Fierra:
I only meant that you asked whether I’d read “Status Civilization”, and it’s pretty clear from my post that I had.
SC was one of the first sf books I ever read, so I didn’t realize at first how intentionally hokey Sheckley was being. Now I read it with a more educated palate.
As far as Piers Anthony goes, I liked “A Spell for Chameleon”, but just haven’t been able to get into his other Xanth books. I liked some of his short stories.
Sorry, Cal, brain blitzed. I should have said hunter/victim for one thing & I meant to say immortality inc, (which I already know the answer too, now!). New rule, never post on a friday afternoon!
Some of the shorts are good, although, he has developed some of them into full lengths later, which can either be boring or spoil the original one, orhave lack ofmaterial. It’s worked when Anne MacCaffery (sp?) has done it, but not all of Anthony’s and not all of the Asimov ones that were done in collaboration or after he died. But it’s a damn sight easier to pick wholes in something than do it yourself!
It’s scary how, diverse though this board is, the intelligence level for fantasy literature is consistent.
Same exact thing happened to me. I gave up on Xanth after Color of Her Panties…and even sold my whole set to some guy from Montreal. Didn’t buy anything of his after And Eternity…though, truth to tell, I probably would have given up before that if I hadn’t known the series had an ending and wanted to know how it ends.
To me, he just got way too obsessed with sex (the first two Incarnations books had almost none of it, the third, my favorite of the series had some but it was very tightly bound to the plot, and after that, the sex seemed to be thrown in gartuitously), and, in Xanth, he took what were originally funny jokes too far. The panties stuff, the stork stuff…he didn’t just beat a dead horse, he beat the corpse until it disintegrated into mush and beat the mush until it was liquid.
I haven’t read a new Anthony book since, although I occasionally re-read the Incarnations series, especially the first three books.
I like a lot of Piers Anthony and have read almost everything of his. I have definitely found that he leans toward the creepy side. Not just in his writing but as a person in general (this mostly from reading his Author’s Notes at the end of all his books).
Anyway, even though I find him slightly creepy, I enjoy his stories (yes, even Xanth–I’ve read them all. At this point, they’re like a trashy romance novel–fluff to read to pass the time and not really expect to get much out of) and I think he puts the creepy stuff in to make people think. Not necessarily to change people’s minds and decide that pedophilia or whatever is ok, but just to make them think about subjects they normally tend to avoid considering at all. (I know I don’t think about pedophiles if I can help it. Maybe it would do everybody some good to think about the unpleasant stuff once in a while).
That’s not being a virgin. That’s probably what you meant to type, but I want to avoid any confusion here.
The age of consent in some parts of the US is also 16, and I believe in a few states it’s even younger. While the huge age gap between the girl and the man was pretty creepy I don’t think it would have bothered me so much if the girl were portrayed as a character who was emotionally and intellectually mature and had experienced satisfying (or at least non-abusive) sexual relationships before. But this was not the case. This was a girl who ran away from home after being raped by her stepfather and ended up a prostitute and a drug addict. I can believe that such a girl would develop a crush on the first older man who showed her any kindness and that she would be willing to sleep with him, but I do not for one moment buy the idea that such a relationship would do an abused and emotionally fragile adolescent any good at all.
Has anyone read his “Chaining the Lady”? That had some weird sexual/gender stuff in it. I think that was the first book of his I ever read, and it was so weird, I didn’t even realize it was the same guy when I happened upon “Chameleon”, which was delightful.
I have also read that he brings up the creepy stuff on purpose, purportedly to make everyone think. Doesn’t make it any less creepy. I stopped reading his books after “Firefly.”
Have any of you read his early short, ‘In the Barn’? This guy travels to an alternate universe where all mammals except man have been wiped out, and spends a day working in a dairy farm. The ‘cows’ are human women who have their hands bound and are put in sensory deprivation chambers at birth for a couple of years (so they grow up unintelligent and without opposable thumbs) and after that are treated pretty much how we treat livestock. The main character attempts to have sex with a pubescent ‘cow’ who he is supposed to take to a bull for it’s first breeding, but is unable to achieve orgasm because her vagina is too loose (‘He could not plumb the well to it’s depth, nor gain purchase at the rim’). Pretty sick stuff.
I DID like Cthon, Orn, and Omnivore, but his later stuff has this combination of immaturity and perversion that I can’t get into.
I read “Firefly” and didn’t like it much, although I did enjoy the afterword. I read the first five or six Xanth novels, then got tired of them. Same with the Adept series - I thought the same themes were coming up, and there was little character (as opposed to plot) development (compare the Matthew Scudder series by Lawrence Block) in either of those series. I got really tired of the Incarnations series after the fourth one (either Chronos or Fate?), and never read either the sixth or seventh installment, although I still think “On a Pale Horse” is one of the more thought-provoking books I’ve read.
One book of his I enjoyed was “But What of Earth?”, in which the text is heavily annotated with his comments regarding what various copyeditors did to it during the editing process. He gives the text as written, then derides the copyeds for their idiocy. Man does he come across as a curmudgeonly bastard, and his descriptions of the women copyeds are less than flattering. I understand he wants to make people think about societal taboos and all, but he still comes across as a bit misogynistic, IMHO.
Adam
I read ‘But What of Earth?’ as well. He admits it’s probably his worst novel. I agree that the editors seemed to take more liberties with the story than they should, but fact is, it probably shouldn’t have been published, period.
Amazing that we’ve gotten this far in a Piers Anthony thread and nobody’s mentioned the Bio of a Space Tyrant series. One of his few attempts at really “serious” or “adult” science fiction, and it’s just as ridiculous as everything else. That’s when I finally gave up on the man, and it’s been like ten or twelve years since I’ve even touched, let alone opened, another of his books.
I’m a little surprised no one has mentioned “Bio of Space Tyrant” yet. That was pretty much the last thing of his I read, as it lay bare all of his rather icky distractions, with the addition of incest, which I don’t remember appearing anywhere else in his body of work. I basically forced myself to finish it, and said, “there, i don’t have to read anything else of his ever again”. I did rather enjoy, “For the Love of Evil”, but not very much.
My my my. This thread brings back memories. is stuff was entertaining when I was 12, but then, yech. It’s the same fucking story over and over. Same thing happened to me and David Eddings (aolthough he is miles better than Anthony). The whole Split Infinity series started to get to me after a while. Too much gratutitous nudity and sex, I mean really, what was the point of it after a while. Simply acting out adolesent fantashies, great for adolesent readers, not so hot for everyone else. Bio was in equally poor taste, rape scenes? Being arroused by seing your family raped? yech again.
FYI Did you know he wrote a book called Pornucopia?
Also on a last note. Has anyone read BattleCircle? i’ve found it the most mature and interesting of his work. I read it a while ago, and it wasn’t nearly as off-putting as his later stuff. Of course it was writen in the 80’s.
um oldscratch, methinks you are off by a decade on BattleCircle. My copy of Sos the Rope says it was published in 1968.
Oh, and I gave up on Xanth with Golem in the Gears. I gave up on Incarnations with the third book (which I could not finish).
Ooops. Thanks Dr. that’s what I get for remembering a book from his, not remembering the title, then searching through Amazon to find the title, then going and taking the publishing date from a review. Ahem. Anyway, I stand corrected. Anthony’s best work occured before 1970, after that it was all downhill.
Wasn’t really into fantasy or science fiction growing up, but I did finish the entire Incarnations series, and I think I read some of two Xanth books (A Spell for Chameleon was one). The first one I read was For Love of Evil, which belonged to my sister, which to me was a very compelling story, and from there I was hooked.
I think what kept me going was that he was refreshingly unconventional, not afraid to take chances (from some of the posts here, THAT much is obvious), and he tackled a lot of sensitive issues with far more honesty and common sense than nearly anyone else I’d heard of. Of course, there may have been others…I admit that that’s a genre I haven’t really been into, but as a teen I took whatever I could get.
A lot of material was pretty disturbing, but understand that the Incarnations have a duty to deal with a lot of very mean, callous, or outright evil people, as well as bizarre forces beyond anyone’s reckoning. Time warping, bizarre relationships, inconvenient shapechanging etc. were just part of the game plan.
I found And Eternity satisfying, if not spectacular. He probably did use up all his great ideas by then, but the story was still compelling enough to keep me through to the end.
Creepy? Maybe. Some writers are like that…almost comes with the territory. I don’t even want to speculate what keeps V.C. Andrews going.
IIRC, VC Andrews is dead. Some other author(s) just write the books in her “style”. I could be wrong as I’m not a fan of that crap.
Hmm… after reading this thread I don’t know if I want to read Piers Anthony so much anymore… I was recommended him by some people and I did get a few books from the library I just never got into him. From what is said here he doesn’t seem to be much my style (in general I avoid stuff with lots of rape and/or sex… well sometimes… I have read several ‘Hot Blood’ anthologies and such…)
Oh and Fierra… is McCaffrey…
Sue - Oh, my apologies. I had no idea that a lot of these novels were, er…ghostwritten (don’t shoot, don’t shoot!). Actually, what really amazes me is that there are that many writers fascinated with creepy families, abuse, misery, pain, terror, and horrific pasts that absolutely refuse to die. Acquired taste, I guess.
Topaz - From what I’ve seen (reminding everyone again that I’ve read only a little aside from the Incarnations series, and that was some time ago), while there’s a lot of sex, it isn’t, you know, explicit, like the kind you find in some of the books at Borders (and no, I’m not naming names). I think that simply having sex scenes is important to him, because sexuality is a part of these people’s being. You know, full range of human behavior, serving the whole man/woman/monster, and all that.
Or maybe he’s just pandering. Whatever.
BANG!
I gave up on Xanth for a while when he introduced a very very young girl (Ivy?) as the main character in Dragon on a Pedestal. Somehow I just couldn’t get into that mindset. And Vale of the Vole REALLY turned me away from Xanth when I went back to the series later on. I mean, there’s this creature who makes a “v” sound to start every “vord he vays,” and it gets extremely annoying and hard to read. I actually did buy Color of Her Panties, despite the store clerk’s stern disapproving glance at me, but I never read it.
I had always thought that Anthony’s young daughters were his main source of inspiration for his young female characters, and that’s why there are so many of them. Can anyone corroborate this? Or refute it?