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.

I read and enjoyed all the Anita Blake books up to and including Obsidian Butterfly. I decided to stop there mostly because of what Buffistas have said about the later books. Thank you, Buffistas!

I found myself writing in my copy of OB to correct the many typos. Someone really should do this prior to publication, but maybe that's just the proofreader in me talking.

And one Merry Gentry book forever cured me of my desire to read any more LKH. She really has the plot/sex ratio reversed.

Except for Big Blue, the dudes of DC are pretty damned flawed and often wrong.

You're right. I was thinking of Supes and contrasting him with the Stan Lee heroes who are all about the questioning. But yeah, other than Superman, the DC heroes are often more complex and interesting than your standard Mary Sue.

Are we discussing Fafhrd's preference for barely pubescent girls?

Not specifically, but that's definitely in there, to the point where the Mouser says he himself is disturbed by it.

I was actually wondering if it's my perception, or if it's a real phenomenon that the explicit sexual component of fantasy genre books sort of peaked in the early 80s and has been disappearing, or moving into sub-categories of the genre. I can't say for sure, because I haven't really read much fantasy that's been written in the last, oh, 10 years, but it seemed to me like the later Fafhrd/Mouser stuff was more explicit than you'd get with anything in the sword-and-sorcery line today. If there is even any s-and-s written today. The last of that I actually read was Melanie Rawn's series. More and more it seems that fantasy has been subdivided into sub-categories like the Anita Blake stuff, and that's where you get the porn.

Also, more female authors.