That could be written by me. I remember loving the early books, and never realized the undercurrents (I blame my age and the years in which I read them). Now, instead of recommending them to my kids, I avoid this particular series of “I loved it as a kid.”
Not.
There was a “virgin heifer” he took to the “stallion” (a lobotomized male), but it was strictly the “livestock” screwing in that scene. I got the impression that the woman the protagonist had sex with was fully adult and had had more than one child.
Yes, squicky, the whole of Dangerous Visions was like that. There was a story in the first collection about a world where father-daughter incest was the norm and considered entirely proper and right (“If All Men Were Brothers, Would You Let One Marry Your Sister?” by Theodore Sturgeon). Among other things.
I never even heard of Piers Anthony until I read about him in this thread, but how in holy hell is Claremont even a contender? I’ve read a lot of his stuff, particularly his work on X-Men, and nothing I’ve read has ever come anywhere in the neighborhood of boinking five year olds.
I have no strong desire to defend Anthony, since he genuinely is creepy in his recent works, but I would argue that it’s unreasonable to look back at his older (e.g., pre-1990) stuff to castigate him.
A Spell for Chameleon, for example, is almost certainly mysoginistic. But, it was also written in 1977 by a man born in 1934, not in 2016 by a millennial.
The regular recurrence of panty discussions, in Xanth, was a running joke in that series. In other series that he wrote, there was never any mention of them, and even in Xanth the impression was that he was making fun of the fascination with “panty shots” that other men have, than that he had any particular fondness or fetish for them.
Now, certainly, Anthony has always had an appreciation for sex and enjoyed working it into his stories. But it’s not like the rest of the world is composed of angels. Most of us like and enjoy sex and sexual situations. He was good at working that in at a level sufficient to attract a wide audience without being classed as a pornographer of being censored, and so he made a good living. You can’t just blame Anthony for that. And, really, there is no blame. Sex isn’t a bad thing and there’s no reason for it not to appear in our fiction.
Authors are often appreciated for introducing questionable elements into their stories that make us think. We ask think that incest is bad, but what if the main character has gone back in time, met a beautiful woman, and had sex with her. He returns to the future, sees a photo in his mom’s home, and realizes that the woman in the past was his grandma. He’s his own grandfather, dun dun DUUUN. Well that’s where we, the reader, are throwing back the popcorn and celebrating the twist. An author who isn’t coming up with weird, questionable, thought-inducing scenarios isn’t going to sell as well.
Now, granted, it’s easier for someone to introduce scenarios and situations that readers enjoy it that’s how his mind actually works. You could tell a room full of writer wannabes to include questionable content in their fiction, but the guy who has just the right natural inclinations is going to be the one who has the advantage over everyone else. And he’ll be rewarded, financially for it.
So certainly there’s edgy material in Anthony’s older works. But I wouldn’t say that most of it is more or less creepy than stuff by most authors of the time (Lackey, Ellison, Moorcock, Zelazney, etc.) and it’s not like modern series (e.g. Game of Thrones) are rife with unassailable characters performing benevolent, unquestionable actions.
Since the 90’s, Anthony has clearly gone off the rails. There’s only so many times a 14 year old black girl can have sex with a forty year old man in different, unrelated series as happenstance. Clearly, there’s an allure to that particular scenario for Anthony. And it sounds like the amount of sex and the prevalence of editor refusal to publish his works has risen as time has passed. It’s very reasonable, at this date, to classify him as an old pervert with insufficient self-moderation.
But, a lot of the works being discussed here aren’t from that era of his career (largely because his post-1990 works are either creepy or so formulaic as to be instantly forgotten.) Few have actually read any significant portion of them. I probably haven’t read anything by him in decades.
It could be that Claremont will one day also be a creepy old man, but it’s also possible that he’s just found a certain set of scenarios that are deviant enough to attract his audience and, when you have to turn in a script on a deadline, you’re going to dip into what worked before. It might not be a particular fetish of his. His readers, when he got famous, were mostly teen boys. It made sense to use teen girls as his heroes. And, for the reasons given above, it makes sense (financially) to put them in questionable situations. That’s what he did, it made him successful, and now he’s in a rut.
Eh, Aspirin’s Myth series all have punny titles, and there’s the running gag about the names of various dimensions and their denizens, but the stories aren’t nearly as pun-dependent as Xanth.
And for what it’s worth, the thing about panties in Xanth is actually explained in the books. In a world where you’ve got nymphs, dryads, and succubi running around all over the place, there’s nothing special about seeing an attractive lady naked. And, of course, there’s nothing special about seeing one fully-clothed, either. So what’s left? Seeing a woman minimally clothed.
The same thing holds on Proton, in the Apprentice Adept series. I never read Xanth; what I read about them in Anthny’s Author’s Notes (which I actually liked, before I grew to despise him), led me to think I was just going to be annoyed.
I’ve only read the first Xanth novel – a Spell for Chameleon – and his anthology Anthonology (and his Dangerous Visions piece “In the Barn”, alluded to above, but it’s also in the anthology) and Omnivore. My roommate was into the Xanth books, and I had to see what it was like, aside from the obvious bad puns (clear from the book titles).
Not much. I find that Anthony bores me too quickly. I finished Chameleon, but found the next book, The Source of Magic, didn’t interest me after the first couple of chapters. Similarly, I lost interest in Orn, the sequel to Omnivore, when the characters started acting stupid.
In Anthonology, he gives the clear impression that he’s trying to push boundaries and write about things avoided (at least until then). His “In the Barn” covers fetishistic sex, “Up Schist Creek” cover scatology, “On the Uses of Torture” covers torture in loving detail. I’d get the impression that he was trying to do misogyny and pedophilia in his books, except, from what I hear and read, it seems to be a constant and recurring theme.