One and Only Wanderers, I echo all the gratitude. That must’ve taken a strong will (and stronger stomach) to read and relate. Oy.
So am I correct that the heroine was still thirteen when she joined yon best little whorehouse in Camelot?
I can’t believe he repeated himself to such a degree. Talk about being enamoured of your own mythos.
How 'bout getting Laurell K. Hamilton in on that?
There’s an author’s note, but I didn’t read it. I’ve never been particularly interested in them
Usually, the actual story he is telling is interesting, the prose etc is usually poor, but same as most people, I first started reading him as a young adult, so that didn’t bother me. The bad aspects are the child sex, occurs a lot in his work, and his not so subtle preaching that it should be OK, that young girls should be able to go off with middle aged men, no questions asked.
choie
she must have been all of 15 by then.
My main issue, to be honest, is just that he’s gone way past being formulaic, and the set characters and situations now take up the majority of any work. The whole chocolate colored 13 year old sex goddess thing that pops up semi-regularly makes me wonder about Teh Piers a bit, but everything that I’ve ever read has been consensual or portrayed as “a bad thing” if not, with the characters written as adult-minded characters not all “Mommy mommy, can I have a pwony and gwitter to pour on my widdle pwony, oh pwease mommy!” So I mean, regardless of whether he’s fantasizing about 13 year old bodies, the minds he presents are 18+.
A selected reading of Xanth would actually be pretty decent:
A Spell for Chameleon
The Source of Magic
Castle Roogna
Ogre, Ogre (which is the basis for the Xanth formula)
Night Mare (personal favorite)
Crewel Lye
Question Quest
(Wow, I can’t believe that Question Quest is less than halfway through the series now…)
I’ve always thought that he doesn’t write stories, he writes puzzles. All the characters are pretty one dimensional. If a particular book has a really good puzzle, great. I can overlook the lack of characterization. But if the puzzle isn’t really good, there’s nothing else there.
Yeah. I’d put up ‘Man from Mundania’ in the list of the better ones, despite its serious pun infestation. I do have a soft spot for that book in that it earned me an A on a term paper in university, for a ‘Modes of Fantasy’ humanities gen-ed requirement. It fit the course syllabus well, we’d talked a lot about how fantasy reconciles the real versus the alternative, (Mundania against Xanth, Grey and Ivy themselves representing their homelands,) and about the ‘femininist romance’ (ie Harlequin,) and the ‘masculinist romance’ (old fashioned adventure epics like Beowulf.) My main thesis was that MfM reconciled the masculinist and the femininist stance, by constantly balancing Grey and Ivy’s importance, keeping the love story and the puzzle/adventure intertwined so that neither had a chance to dominate.
I can remember a time when Anthony was actually a pretty good writer. Back when I was in school, Anthony was still writing decent work like the Cluster and Tarot series. I remember when I read the first book in his Bio of a Space Tyrant series and thought that was unusually weak for him and I also noticed that the Xanth series really dropped off after the initial trilogy. Anthony still published some good books but his ratio of hits to misses kept getting worse. I think it was his embarassing whining in his “corrected” version of But What of Earth? that finally made me decide to move on.