Cafe Society's 1st book review: Two Xanth books or What the hell is Anthony thinking?

“What the Hell is Piers Anthony thinking?”

A while ago, I read a couple of Xanth books and wrote this review, which I posted elsewhere. I thought, given the discussion of Anthony in two other threads, it would be worth reposting it here (actually, I was about to post it to IMHO when I saw this shiney new forum, and the rest is history!)

Anyway, after reading these books all I can say is…yuck…brrrrr. Let me be clear: I can enjoy Chalker, despite his…odd…ideas about how men and women interrelate (I know I’ve never had a fantasy about turning a woman into a big breasted, half-animal sex-zombie). I’ve even been known to read a Gor novel or two, but these two books are just bent.

I read Vale of the Vole and Heaven Cent, which, along with Man from Mundania make a trilogy.

In Vale of the Vole, a kid of about 14 or so named Esk has a demoness sexual predator after him. He’s not able to handle a millennia old woman trying to seduce him so he goes to Magician Humphrey’s castle to find out how to deal with her. He meets Chex, a winged centauress and Volney a burrowing vole. They’re off to see the wizard as well. Chex can’t fly, despite her wings and Volney’s valley and people are being ravaged by demons. They get into the magician’s castle, going through the obligatory puzzles and find the magician’s missing. They run to Castle Roogna and tell King Dor that A) the Magician’s gone and B) Demons are running amok, polluting one of the two major waterways in Xanth and are killing his subjects. Dor says “How 'bout dat” and an insanely irritating bit of idiot plotting ignores them. On their own, the three have mini adventures as they try to assemble an army to protect Volney’s Vale. Esk meets Bria a brass humanoid woman who tries to seduce him to get half Esk’s soul. The armies assembled, they go to Volney’s Vale. There’s a long creepy scene as the demoness tries to get into Esk’s pants. It’s played partly for laughs. It’s not funny. Eventually, the good guys win and the demons leave.

The second book, set three years later has Dor still sitting on his ass. Humphrey is still missing and some people who’ve gone looking for him are missing too. Ho-hum. Dolph, Dor’s nine (9) year old son (note the kid’s age. This is important) decides to go look for Humphrey. He sets out with an animate skeleton (who appeared in the last adventure) with his parent’s approval.

Point #1) Anthony has no idea how to write a nine year old. This kid’s dialogue varies from a dim three-year old’s to a sophisticated 40 year old’s.

Point #2) Note to Piers: Alliteration isn’t funny. It’s less funny when EVERYTHING is alliterative!

Anyway, they set out and get to Humphrey’s castle. They pass the obligatory tests and get a clue left by Humphrey: “Skeleton Key to Heaven Cent”. They decide to go to the Keys at the southern end of Xanth. They meet a Vila (a shape-changing nymph). She tries to rape the kid (She strips and grinds herself against this nine year old boy, she French-kisses him. He fights back). They escape and get to the Keys. An amorous mermaid kidnaps Dolph and tries her best to seduce him. The kid is eventually rescued. The kid meets up with a group of Nagas (snake bodies/human heads). The father won’t help the kid unless the kid gets betrothed to his (older, 15 or so) daughter. They meet some Fee (duck-footed humans). The Fee won’t let them pass unless the NINE year old kid mates with one of their women. He doesn’t, but just barely. There’s a disquieting speech somewhere in here (not at this point, but somewhere before) about how adults just love to preserve the innocence of childhood and that’s why they won’t tell Dolph how to summon the stork. This has a creepy ironic flavor, given that almost every woman Dolph meets wants to molest him.) Eventually the kid kisses a sleeping princess who can make Heaven Cents. He has to get engaged to her too (this one’s only 11 years old though). Nine years old and the kid’s almost a bigimist. Finally the kid gives a speech about love and honor that sounds like it was written for an overblown 40 year old actor (“I learned last night that there is nothing wrong with that age. What matters is the relationship…Give me the test [of true love, for] if it does not vindicate me, you can break my betrothal to Nada”.) You know: typical nine year old dialogue :rolleyes: . It ends with the kid (at nine) engaged to two women.

I won’t even get into the misogynistic attitude that (almost all) women only want trap men into marriage to get something from them (Bria wants half of Esk’s soul, Nada wants protection for her people, both scheme to get married to their prey/potential hubbies).

What really creeps me out is not so much the concept of a younger kid and an older person (which in and of itself is creepy) since it’s a medieval society and marriages happened at a much earlier age. I understand that. I also understand teenage sex fantasies. I was a teenager. I’ve been there. What keeps giving me the creeps is the recurring theme of uncomfortable youth with lecherous older person and the delight that said person (and, from the narration, Anthony) seem to take in watching the kid squirm. The recurring treatment molesters aren’t presented as bad or sick or evil, just as someone who’s offering something that the kid may not want. And it’s no big deal that they keep trying to force the kid to accept it. I know this theme has cropped up in at least one other Xanth (a young girl who had a demon that was trying to rape her…maybe Ogre, Ogre or Nightmare.).The recurring molesters aren’t portrayed as sick or evil, but just as fun-lovin’ folk who’re out for a good time.

I understand that in some segments of our society, it’s considered no big deal for young boys to be seduced/molested/boinked by older women, indeed it’s a badge of honor. This isn’t even that. Anthony isn’t portraying some eager young kid looking for a good time in either book, he seems to enjoy showing how uncomfortable the kid is. The message portrayed is “Kids, older people will try to molest you. You don’t have to do it, although they may try to force themselves on you, but it’s no big deal if they try. And you might regret it later if you don’t.”. Another way to look at Anthony’s message is “Child molesters are just looking for a good time. If you go along with it, fine, if not fine, either way, no-one’s hurt by it.” Also, none of the molester are ever punished (granted there’s a third book in this trilogy and maybe all the would-be molesters will be thrown in a pit somewhere. If they get what’s coming to them, I’ll follow up with another review taking back much of what I said here. I doubt I’ll need to.)

I’d love to see someone like Andrew Vachss’s take on these books.

Fenris

PS: Let me be clear: I’m not saying that Piers Anthony supports child molestation. I am saying he’s sending an awful message (intentionally or otherwise) in both of these books.

I stopped reading Anthony for this very reason. His books just seemed to have gotten obsessed with children and sex, and even self mutilation occasionally. Having worked a lot with abused and disturbed children, I got sick of this fast.

When I was younger, I used to read Piers Anthony. Several of his first books are pretty good. Unique. But then he really started whipping out the books. He was producing boooks at an amazing rate! And the quality really suffered. The puns weren’t punny anymore. Tired and old, really.

Then I read an interview with him (I forget where) and he claimed that he was actually selling the book before he ever wrote it! He would come up with an idea, jot down an outline and the publisher would buy it. Then he would have to sit down and write the book! :eek:

No wonder the quality suffered. He was under no pressure to generate a quality product, he was merely filling an order for a novel with so many words.

I have never picked up another Anthony book again.

Well then, you just don’t know what you’re missing, Fenris!

Fenris, I know you and I have similar tastes as far as genre and quality in the literature we consume. And I know we’re about the same age.

So my question to you is why you’d start a thread saying you’re shocked, shocked, to find out there’s hackwork going on in here! Anthony is a creatively bankrupt old perv with an unhealthy interest in young girls: check. Now throw “pedophiliac fantasies” onto the same pile and walk away.

Nothing to see here, folks.

Actually, I was shocked. I remembered him as being a hack who was sometimes entertaining (The first Apprentice Adept series wasn’t bad and the second Xanth book was excellent. Hell, Macroscope and maybe Cthon were nominated for a Hugo!). I got those books from a pal who picked 'em up for .25c each at a yard sale. I jumped from Xanth book 6 or so to Xanth book 14 or so and really was shocked to see a) how far he’d degenerated in quality and b) his weird sexual stuff which isn’t evident in his earlier books.

In other words, it wasn’t faux shock, it was real shock.

Fenris

Sorry to burst your bubble, but most established authors work this way, at least in fiction. Very few profesionals write a novel on spec and then shop for a publisher, except when they are trying to break into a new market or shift to a new publishing house. Generally a treatment and outline/first chapter are sufficient for an established author. A very established author (such as Anthony) can sell books in a series with nothing more than a placeholder.

As to the OP: I have a great deal of respect for Piers personally, but I long ago came to the realization that the Xanth books were not written with my tastes in mind. Happily the Xanth series, though it seems endless, is only a fraction of his total output.

I stopped reading the Xanth books years ago with the Golem one. At that point it became pretty clear that the way they were written was (1) get idit fans to send in puns and then (2) string the puns together in some semblance of a storyline. It basically became a big wankathon for the fans.

The first book is really good, and a few of the others I read I enjoyed, such as “Crewel Lye”, but it got pretty old after a while.

I quit reading the Xanth books way long time ago myself. I enjoyed the Incarnations of Immortality series, but have no patience for his sad punning attempts at humor.

Yeah, I started a thread on this as well:

http://boards.straightdope.com/sdmb/showthread.php?threadid=41202
He follows this trends in other books as well, such as the last book of the Incarnations of Immorality series And Heaven

Grrr… I don’t believe I did that… the title is And Eternity, not And Heaven. Can you tell I just got home from an extended graveyard shift?

I remember reading the first couple of Xanth novels as a pre-teen. I still remember A Spell for Chameleon as one of my favorite books from that time period. I was an avid fan of the entire Xanth series, as well as the Incarnations of Immortality and Apprentice Adept series, for a long time. But Vale of the Vole completely turned me off, and for a lot of the reasons already stated by Fenris. The quasi-sexual themes aimed at pre-teen characters just got to be a little too much for me. That, plus the books seemed to be more vehicles for delivering really bad puns (which never excited me, as I personally feel the pun is about the lowest form of humor).

It’s a shame, because I thought his earlier work showed a lot of original thinking (if not fantastic characterization – his characters have always been pretty one-dimensional), and they were great for younger readers. But in his later years, I don’t know if some of his personal issues got in the way of his writing style or what, but they just got WAY too creepy.

Plus, he fell into the Robert Jordan trap – take an idea and beat it to death with a rock. (Actually, I think Robert Jordan fell into the Piers Anthony trap.) There aren’t many genres where you can string out a series for more than a half-dozen books and have it stay fresh and original. But when you’ve got, what, twenty-plus Xanth books and two Apprentice Adept series, I’m sorry but you really should concentrate your efforts elsewhere.

<minor hijack> As for the Incarnations series, I enjoyed it all the way until And Eternity. That last book just really left a sour taste in my mouth.

In this Great Debate, I gave a fairly lengthy defense of Anthony’s books, but it looks like I stopped reading them before they really degenerated. When did they really start to go bad? I stopped reading the Xanth series in, oh, 1991 probably, and never did read any of the Incarnations books.

Beadalin: The first Xanth book that really, really stunk (to me) was Dragon on a Pedestal, then there are 2 that I haven’t read, and then the next bundle, starting with Vale of the Vole through Demons Don’t Dream are generally bad-to-terrible, except for Question Quest which was surprisingly good (it’s Humphrey’s history and there’s a magical moment about 3/4ths of the way through when a big lunk bangs on Humphrey’s door, demanding to know what his talent is and introduces himself as Bink.) What pisses me off is Anthony can write well. But he seems to choose not to.

Oh, and I’ve read literally thousands of novels. I am not exaggerating when I say Demons Don’t Dream is one of the 10 worst books I’ve ever read. And I’ve read the later GOR books. (The upshot of Demons: A boy and a girl get ahold of a bootleg copy of the AMAZING! NEW! XANTH!!! COMPUTER! ADVENTURE! [sub]coming soon from Microprose(?)[/sub] and it takes them to Xanth where they can experience the thrills of the the AMAZING! NEW! XANTH!!! COMPUTER! ADVENTURE! [sub]coming soon from Microprose(?)[/sub]. In short, it’s a 300 page commercial for the Xanth game. Eech.

Basically, I’d say the thing that transforms Xanth novels from fun to crap is the age of the progtagonist: Anthony can’t write a pre-teen or a mid-teen and when he tries it comes out as weird and creepy. When he’s got older characters (Bink, Dor, etc) he’s not bad.

Fenris

Fenris, I read and enjoyed several of Anthony’s books when I was in my early teens, but stopped reading him once I was old enough to realize that 1) the man is a hack and 2) he’s a creepy hack. It’s the latter that I find really unforgiveable. I might be inclined to re-read some a few of his books (such as the first couple in the Xanth series) when I’m in the mood for something light, but Anthony has creeped me out so much that I won’t spend any more time, money, or effort on anything that he wrote.

It does my heart good to see that the fantasy section of most secondhand bookstores are well stocked with Anthony’s work. I take it as a sign that many of the people who do buy his books end up wanting to be rid of them.

Hmm. Thanks for filling me in, Fenris. I remember a bit about Question Quest… at the time I stopped reading, I thought I was simply outgrowing him, the way you outgrow the material of authors who write for a younger audience. You know, the puns seemed less funny, the adventures less interesting. Sounds like it was actually his writing that went downhill, and I never re-read any of the earlier stuff to compare!

I think most would say only the first three books were any good. I would also include the fourth, Centaur Aisle, because the love story between Dor and Irene was cute, the puns weren’t yet overwhelming and it had some neat things to tell us about the way the magic of Xanth worked.

By Night Mare the formula was beginning to emerge and by Ogre, Ogre it had definitely jumped the shark. I think I read the first twelve or so (hard to say since I’ve since given most of them away) before giving up entirely. Crewel Lye was an all-too-brief return to form and I would still recommend it, but give the rest a miss.

Just as bad as the books themselves are the awful, lifeless covers illustrated by Darrell K. Sweet. Michael Whelan illustrated the first three covers; compare his Gap Dragon with the one depicted by Sweet on a later book and I think you’ll agree Sweet sucks.

I really believe that he did take a nosedive in quality. I don’t know why, but I do know that I can (and have) gone back and read some of his earlier work and enjoy it quite a bit (I love Source of Magic. It deals with real characters, has a complex plot an untidy ending (in a good way) and the treatment of XAN[sup]th[/sup] was an astounding bit of characterization. But the guy who wrote it has very little in common with the guy who wrote The Color of Her Panties or Demons Don’t Dream. And it’s not just you. He was nominated for a number of prestigous awards (Hugos, Nebulas, World Fantasy Awards (I believe he won that)) when when he was writing decent stuff. Then (as a guess) he realized a bad Xanth book would sell as well as a good Xanth book and started grinding 'em out.

One other amusing/irritating story. There are two people involved: Stephen R. (“Thomas Covenant”) Donaldson and Stephen “Donny” Donaldson, a prison reform activist.

Anthony had heard somewhere that Stephen Donaldson had died. He decided to post it in his June 2000 newsletter. The following newsletter (in August) Anthony wrote about Donaldson’s life: His writing of the Thomas Covenant books, his life as a prisoner, his work as a prison reformer following his prison rape, his “Mordant’s Need” novels, etc. He even decided that Donaldson had written the infamous rape scene in Lord Foul’s Bane because of his prison rape experiences.

Obviously, Anthony had read that “Donny” had died, seen a brief bio, assumed that it was Stephen R. and written an obit without doing any research. An honest (if kinda stupid) mistake, since he never bothered to check or wonder why none of “Donny’s” obits mentioned the Thomas Covenant stuff. But it happens.

However.

Someone aware of the true situation, horrified asking Anthony to quickly print a retraction. Anthony waited 'till October (5 months after the initial false report) and responded in an asshole-esque fashion, calling the guy who wrote it “arrogant” and “self-rightous” among other things.

The whole train-wreck can be seen
here
here and
here

plus there was a follow-up on rec.arts.sf.written by the letter-writer.

And before anyone asks, I wrote this review somewhere around Jan. 2000, long before this situation occured.

Fenris

I was a big Xanth fan around middle school. My interest died down as I hit the later books where you can see Anthony just didn’t care anymore - I think the last one I enjoyed was called Harpy Thyme or something like that, and I’ve thought a few times about going back to reread some of the early books to see if they were really any good. But what turned me off more than anything else was the preachy, self-righteous tone Anthony takes sometimes. I get the distinct feeling that in Anthony’s mind there’s no room for reasonable people to disagree with him; I remember once seeing a letter printed somewhere in which a reader wrote in disagreeing with a moral choice made by a character in one of the Xanth books, and Anthony’s response boiled down to “you think that because you’re a bad person.”

Weirdly, at the time I wasn’t really bothered by the disturbing pedophilic stuff, but reading this thread it’s starting to come back to me and, man, those books were freaky. It’s starting to creep me out that I didn’t notice it when I was younger.

Yeah. The letter was in reference to (and in the book after) Man from Mundania. In the book, the character chose to do something morally reprehensible to him because his parents promised a bad guy that he (the character) would. Keep in mind that the kid was either a newborn or was unborn at the time and didn’t consent.

The letter writer said something like “Um…if my parents promised Hitler that I’d guard a concentration camp, I wouldn’t. I didn’t make the promise and a broken promise is better than a great evil.”

Anthony attacked him saying something like “Dishonorable people like you are the reason the world’s so screwed up”
(note that this is a paraphrase! I don’t have the book handy)

Fenris

I think Fenris’ summary leaves a bit to be desired.

No. He posted information that Donaldson had set up to address teh rape of male prisoners. He clearly uses teh present tense in regard to the effort and does not say Donaldson was dead.

He reported the death without verifying that the Stephen Donaldson mentioned was the same Stephen Donaldson, yes. Whether that equates to writing it without doing “any” research is conjecture. It was certainly a mistake.

Yep.

The newsletters are bimonthly. The October letter was the first one to appear after the mistaken report of Donaldson’s death.

The text of his letter is present on the last link. It includes such statements as, “This is a flat-out untruth. Although Stephen R. Donaldson may have had his own reasons for writing about violence and rape in his Thomas Covenant novels, implying that he was himself a victim of such attacks both slanders him and cheapens the situation of the late Robert A. Martin Jr. who actually was the victim of said attacks.”
and
“Even five minutes’ searching would have shown that Piers had the wrong man --and yet he didn’t spend those five minutes.”

Anthony’s response is also present. It contains such lines as, “If you had taken five minutes to think about it, apart from your self-righteous attitude, you would have realized that there was no malign purpose here - in contrast to your own approach.”

Asshole-esque? Maybe, but I also found the tone of the first letter to be insulting. It was certainly not a friendly correction. When someone initiates an unfriendly contact I can hardly be outraged when they receive an unfriendly response. I will freely admit, though, that Piers is not world famous for his tendency to turn the other cheek or forgive insults. I guess each of us has to decide for ourselves what makes someone an asshole.