Joe's World

Joe's World is a series created by Eric Flint and Richard Roach, consisting of two books so far with several more in the pipeline.

Long ago, a caveman named Joe created food to keep the humans going. Then, he invented sex to keep the humans occupied. Then, he invented work to keep the population in check. To help organize work, Joe then invented bosses. To help the bosses keep the worse workers in line, Joe invented the police. To help keep the worst ones in line Joe invented priests, and to help priests put the finishing touches on keeping everyone in line, Joe invented God. God, in his turn decided that Joe was a liability to him, and froze Joe in a flash ice age.

Since then, the bosses, police, priests and God himself have fallen short of Joe's expectations. Even mentioning Joe is considered heresy and the common man is downtrodden. Luckily, there is a resistance movement going on, led from the communist libertarian/anarchist nation of Mutt. And now, Joe's about to come back.

The first book, The Philosophical Strangler by Eric Flint, tells the tale of Greyboar, the greatest professional strangler around, and his agent Ignace. The book opens with an account of what was supposed to be a routine royal strangulation; the crown prince of Sundjhab wants his uncle, the king, dead. The job goes smoothly until Greyboar declares the king his guru, and strangles him as a matter of professional ethics. Naturally, Greyboar then has to strangle the prince for hiring him to strangle his own guru.

After a Time Skip, the story picks up with Ignace and Greyboar back in New Sphinctr, the capital of Sphinctria, a kingdom on the continent of Grotum, after a Noodle Incident in Prygg, among other things. What follows is a number of separate stories relating to the general story.

The second book, Forward the Mage, written with Richard Roach, has two separate storylines. One focuses on the artist/mercenary Benvenuti Sfondrati-Piccolomini and Greyboar's sister Gwendolyn, and the other on the wizard Zulkeh and his dwarven apprentice Shelyid. The book is set mostly during the Time Skip of the first book, providing some background on the first one and shedding light on the Noodle Incident.

The series subverts, lampshades or just generally plays for laughs most of the tropes it uses.

"Greyboar:..we finally know what happened to the Great Wall of Grotum -- it pulled a knife on !"
 * Achievements in Ignorance: Wolfgang Laebmauntsforscynneweëld
 * A God Am I:, according to Hildegard.
 * ...And Show It to You: The only weapons, outside of garrottes, Greyboar uses are ones extracted from hapless bodyguards.
 * Artifact of Doom: The Pink Slips, The Rap Sheets, The Switches, The Boots, and whatever artifact God was given.
 * Badass: Greyboar, Benvenuti and
 * Badass Grandpa: The elders in Sign of the Through are generally considered heroes since they've survived to a ripe old age in Flankn, the rougher neighborhood of New Sphinctr
 * Bad Guy Bar: The Sign Of The Trough
 * Beware the Nice Ones:


 * Blind Without'Em: Possibly inverted; Schrodinger's Cat is apparently blind with her Coke-bottle glasses.
 * Cloudcuckoolander: Schrodinger's Cat
 * Confusion Fu: The Cat, of whom you can only tell for sure where she is or which way she is moving, but not both at the same time.
 * Corrupt Corporate Executive: The Consortium
 * Death Glare: Greyboar has the Stare. Other names for it include "The Mirror of Mortality", "The Mirror of Imminent Mortality", "Basilisk" or "Time to Reconsider".
 * Easy Come, Easy Go: The Queen of Sphinctr's favor and disfavor
 * Five-Man Band: there is a group called Les Cinq, as well as Les Six and Les Sept, going around.
 * Girl with Psycho Weapon: The Cat.
 * Hurricane of Puns
 * I Have Many Names: While Greyboar himself only goes by that name, his grip, like his glare, has plenty of names.
 * Inadequate Inheritor: Etienne Avare has provided Greyboar with steady business throttling these.
 * In Which a Trope Is Described: the chapter titles of Forward the Mage take this Up to Eleven.
 * La Résistance: One of the many things going on in Joe's World is a socialist revolution.
 * Like a Badass Out of Hell
 * You Fail Logic Forever: Zulkeh, whose theories include that practice follows from theory. Do note that the other characters lampshade this frequently.
 * Long Title: Forward The Mage does this, to the point that several chapters consisted solely of the title.
 * Mega Corp: The Consortium again.
 * Murder, Inc.
 * Offing the Offspring: Etienne Avare, for several generations
 * And once he dies, most of the remaining offspring off each other.
 * Overly Long Name: The Laebmauntsforscynneweëld clan, and the Sfondrati-Piccolomini clan.
 * Solid Gold Poop: Dwarves' lives get significantly less pleasant when it is discovered that it is trivially easy to transform dwarf excrement into pure gold.
 * Strawman Political: Ozarine politics, in particular.
 * Unreliable Narrator: None of the narrators can be expected to tell the truth without embellishments, omissions, wishful thinking, self-aggrandizement, creative editing, or adjustments of facts to theory. It gets Lampshade Hangings when the same scene is told by two different narrators, in entirely different ways.