoid: the first six Thieves' World collections should appear in the Kindle store in February 2020, thanks to the efforts of Open Road Media. The task of securing rights was probably significant.I'd be curious if this experiment--a shared setting and usable set of characters--has ever been repeated. The logical conclusion would be open-source or copylefted material, and the only thing I know of is the Jenny Everywhere project. Sadly the most common example these days is tie-in novels and licensed properties.So the essay itself, "The Making of Thieves' World", is the standout piece, as being partially a fascinating insight on wrangling together this material, as well as a bit about how this outstanding example of worldbuilding came together. On this reading (versus decades ago) the best stories trade places with the others, with the hardscrabble, character-driven ones being more involving and resonant than the boilerplate sword-and-sorcery adventure stuff that attracted me originally.Strangely, the story that I most remembered, "The Secret of the Blue Star", has aged poorly because of real-world changes to gender politics. The drama circling Lythande's "Secret" is so particularly heavy-handed and telegraphing that one wonders if any reader at the time was truly surprised by the twist ending. But I'm curious what this story would look like if written today. Also, the later accusations made against Marion Zimmer Bradley are only highlighted by the fact that a character here, Bercy, is concocted as a romantic or sexual object but her description signals her as being inappropriately young.