I have heard from a number of sources over the years that at one point in his career, author Piers Anthony was “blacklisted”. I have also read Anthony himself alluding to the situation. However, I have never heard exactly why he was blacklisted, or, for that matter, who blacklisted him from what? Does it mean he couldn’t get published for a while?
Any help here?
Piers Anthony is a paranoid drama queen. Hope that helped.
He’s also a crappy storyteller.
The cheating publisher appears as a rape victim in volume two of Anthony’s Bio of a Space Tyrant.
Man, when I was a kid I really enjoyed the first three Xanth books, then they kept coming and coming and coming and the rest were so bad…
I also read a bunch of his other stuff - I liked the Battle Circle series (Sos the Rope, etc…). I read Omnivore and the other books - jeez I read a ton of his stuff.
But for some reason when the Xanth books kept coming and went south in quality, I walked away. I haven’t tried to read his stuff in, oh, 25 years. I get the impression I wouldn’t like it as much as when I was 12…
Here are Anthony’s early novels, with publishers and dates:
Chthon – Ballentine, 1967
Omnivore – Ballentine, 1968
Macroscope – Avon, 1969
Orn – Avon, 1971
Prostho Plus – Ballentine, 1973
Race Against Time – Hawthorne, 1973
Rings of Ice – Avon, 1974
Triple Detente – Daw, 1974
Chthon – Berkeley, 1975 (reprint)
Omnivore – Avon, 1975 (reprint)
Ox – Avon, 1976
In '77, he published the first Xanth novel.
I’d love to be blacklisted like that. 
So the “boycott” resulted in nothing greater than a two-year gap. I’m guessing that he had a dispute with Ballentine after Omnivore was published, but he was working with Avon by that point.
As far as the “writer’s organization tacitly siding with the publisher,” since that organization was probably SFWA, it seems most likely that their grievance committee didn’t see any merit in whatever he was claiming.
Having actually read Macroscope, Race Against Time, and Mercycle (written earlier in his career, but not published at first), I can well believe that there were a lot of publishers who refused to buy his stories. This, however, is not because of some sort of a blacklist, but just because those books sucked.
Yeah, I read a couple of his books in highschool, but that was more than enough to last me.
IIRC, his first book was actually Venus on the Half-Shell, using the pseudonym of Kilgore Trout. He did this because everything he wrote kept getting rejected, so he wrote Vonnegut, and asked him permission to use the name and title, which Vonnegut gave.
I thought Venus on the Half-Shell was written by Philip Jose Farmer, writing as “Kilgore Trout”. A quick search at Amazon bears this out:
Whoops, my bad. Makes sense, though, I’m not sure how Anthony would have been able to write a letter articulate enough to convince Vonnegut.
I hadn’t heard that, but as long as we’re talking about Anthony here, one that I’ve always wanted more details about was the Laser Books-Rodger Elwood/Piers Anthony thing. I don’t know any of the details, but Rodger Elwood(?) was behind a line of (generally bad, although the guy had an eye for burgenoning talent*)
SF. Elwood published something by Anthony in that line, Anthony didn’t like something about it, sued, won big and the guy’s career (as, frankly, the world’s single worst anthologizer ever) collapsed. Last I saw, Elwood was writing bad Christian novels in the mid-80s. Anyway, anyone know what the fight/suit was about?
Fenris
*Tim Powers and K.W. Jeter got their start in Laser Books.
You ask about the lawsuit, but what of Earth?! Basically, Laser was working on a new series of books, and asked Piers Anthony to write one. Anthony wrote a really bad book called “But What of Earth?”. The editor handling his book at Laser then told him, "We’re going to have another one of our editors,Robert Coulson, retype the manuscript, make minor edits and proofreads, and we’ll publish that. Coulson read it, said to himself “This is a piece of crap!”, and rewrote the book (and oddly enough, it was still a piece of crap when he was done…Coulson wasn’t a great writer). The book was than published with the byline “by Piers Anthony and Robert Coulson”. Anthony saw it, flipped out, threatened to sue Laser, it got settled out of court, Laser apologized, the rights reverted back to Anthony, the editor who set the whole thing up got fired, and the series was stopped.
Later on, Anthony republished the book, this time, his version, with a prologue explaining what had happened (which I happen to have in my hand.) If you want to read Anthony’s explanation, his version was published by Tor Books in 1989, IAMN 0-812-53098-5. For such a bad book, this version is a pretty good read, because not only does he include the backstory, he includes endnotes throughout the novel, including all of the notes by the various copyeditors who worked on the book at Laser.
Macroscope makes me hard! :eek: 
You know what was cool?
How, in the appendices to the Incarnations of Immortality series, Anthony let his readers in on the details of his writing process.
My favourite part was when he gushed about how his new-fangled “Word Processor” let him use “templates” for his novels, which upped his productivity by 20% Wow! Cool! No more wasting time considering what to put where. Hell you already did that once!
errgHACK!
Sorry, something in my thoat.
I read Venus on the Half Shell in high school because I was a Vonnegut freak. And a lunatic, apparently, as the book was lametastic but I completed it anyway.
According to Wikipedia, Vonnegut was “not amused” by VotHS.
As noted above, Anthony had nothing to do with any of this.
As a gullible tenth grader, I thought Kilgore Trout was a real author. After all, Vonnegut was using real events like the firebombing of Dresden, why not a real author too? Of course, I also read Farmer’s Tarzan Alive and thought that was real too. 
You forgot to mention the challenge of coming up with a new 30-page description of how amazing a writer he is for every book! Let’s see Umberto Eco try that, eh?
I’m ashamed to admit I was a fan in my teenage years. And Eternity was what finally made me snap out of it and realize that life was too short to waste reading crap.
As a teenager I liked some of his stuff. I can still read battle circle (My family nickname has always been Sos so those books were amusing) and Incarcations and Apprentice Adept and very early Xanth, but I recently had a clear out of my book collection. Bio of a space tyrant just had to go. The more authors I read the more I realize how poor Anthony is, which explains why i liked him as a teenager. I didn’t know any better!