What makes him tick? Only one thing I know about him for sure… he has published a huge number of books. How can I know in advance which are the good ones?
So far, I’ve only read one of his books: With a Tangled Skein. I thought it was a nice story, cleverly told (especially the gigantic Video Game from Hell at the climax), and I liked it. But for all I know it isn’t representative of Piers Anthony’s writing in general. It didn’t seem to match his racy reputation. Can anyone summarize PA’s oeuvre briefly, so I have an idea what he’s all about?
They all pretty much follow the same plot. (With variations on the amount of overt sex depending on the target audience).
You’ve picked a good series to start with. The Incarnations of Immortality is probably the best thing he’s ever written. I’m on a quest to find For Love of Evil.
Xanth is the fantasy version of Florida. The first few books are really good, up until they lose the Good Magician somewhere along the ninth book. Then it degenerates into a land populated by puns with a shred of plot floating in the occasional wayward breeze. Check the above link for the plot of every single Xanth novel since 1986 or so.
(I used to like him, but then I got too bogged down in the puns and the “I am so great!” Author’s Notes, so I dropped him like a rock. Can ya tell? )
Xanth makes me see red. I like my puns to be clever.
The Incarnations of Immortality series started off pretty good, (although I was 18 or 19 when I read it, so my standards might have been a little lower.) I thought the the concept behind the series was pretty neat. Reading the notes in the back of them pretty much sums up for me why so many of Piers Anthony’s later novels just don’t make the grade as far as decent writing goes. Partway the the series, he starts extolling the virtues of his new-fangled Word Processing Machine, and how much time it saves him by allowing him to crank out his books according to templates. Sorry Piers, WP templates might be great for business letters, but they don’t have any place in creative writing. I found that the quality of Incarnations of Immortality waned pretty noticably towards the end of the series. Or maybe I was just growing up.
I read a lot of Piers Anthony when I was in High School and Jr. High. Towards the end of my time at high school, I suddenly realized: Piers Anthony really, really sucks. To a wholly unprecendented degree. Bad jokes, repetitive plots, paper-thin characters, ludicrously convoluted and juvenile double-entendres. Simply godawful. And then there’s the ego! My God, but Anthony has the worst ego-to-talent ratio of any author working today. His autobiography was the most self-serving, facile piece of crap I’ve ever had the misfortune to read. And don’t get me started on the smug, self-congratulatory Letters from Jenny!
I’ll say this much: usually, the first book in any of his far-too-numerous series are pretty good, but the rest of the series always consists of countless rehashes of the first book. If you want to get the best of Piers Anthony, just read the first novels. A Spell for Chameleon and On a Pale Horse stand out as pretty tolerable. You’d be better off reading something with a little more literary merit, though. Like stereo instructions.
Well, my opinion, for what it is worth, is that usually the first book (and sometimes the first few books) of any series has the strong possiblity of being good. Being the first, or first few, doesn’t garrantee that it will be good, but it is a strong possibility. After that, they are usually quite formulaic and redundant. And so “With a Tangled Skein”, not being the first, I found it very redundant and dull. The first one “On a Pale Horse” I enjoyed. Likewise for his Adept series and his Xanth series. I enjoyed the first 3 Xanth, and the first three Adept. HTH.
The bad ones are the one with “Piers Anthony” written on the cover. I second SpazCat’s comment especially – after reading the Space Tyrant series, I vowed never to read Anthony’s books again.
I concur that his books are very formulaic. I read the “Incarnations of Immortality” series, and found that all the books were basically the same, not just in style but in plot. I read a couple of other books and gave up. I’m convinced he has an application set up on a computer so he just enters some names and places and it spits out a book. Sort of a mega-mad libs.
So by chance I happened on one of the less-bad ones. Lucky me.
Since he has big fandom, I thought I would ask what is all the fuss about. Usually people mention his racy stuff, but With a Tangled Skein was not noticeably sexy… it was more about religion. Pop religion and pop mythology, that is.
Thanks, everyone, for warning me off of PA. Since my precious reading time is limited these days, it’s important to choose carefully only good quality stuff. What’s up with Lloyd Alexander?
I hate the idea of formulaic anything. I remember back in the 1970s I was reading about the disco music industry (I hated disco, so I was probably reading up on more reasons to hate it.) The producers were telling how they assembled disco tracks mechanically on an assembly line, with no human artistry involved in the process. And they were boasting about it as though this were a good thing. :rolleyes: I retched.
He has said as much himself. Not that extreme, but the plot/sub-plot structure/conflicts & resolutions have been codified and produced according to a formula. That he would admit this at all, gushing “I’ve been able to triple my output!” in the back of one of his own books, is really pitiful.
That being said, I’ll say it again-- his short fiction can be quite good. He’s a crap novelist, though.
I really enjoyed the Kirlian Quest series, and the Orn, Omnivore, Ox trilogy. I still enjoy reading Xanth books for a light read, although I haven’t read any of the ones that came out in the past few years. Hasan is certainly a bit different from the usual stuff, being an adaptation of one of the Arabian Nights stories. And I enjoy the Author’s Notes at the end of his books; I like reading about how he wropte the books and what he was doing at the time. Oh yeah, I haven’t reread it in a while, but I remember really liking the Apprentice Adept series. However, I’m obviosly in the minority in this group, since Piers is one of my favorite authors ever, and the rest of you seem to think pretty little of him.
I used to read his stuff for the cheese value, but I realize its crap. “Riding a Pale Horse” was a cool novel with a cool premise and cool characters and all that… and the rest of the series until “For Love of Evil” was pretty good, too. But I guess even a stopped clock is right twice a day. Never read the “Xanth” books.
If you want good puns and better gratuitous sex, read anything by Spider Robinson. He’s not much like Piers Anthony, but he is damn good.
Nation Lampoon had a good article about disco back then, describing how it was harvested in South America, cut into twent-foot lengths for shipping, etc. Ah good laffs. Yup.
obPiers Anthony: The last book of his I read all the way through was called Chthon or something like that. I forget what it was about - that was almost thirty years ago; how old is that bastard anyway? I started one of the Xanth novels a few years ago, but I wasn’t enjoying it so I didn’t bother to finish.
I liked the first books of the Xanth series when I was … like preteen. Once he started giving credit at the end of the books to the idiots who sent in pun ideas that were used in the book… well it became clear that the only reason for writing the stupid things was to string together as many idiotic puns as possible.
I liked Macroscope, but have never been able to finish anything else by him. I tried reading the Apprentice Adept series and detested the first book (I loved the idea of mixing SF and fantasy, but he never did, and his preaching got boring very fast). From what I’ve seen, he has no talent for puns, but that doesn’t stop him from making them.
In addition, his biography shows him to be extremely petty and vindictive, carrying trivial grudges for decades.
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