Bittercon panel: Thieves Guilds and Other Criminal Societies

[kate_nepveu]

Last one; I really hadn't meant to spend my night doing this.

Thieves Guilds and Other Criminal Societies

The Thieves Guild is a common staple in fantasy novels. Terry Pratchett's Discworld books parody it; Scott Lynch's The Lies of Locke Lamora critiques it; and Steven Brust's Taltos novels examine a more modern Mafia-style version. What's good, bad, interesting, boring, otherwise worth talking about when it comes to this idea?

Comments

[peter-erwin.livejournal.com]

That's true of most 20th Century pirate stories, including the swashbuckling movies of the 1930s and 40s.

This page (http://www.cindyvallar.com/romanticism.html) suggests that the "romantic pirate" stereotype started with Lord Byron's poem "The Corsair" and really flowered with Rafael Sabatini's Captain Blood; there also seems to have been a gradual domestication of pirates on stage (so that by the time of "Pirates of Penzance", they're entertaining rather than frightening.

[antonia-tiger.livejournal.com]

The difference between the privateer and the pirate was sometimes very vague. And the English have the whole business of Sir Francis Drake affecting the cultural view. Drake, and Morgan a century later, was by some standards a pirate. But he was also the Queen's man, doing the Mission Impossible of the 16th Century. And one of the classic pirate periods in centred on the Spanish Main, bracketed by Drake and Morgan, with "no peace beyond the line".
The Sea Hawk and Captain Blood pretty neatly encompass that period.
There's a continuing permitted piracy in the use of prize money by the navy, and some of the most notorious pirates are in the transitional period of the early Eighteenth Century--"Blackbeard", Kidd, "Calico Jack" Rachgam, Anne Bonney and Mary Read. They're still the romantic pitates wo, we expect, would be leaping from the rigging singing of how find a thing it is to be a Pirate King.
But there's other pirates all over the world, and when they're not people like us things are different. North Africa, Malaya and Indoneaia, off China, places where there still are pirates and the romance, such as it was, attached to the Navy.
And there are stories. It is ssid that, in the last years of the Soviet Union, an Ivan Rogov assault ship, a floating dock and barracks for amphibious warship, was travelling from European waters to the Far East. The silhoutte is not very military: think of something more like a RO/RO ferry or a container-ship. As always, it is not good for a pirate's career to board a warship.

[gauroth.livejournal.com]

Delurking here just to squee Captain Blood! Mind, the book and short stories are better than the film; and the description of Judge Jeffries near the beginning of Captain Blood really brought home to me the dreadfulness of the Bloody Assizes. Peter Blood always seemed to me to be a knight like Ivanhoe rather than a real pirate: though of course the real-life knights of Olde Englande were pretty vicious themselves.