Hey, I’m not trying to say Bobbio’s kinks are as nasty as Anthony’s; but you were fixin’ to go all 5150 on Quercus for even mentioning Heinlein, and I was just pointing out that homie had a freak flag of his own. (And real, actual incestuous relationships of the sort that you describe - between consenting, mature adults - are, I venture to say, fleetingly rare. But as you point out, all the kin-boinking in Heinlein, is of this relatively ethical sort.)
I’ve never read Anthony, and after reading this thread I doubt I ever will; but I trust your assessment of the merits of Anthony versus Heinlein. I can’t say I thought Heinlein was a great writer, per se, although he had a decent grasp of realistic dialog, and I very much enjoyed Job. Some of his later books, with all the convolution of plot and relationships, had a soporific effect on me. Sometimes I felt the need to take a caffeine pill after reading Heinlein; sounds like after reading Piers Anthony, I’d need to take a shower.
That entire book was nothing but 500 pages of castration anxiety slapped between a couple of covers. In addition to the incident you mention, of the four main male characters, one has had his penis cut off through some misadventure I don’t remember, one ends up losing all sexual function as a result of surgeries to turn him into a super-soldier, one is rendered sterile by excessive radiation exposure, and one is psychologically impotent. Oh, and there’s also a genetically-engineered minotaur who was designed to have irresistible urges to rape virgins, and who is so well-endowed that he always accidentally kills them in the act.
But back to the comparison in the OP: Both Claremont and Anthony write about people doing creepy and evil things to teenage girls. The difference is that, in Claremont’s writing, the evil things are done by villains, and you can tell that they’re villains by the evil things they’re doing, and the heroes all kick the villain’s butt for it, or at least attempt to. In Anthony’s books, however, the people doing the evil things are supposedly themselves the heroes, and are praised and admired for how loving they are.
Here is a good article from the AV Club. It details the misogyny of the first Xanth book which was worse than the skeeve. The skeeve was turned up even more later.
I suppose you could have used Jack L. Chalker, he had some weird sex in his books. Actually there was a lot of weird sex in his books, but I don’t recall offhand any between adults and the underage.
Well I recall liking the first two incarnations books and possibly the final one. The one about Satan I think. And yes…I’m pretty sure the sex may have titillated my teenage mind…I don’t recall the specificness of age and all that but will take your words for it
Yeah, my username dates back to when I was young and had no taste. The Incarnations books monotonically decreased in quality as the series went on. By the sixth one (Satan), the only reason anyone could possibly enjoy them is if they were going through a phase of adolescent rebellion and just glomming onto anything having to do with Satan etc. just for the Hell of it. And for the seventh, there was no excuse at all.
Apropos to the thread, I don’t actually remember any perviness in On a Pale Horse (which isn’t to say there wasn’t any that I’m just forgetting), and Bearing an Hourglass was relatively tame (by Piers Anthony standards), though the relationship between Chronos and Clotho was a bit awkward, what with their last meeting being their first and so on. Later books in the series, though, got full-on into why-isn’t-this-guy-on-the-sex-offenders-registry-yet territory.
Particularly “And Eternity”, with the middle-aged judge and the early-teen girl, a relationship which is not just present, but practically championed by Anthony, with almost constant sympathetic explanation, characters who are critical of the relationship being shown as judgmental and closed-minded and, in the end, the new Incarnation of God herself judging it A-OK…
Sure, but Sunset is actually written from the point of view of Lazarus’ mother, who was born in the 1800s and lives to what would be about the modern day, and the incest in question happens among her grandchildren in the 1980s IIRC.
I’m aware of all that, though I believe the incestuous siblings were her own children, not her grandchildren; even that early in the Howard experiment, they were aging much more slowly than norms. And Maureen is the most … how to put it … most incest-among-consenting-adults-friendly character Heinlein shows us. In TIME ENOUGH FOR LOVE, she was willing to sleep with Lazarus when she thought he was her long-lost brother, and attempted to seduce her own father (but was rebuffed).
IIRC, Chronos makes his big appearance in Pale Horse because of that element: there’s a youth who dies in a burning building, and Thanatos is shocked to find so much evil on the boy’s soul that the kid might go to heaven or hell; seems an older woman has been up for sex-with-a-minor hijinks, which counts against the minor. Thanatos finds this grossly unfair, and asks Chronos to reverse time and give the kid a second chance to avoid hell – but not by going back so far as to stop the sex from happening, that’s just crazy talk; by going back far enough to get him out of the building, so he can keep living a while longer and rack up some good deeds.
Also, IIRC it’s a major plot point that Luna’s father thinks she’s good enough to go to heaven, which is why he’s been darkening her soul with his black magic – you know, so she’ll still barely squeak in on the right side of the line – but what he doesn’t know is, she was all about letting a demon have its way with her while she was underage, because she wanted to learn black magic like her dad, which is why she’s now a borderline case for Thanatos, like that kid in the burning building.
(Anthony also throws in a well-endowed woman who gets her clothing hit with an invisibility spell, but she takes it pretty well when the crowd roars with approval; likewise, he has a woman offer sexual favors to a good samaritan who helps her out, and has the Devil offer up temptations of the flesh to our hero – but that’s, like, wholesome compared to the underage element that keeps popping up.)
Chris Claremont has issues, but Piers Anthony has the complete polybagged collection. I really dug Xanth for a long time, and I never branched out into his other stuff, but Xanth began to lose is luster for me as I heard about some of the consistent themes in his other works.
As strong as Claremont made his women, though, he was definitely putting a lot of his fantasies on the page - enabled ably by his co-conspirator John Byrne, who also seems to have a thing for too-young female characters in adult situations. As far as X-Men skeeviness, it’s hard to decide which of them would be more responsible, but my rule of thumb is that if it reads like bad Psylocke fan-fiction, it’s Claremont, and if it’s Kitty Pryde, probably Byrne.
Actually, I take that one back; I just went back to check, and he apparently doesn’t specify how old she was when she started ‘fornicating’ with the demon.
I think the bit about that kid in the burning building still qualifies, though.
I think it’s a bad example of Anthony’s perviness. For one thing, a good argument can be made that Luna’s sin wasn’t fucking the demon, but fucking the demon in an attempt to learn black magic. For another, it is clear that the current laws of good versus evil are supposed to be largely bullshit. Thanatos is vexed to discover that a bastard child is inm danger of damnation because of being born out of wedlock, something she obviously had no control over. As I recall, it’s not until the seventh volume of the Incarnation series – the one about God – that Anthony’s…oddities … come into play.
To be totally honest, if I could get such a regular payday from just typing away, I’d be sore tempted to test what does it take for my editors to say “dude … that’s wack, no way”.
I first began to wonder about Piers Anthony when I read his story “In the Barn” in Harlan Ellison’s Dangerous Visions series. The protagonist travels to a parallel earth where some catastrophe wiped out livestock and so lobotomized women are kept in stables and milked like cows. He has sex with one of the women, combining elements of both rape fantasy and bestiality. I can’t remember if the female in the story is described as underage or not.
I have to say, though, that both Anthony and Claremont have nothing on Samuel Delaney, whose most recent books are one long depiction of pedophilic fantasy.
Even Delaney’s pre-pedo works are all but unreadable except as technical treatises. He always forgets to bring the funny, the intriguing, the exciting, or the emotional-anything.
