Obscure series of shared-world novels

[Ian Kaplan]

Hopefully I'm remembering these details right; it's entirely possible I'm not.

Looking for the name of a series of shared-world books that must date to sometime in about the 1980-1995 period. As I remember it, the books were separate novels or at least sets of novellas by different authors. They were the sort of thing that had some notable author or editor's name on the set - i.e. "Harlan Ellison's Such and Such" (not that I think it was Ellison) - and I think the notion at the time was some sort of way to promote new or lesser-known writers.

I can come up with almost no details about the books themselves, but I recall some sort of a travelling-between-parallel-worlds motif, and a sort of air of mystery. I know that's not much to go on!

N.B.: Pretty sure it's obscure. To cover a few folks have already guessed, it's not Thieves' World or the Dungeon series or Merovingen Nights or Sword and Sorceress or Wild Cards or... well, I spend a lot of time browsing science fiction, and I'm pretty sure I've never run into it since that first time in like 1990.

 

[BAYLOR]

I could be wrong but. It sounds a bit like the Dungeon series by Jose Phillip Farmer. I think I read one book in that series and never went back to it.

 

[dask]

Maybe Continuum 1-4 edited by Roger Elwood?

 

[psychotick]

Hi,

The Paratime books by H Beam Piper?

Cheers, Greg.

 

[Matteo]

Could it be Murasaki? It's a single novel but in six parts each written by a different well-known author (the two I remember are the two "Pools"; Poul Anderson and Frederik Pohl). Don't think it was parallel worlds - pretty sure it was twin worlds. Edited by Robert Silverberg. As far as I know, it never made it beyond the single book.

Sorry to be scant on details - internet is playing up something rotten today (this site must be coming from its own parallel universe; one where the internet is working - what's the weather like over there?).

 

[Danny McG]

In this universe we don't have weather, the Greyness covers all. Hail to the Greyness!

 

[tinkerdan]

It took a while to hunt it down.
There was a series of books::
Robot City
based on Asimov's robot series.

Also Paul Pruess wrote a series based on Arthur C. Clark's Venus Prime.::
Amazon.com: venus prime preuss - Prime Eligible: Books
::Not what you are looking for but rather interesting series.

 

[geosmithredux]

Off the top of my head some other shared-universe titles to look at are maybe -

The "Isaac's Universe" series which had three anthologies, "The Diplomacy Guild", "Phases in Chaos", "Unnatural Diplomacy", as well as one stand-alone novel "Fossil".

The "War World" series which ran for many volumes, though the only title I remember is "The Burning Eye". Also the many "Man-Kzin Wars" books.

Since you wrote obscure possibly "Roger Zelazny's Alien Speedway"?

[eta] Ignore my suggestions, just reread your post and I may have got caught up in the shared-world part and been looking at things completely wrong. Sorry for my being thick but are you looking for a series that is something like the "Next Wave" books, which promoted new writers but I think were all stand-alone, or one of the many ongoing series like "Ray Bradbury Presents Dinosaur World" or "Asimov's Robots in Time", which were more about exploiting the established authors name and ideas rather than promoting new writers. Thanks.

 

[LMGTFY88]

It's been a while since you asked the question, so you might already have moved on, but this is how I would have described Robert Lynn Asprin's Thieves World. I'd link to the Wikipedia page but I'm a noob on this site and it's apparently not allowed. Anyway, he created it to feature up and coming fantasy writers. And its heyday was during those date ranges you posted.