He wrote some (really gross) porn and collected it in a book called ( :rolleyes: )Pornucopia and from the little I’ve read, I’d have blacklisted himi based on that too.
He also wrote a really disgusting story for Dangerous Visions called (something like) “In the Barn”.
Plus there’s the very disturbing “adults oogling little girls wearing only panties” thing that’s all over the Xanth novels in the #13-#18 range.
Fenris
I just want to state, for the record, that I have never, ever gone through a Piers Anthony phase. I have never read a single Xanth novel, and I most certainly did not read more than a dozen of the books in the series before becoming disgusted by it. Nor did I read Incarnations of Immortality, although I have heard from sources that the first book in the series wasn’t that bad. Not that I’d know myself, because I’ve never read it. I also never read the Adept series, nor did I check out the entire Cluster series in one trip to the library, and return them all, read, before they became overdue.
And anyone who suggests differently will be hearing from my lawyer.
That’s exactly its title. I think it was not a bad story. He did show signs in early days of having the potential of turning into a pretty decent writer. But his personality traits showed there too; in ADV he waxed poetic about Harlan Ellison, but later criticized him for renaming the story. (from “The Barn”)
As mentioned earlier, Steppe was not totally bad, though it’s full of plodding prose, and On a Pale Horse was interesting. The series went downhill so fast though that I gave up midway through the third book. I’ve never read a Xanth book.
Actually, Chuck, the two genres were mixed more thoroughly later in the series.
I was a big Anthony fan for a while. I don’t read him anymore for the reasons discussed in this thread. But his earlier work (up through the early '80’s, when Xanth started to become the juggernaut it is today) is still interesting. I don’t know of another author whose interests were so catholic as Anthony’s. And while he’s never been the most economical of writers, there were enough cool concepts in Steppe, Macroscope, Pretender, Hasan, the Cluster books, Ghost, Tarot, and Triple Detente that I still look back on them fondly. (Indeed, I can see how those books shaped my own thinking – no, I’m not talking about a prediliction for little girls.) The Incarnations of Immortality series is about the only thing after this period that I’ve read which is still worthwhile (my wife even dug these books, and she hates sci-fi), but I would (and do) happily re-read anything Anthony wrote before 1983.
–Cliffy
This pretty much describes my Piers Anthony experience, too. As a teen I had read the Omnivore trilogy, and Macroscope, and thought it was great. Then I got the Cluster(f*ck) series, and the Tarot series, and began to think it rather formulaic. Then I read the first Xanth novel and thought “WTF?”
My favorite memory was starting 10th grade and the English teacher telling us to bring in a novel to write a report on. I was actually reading one of the Cluster(f*ck) novels at that very moment, and she walked over and asked me to show it to her and describe the novel to the class. And to stand up while I did it.
So, put yourself in my 10th grade Lit class. This gangly, greasy, geeky, four-eyed nerd stands up and says to the class: “Uh… it’s about this caveman, who uhh… gets recruited by the government to uhh… beam his aura uhhh… into the bodies of aliens… uhhh and he has sex in the alien bodies… and, uhh spies on the aliens for the goverment.”
Thank god I changed high schools a few weeks after that incident.
A couple years ago, I found Orn, Onmivore, and OX on the shelves of a used bookstore, and bought them out of nostalgia. Then I read them and found the characters completely shallow and the plotline rather simple and uninspired. But I’ve become a jaded adult by reading works by authors like Vernor Vinge, Neal Stephenson, Greg Bear and Iain M. Banks.
But the early Anthony novels are probably still rather good teen fiction. (Although I dunno about the Tarot series, there were some pretty raunchy scenes in those.)
Piers Anthony? Bleah. I don’t even recall what book of his I tried to read, way back in my innocent youth. I couldn’t get more than a couple of pages into it. Then I hurled it into the trash.
We REALLY need a puke smilie.
Macroscope was the book that got me reading Science Fiction as a teenager(I was fifteen, I think[I stole it from my brother because I thought it contained sex because that was the kind of books my brother read.]). Up to that point, I only read mysteries like Agatha Christie and UFO books. In fact, reading this book encouraged me to try reading LOTR. Up to that time, Macroscope was the fattest paperbook I ever read. I read Race and Mercycle first only as a reprint. As juvenile books, they are superior to most of their ilk.