Well, mostly two, or three. But no more than 6, I'm sure.

male Mary Sues--It's not as if all those hard-boiled detectives who get the blonde and the whiskey were completely original characters whose authors had absolutely no desire to beat up bad guys and be irresistable to women.

CoughSpenserCough

Is there an official term for a male Mary Sue? Markey Steve, probly not.

I usually see Marty Stu.

I am equal opportunity these days, and apply Mary Sue across the board. I also use it descriptively, to mean any authorial ego-ideal insertion, whether or not it is skillfully done; most people I talk to use it only in a derogatory sense.

Did it seem to anyone else that Leiber pulled a Heinlein and towards the end of his writing career spent more time on soft-core porn and women with shaven "privies" than on adventure?

I wouldn't go quite that far, but I definitely know what you mean. The last one in particular was surprisingly porny. I attribute it to the fact that it was the 1980s by then and he could actually say the things that he could only suggest back in the 1960s. I mean, all of the books have lots of gratuitous sex, he just describes it in more detail as time goes by.

And I could be totally wrong about this, but I suspect including some naughtiness made the stories easier to sell to a high-paying magazine like Playboy.

Leiber always did have a fair amount of kink in his stories. Part of their charm. I suspect Strega is right that shifting standards allowed him to be more explicit. Also, he wrote those after his wife died so he might've been indulging that aspect of his fantasy life a bit more.

Are we discussing Fafhrd's preference for barely pubescent girls? Because I found that very disturbing.

Fafhrd? Hm. Somewhere along the line I was disturbed by one of Mouser's escapades, but I think I reread the story and couldn't find anything that hinted at her age. So then I decided that while the word "girl" made me imagine a twelve year old, it wasn't intended that way.

I could just be willfully ignoring things that would disgust me, though.

I just read Incubus Dreams last night, and I just want to slapslapSLAP whoever edits/proofreads LKH. Or, rather, who doesn't. Damn, so many fucking mistakes, and they misspel deity throughout the WHOLE DAMNED BOOK.

LKH writes fun, hot sex -- I'll give her that -- but I am so frustrated that there is no plot anymore. It seems like there is, at the beginning but it goes away. At the end of ID, don't you think that all of the plot was just forgotten, so that LKH culd get to the hot poly sex? Which is fun, sure, but that was th bulk of the book. And then at the end -- like the last three pages -- there's this shitty kind of "oh, yeah, that plot thing" epilogue that basically says to me "I forgot to write a BOOK this time, and maybe I'll get to actual plot in the next book. Maybe."

And since she really hasn't had a plot since Obsidian Butterfly, I'm not holding my fucking breath.

GRRRRR.