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Among the trendy things in the science-fiction world of the 1970s was what was known as the “shared world” anthology, in which the editor of the book would propose a theme and a miscellaneous group of writers wrote stories based on it. Sometimes they worked consecutively, each one devising his or her story on the basis of what the others had written before, and sometimes each took a whack at the theme without knowing what the others had written. One of the first of these to make a splash was Robert Asprin’s Thieves’ World, which ran for a dozen volumes,