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

[kate_nepveu]

One of the things I liked best about _The Lies of Locke Lamora_ was the way it dealt with this; it's one of those treatments that will forever change the way I look at the idea. (Spoiler rules still apply in this post, please.)

Now that I think about it, I suppose the criminal organization in that book might be closer to that of the Taltos books, but going to check almost certainly would lead to a re-read, and that way lies not getting done the other things I want to do with my weekend . . .

[jonquil.livejournal.com]

What a fantastic topic.

off to bed. v. sleepy.

[sartorias.livejournal.com]

Oooh, good one.

I loved the idea of thieves' guilds when I was a teen reader. They sounded dashing and daring, they were anti-establishment. Somehow the thieves just stole from icky people who really deserved being robbed, because they were good thieves.

[jorrie-spencer.livejournal.com]

I'm enjoying these topics, even if I don't have much to add. In fact, I'm not sure I've a thieves guild book, though surely I must have. (Just not the ones you've mentioned. I'm one of those few odd people who don't enjoy Pratchett.)

[athenais.livejournal.com]

Marvelous. Although I don't know how to talk about this without spoilers.

[shsilver.livejournal.com]

Off hand, the earliest Thieves' Guild references I can think of would be in Lankhmar, where our (anti-)heros are constantly getting into trouble because they are not members of the guild.

This was, of course, picked up by Gary Gygax when creating Dungeons and Dragons, which may be a major reason for the use of Thieves' Guilds in modern fantasy.

[papersky.livejournal.com]

I haven't read the Lynch yet, I'm waiting for a decent sized paperback -- all I've seen is the ghastly UK C-format thing. (Why does anyone buy them? Less durable than a mmpb, harder to hold than a hardback, and ridiculously expensive?)

Anyway, I think there's a boring D&D way of doing it, which does indeed derive from Lankhmar, and Brust does it brilliantly, and so does Tim Powers in The Anubis Gates.

The thing most worth talking about would be why this thing that never really existed in the form it typically exists in fantasy novels, and certainly not in a medieval world, is so common as to be a cliche. Why did Leiber's little bit of invention and extrapolation from C.18 London to Lankhmar become this standard piece of fantasy furniture?

[prince-corwin.livejournal.com]

I can't off-hand remember a thieves guild treatment I like, because not a single one of them rings true for me. "Okay, so there's this bunch of crooks, and they have this deal worked out with the police where as long as they follow these particular rules during and after their crimes, they're scott-free...." and then it all becomes a silly game.

It makes no sense. It's trite. It's grade school D&D-esque.

If you want to tell me a thieves-guild story, show me something like the modern mafia, which is powerful and ruthless, works legal loopholes but exists mainly by exercising fear over the populace, and where the authorities really want to shut those bastards down, but just can't quite do it.

Francois Villon in space may be an alternative to Robin Hood

[cem.livejournal.com]

As Sean Connery duly noted Robin Hood was illiterate but Francois Villon is a perfect Gary Stu for any writer of romantic verse. I think true thieve's cant survived better in French as well - or perhaps the whole Cockney commmunity was bent and rhyming slang worked like any slang to establish a sense of community?

In that sense a thieve's guild is a way of incluing an ongoing community that lacking such justification would be unrealistic - can't have one's established characters be all ad hoc and getting executed all the time. In that connection the guild structure to open Citizen of the Galaxy allows Heinlein to say something about the specific frozen society while maintaining a POV from the bottom. Thorby as youth can't interact much with a skilled guild.

[kgbooklog.livejournal.com]

The webcomic Lackadaisy (http://lackadaisy.foxprints.com/archive.php) just updated, reminding me that it's appropriate for this thread; it's about Prohibition in St. Louis. With cats. The characters are fairly sympathetic, without any attempt to hide the fact they're murdering thugs.

[janni.livejournal.com]

The first fantasy novel with a thief with official sanction that I read and actually believed in was Megan Whelan Turner's The Thief, and he wasn't part of a guild, though he was in something of an inherited position.

[clarentine]

Personally, I have always been fascinated by the parallels between the concept of the Thieves Guild and the modern intelligence establishment. There are more things to steal than cash and jewelry.