Has anyone else noticed a trend in his later books, where he seems to be focusing on the ‘sexual coming out’ of his teen characters, then when they’ve ‘matured’, he moves on to younger characters again, and restarts the cycle?
Also, in the last book of the ‘Incarnations of Immortality’ series (And Eternity)he has a character that is 50 years old lusting after a 16 year old…and he paints it as a ‘loving, normal’ relationship, then sends the young girl into limbo, where she stays for four days, but conveniently returns to Earth two YEARS later, so that th old guy can legally have his ‘nymphette’, without ‘breaking the law’.
Sorry about the pseudo-rant, this thing has been bugging me for years.
It has always seemed to me that there is a strong bit of pedophilia involving young girls in Anthony’s “works”. I read the first 500 or so Xanth books, but finally had to quit at “The Color of Her Panties” simply because I refused to be seen paying for a book of that name with pre-pubescent characters displayed in the cover art.
I guess with Amazon I could order it safely, but I just don’t want to.
Also, I think he’s trying to appeal to his audience in a sense. The “Xanth” series, for instance, really seems geared towards teenages (though there are some pretty sly puns they wouldn’t understand, at least in the earlier books, now it’s just mass-produced dreck, IMO).
I got the impression that “The Incarnations of Immortality” series was for a more mature audience.
I remember when I was younger, I bought “The Color of Her Panties” for my brother for his birthday and I told a friend what I got him and she was like “what kind of book is it” and without second thought, I said that it was a fantasy book, but then had to say it wasn’t THAT kind of fantasy book…hehehe
I read the first few Xanth series books and found them to be kind of interesting, but I never really got into his books too much to know whether they were all the same or not. On a side note, didn’t he also write “Total Recall”?
It’s called “Pornucopia” and BN.com doesn’t stock it. It looks as if you can order it through Amazon (4-6 weeks)though and they have a couple of reader reviews here:
Yes, I did notice that about his Xanth series (The Color of Her Panties was the last one I read), but I think he is writing for the audience in this series.
I read a few of Anthony’s books while I was in my early teens, but vowed to stay away from everything he’s ever written after looking at And Eternity… and finding the plot thread described above. I thought it was especially troubling that part of the justification offered for this relationship was the fact that the girl in question wasn’t an untouched virgin. Why wasn’t she an untouched virgin? Because her stepfather had raped her! So apparently it’s okay for old men to have sex with adolescent girls provided the girl in question has already been molested by another old man.
But the worst part of the whole thing was that the reason the book was sitting around where I could look at it was because my little sister was reading it. I didn’t try to stop her from finishing it, but I did tell her why the book bothered me.
Man, Piers has been creeping me out big time for years. I got to Man from Mundania before the Xanth thing started getting old for me (I think I was 19 or so at the time). Anyway, I noticed a disturbing interest in young girls’ undergarments even then. His ‘horror’ work, Firefly, has a rape scene which gave me the slight heebiejeebies as well (though at least the raped character was an adult - not much better but we’re talking 12yr old’s panties here). Anyway, I stopped reading the Xanth stuff because it got tiresome and favorite characters were pulled out of the rotation quickly in the rapid-fire reproduction world of Xanth. I read all of the Incarnations books (although those got laughable as well. The Incarnations are more inbred by the end than your average lost Appalachian mountian village) but had forgotten about the girl in And Eternity. Very creepy.
I think it’s an issue that he believes (at least intellectually, if not from personal interest) society has very irrational view over. There’s been a bit of discussion on the subject over in my very first GD thread. The “erotic novel” I thought Sue was referring to was Firefly. It contains a chapter depicting a man getting sexually involved with a five year old, at the five year old’s insistence. Anthony got a lot of static for it, by people accusing him of “justifying child abuse”. The point he was trying to make (and he goes into this a bit in an afterword) was that relationships like this aren’t necessarily inherently abusive, and that often society’s response is far more predatory and harmful than the relationship itself. Just trying to get people to think. You know how that goes.
I gave up on Mr. A (and on SF in general, for a while) after reading And Eternity. I was so pissed at myself for wasting my time and money on that piece of crap.
Anyway, I guess all the sex was probably the reason I liked his stuff when I was in my early teens. After all, I didn’t have an internet connection back then, and Playboy was too difficult hide, but Piers Anthony could be read while my parents were still in the room!
If you’re looking for some racy stuff, you could also try his Tarot series. Kinda scatalogical, though.
The Color of Her Panties. Good Dao, is that actually the title of one of his books?:eek: Maybe I should have gotten more into the Xanth series.
Total Recall had a screenplay by the ubiquitous Dan O’Bannon. (O’Bannon has written or co-written a LOT of sf movies, of varying quality (including Alien). He also did special effects for Star Wars, acted in Dark Star, and directed Return of the Living Dead.) It is nominally based on “We Can Remember it for you Wholesale” by the very weird Philip K. Dick, but they exhaust the Dick material in the first twenty minutes or so. I’ve always felt that the movie is really based on Robert Sheckley’s “The Status Civilization” (gunfights, people with memory wipes who seek out the mutants on the settled world, because some of them have the ability to dig the past out of your own mind, arena situations, the hero turns out to be his own enemy, etc.), with a bit of Edgar Rice Burroughs thrown in at the end (An Oxygen Factory on Mars???!)Sheckley has to be the most ripped-off sf writer ever. Compare “The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy” to Sheckley’s “Dimension of Miracles”, or “The Running Man” to Sheckley’s “The Prize of Peril”. There have been a few adaptations of Sheckley’s own work, but these have been uniformly bad (“Condorman” and “Freejack” chief among them.)
I haven’t read much Anthony but Heinlein has a similar pseudo-semi-pedophilia theme in “The Door Into Summer.” Of course, when Heinlein was writing, such things were not noticed and I doubt he knew the subtext he was creating. Anthony was writing late enough so that he should have noticed.
Anthony has made a lasting contribution, in my social circle at least. When a series starts off entertaining, but quickly drops off in quality, we say it follows a “Xanth curve”
If you think firefly is bad try chthon, phthor etc. Yeack! Also creepy is the Mode series, very disturbing - main them e seems to be a munchausens/suicide/lack of selfworth trend. He says in the afterword it is to reassure people that are like that that there is something better out there, but it is hugely depressing to read…
That said, I like most of his books, even the xanth ones.
I don’t remember the bit about her being a virgin as a justification in “And Eternity”, but the 16 bit didn’t bother me anyway because 16 is the legal age in the UK anyway (except for homosexual relationships, but that is SO definitely a GD topic, I’m not even gonna go there!) (the age gap is hugely extreme though, any refernces he makes to x y or z, you can virtually guarantee that she’ll never have heard of them). Maybe the point that he was trying to make is how silly legal things can be, yes children need protection from others and to a lesser extent from themselves, but if someone isn’t mature enough etc to have sex one day, but they are 16 or 18 the next, what? A maturity fairy appears in the night & sprinkles some commonsense & wisdom of age dust on them?
Cal - Terry Brooks did the novelisation of Phantom Menace. I still can’t decide which is worse! They ran out the philip k dick stuff in nothing flat because it was a short story. They have a nasty habit of basing films on short stories and not having enough plot to carry the film (take lawnmower man for instance).
Have you read sheckley’s hunter:killer or his status civilisation?
I used to be a big Sheckley fan (his books were easier to get than other sf when I was a kid),but he got weirder with age. Haven’t read hunter:killer, but I’ve read oa lot of his other stuff. You could make good movies out of his 1950s stuff, but even when they nominally based something on his stuff (Freejack is supposed to be based on Immortality, Inc. = Immortality Delivered)it turns out awful.
Cal:
That tends to happen with good books - usually they go for the special effects and forget any ideas behind them in the first place. Even, if thye don’t forget the ideas, usually some idiot insists on a happy ending because it sells better (tell that to the opera nuts!), or they cut some of the really important bits because it makes the film too long…
When you say reread your original, which bit did you mean? I assumed you were being sarcy about ADF, but felt like whinging about Terry “yawn” Brooks’ adaptation of Phantom Menace anyway. It’s weird as I used to like the early shanara series & the magic kingdom stuff, but most of his more recent stuff seems to twice as long as the story/his writing ability will bear…but I could just be getting cranky in my old age!
