Encyclopedia of Fantasy (1997)
Braid

Tagged: Theme.

Term used for a Shared-World anthology or book-length tale whose individual parts, written by different hands, are edited – generally by the proprietor/editor of the shared world – so that their beginnings and ends weave or braid into one another, and the whole tells a unified story. Lynn Abbey and Robert Lynn Asprin created fantasy's first full-scale braids with their Thieves' World sequence from 1979; the term also applies to several novels of the Wild Cards sequence created and edited by George R R Martin. [JC/DRL]

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