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Myth-Ion Improbable | Rating | |
| D | |||
| Robert Asprin | |||
| Series | Related Books | ||
| MythAdventures | Another Fine Myth, Myth Conceptions, Myth Directions, Hit or Myth, Myth-ing Persons, Little Myth Marker, M.Y.T.H. Inc. Link, Myth-Nomers and Im-Pervections, M.Y.T.H. Inc. In Action, Sweet Myth-tery of Life, Myth-Ion Improbable, Something M.Y.T.H. Inc., Myth-Told Tales, Myth Alliances, Myth-Taken Identity, Class Dis-Mythed, Myth-Gotten Gains | ||
Skeeve has found a treasure map. Well, bought it, really. It may be stupid, but the penny-pinching Aahz isn't about to let Skeeve just throw money away, which means they have to follow up on it. And so they find themselves in a dimension way, way off the beaten path, looking for a golden cow that lives in a golden palace and doles out gold-laced milk. Mmm, crunchy! But there's more going on here than meets the eye, and while the inhabitants are friendly enough, something decidedly odd happens after darkness falls.
This is not a sequel to Sweet Myth-tery of Life. It is set, actually, between the third and fourth books of the series, when Skeeve was still a bit naive and new to this whole magic business. This, unfortunately, does not bring the series back to the good old days, when Skeeve and Aahz's banter was light and refreshing and actually amusing. Instead, Asprin mistakes naivete for idiocy, and tries to shore up the humor with truckloads of puns, mostly cow-related. It turns the setting into something resembling Piers Anthony's Xanth series — which, for those unfamiliar with it, is a bad thing, to put it bluntly.
Not only was the book not funny or even amusing — I don't think I so much as cracked a smile throughout the story — but by setting it well back in the timeline it removes any chance of dramatic tension. We know Skeeve and Aahz get out of this. They're in the later books, after all. We also know it wasn't an important advanture that significantly impacted their lives, because they never mentioned it before. In order to preserve some semblance of continuity, Asprin has to make it largely irrelevant to Skeeve's life as a whole. Thus the only possible reason to read it is to find out what happened, and the story was so incredibly wretched that I just didn't care.
The plot is mostly a travel quest, a sub-genre I dislike intensely, Most of the book is about trying to reach the X that marks the spot, and trying to overcome — or at least live through — the obstacles and encounters they have along the way. In this case, it involves a lot of sneaking around, with very little confrontation of any sort. There was no fighting, no chases (on foot or otherwise), and they didn't even have to talk their way out of danger. They just had to do their best not to be noticed. It might be very tense for the characters, but as a reader I found it very boring.
The only real good thing about Myth-Ion Improbable was that there were few typos. This is a problem that has plagued the series pretty much since its very first volume, but here at last we get a clean printing. It's not much of a plus to say the editors were actually doing the jobs they were wpaid to do, but I'll take what I can get, in this case.
Given that this story doesn't take place in the current thread of events, and given that it is an obviously unimportant side quest in Skeeve's life, there's really no reason to read this book. Unless you are intent on owning the entire series, I'd avoid this one like the plague.
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