Xanth, Incarnations, Adept-- also Tarot-- doesn’t he also have a couple of hard sci-fi series? A half dozen stand alones. Damn, doesn’t he ever sleep? And, what is he, like 90 or something?
I think this thread would get more responses if the subject line read “FORMER Xanth fans…” Then again, that seems to be mostly who’s responding anyway. 
In college I discovered that most fantasy fans had gone through a period of Xanth fandom in the past, and that this was something they remembered with great shame. But I think this is a common enough phenomenon that we shouldn’t be ashamed of it. Yes, I too once read Xanth novels.
Before looking at the list I’d have told you I read up through Demons Don’t Dream, but I think I actually did read or at least browse through everything up through Faun and Games. I had a younger sister who hit the Xanth phase several years behind me, so there were Xanth books lying around the house after I’d stopped caring enough to seek them out on my own. (And for a long while I’d only been seeking them out on my own because I’d read all the other ones in the series and I felt I should keep going.) I don’t think I could tell you the plot of any of them past DDD, though.
As for why so many of us turn out backs on Xanth, well, pretty much what Askia said in post #32. What made me give up on Anthony altogether and decide I wouldn’t even revisit the books I remembered liking was And Eternity… While browsing through it I realized that a huge portion of the text was dedicated to explaining why it’s actually OK for adult men to have sex with teenaged girls and society shouldn’t condemn it. I was myself at the time a teenaged girl and found it seriously creepy. Not to mention badly written and stupid.
I think I read the entire series up through Man from Mundania before I hit the eject button. (Hey, I lived in Florida, and how many other fantasy series are set in Florida?) The earlier books seemed reasonably entertaining as a somewhat uneven blend of humor and diet fantasy, but as the series went on I began to recognize that certain recurring elements in the books revealed way more of Anthony’s sexual obsessions than I was comfortable knowing about. That, and the fact that the entire series contains only a tiny butter pat of characterization, which Anthony tries to spread over several french loaves of narrative.
I also made the mistake of reading his so-called “horror” novel, Shade of the Tree, and that was about the final nail in the coffin for me.
I think the first one I picked up was Castle Roogna at about age 10. That got me interested enough to backtrack to the first two and continue on reading from there. I loved Xanth, I loved the ideas, the inventive weirdness of the place, and I even liked the puns. I sought out most of his other stuff, including things that were already out of print by then (i.e. Viscous Cycle, Firefly, Tarot). I made it up to Isle of View before growing out of the Xanth stuff. And I do think it was a case of growing out of it. My tastes in many things changed, sometimes drastically, in my late teens to early twenties. I read Isle of View as soon as it came out in 1990, which means the last time I read any Xanth and practically the last time I read any Piers Anthony books was when I was sixteen.
I don’t have the excuse of not having good writers to compare him to. I read classic SF (Heinlein, Bradbury, Asimov, Clarke, Dick) at about the same time or even earlier in some cases, and I picked up Gibson and others in the revitalization of SF in the 80s. I think at the time I liked the light entertainment, and the punny wordplay that almost no one I knew at the time would appreciate very much. I read Asprin’s Myth series and Adam’s Hitchhiker’s Guide series in my early teens too. Thankfully both of those stand up better to adult perceptions.
If you still like these books past your teens, there’s probably nothing wrong with you, but I might not want to get to know you too well. Ditto for trashy romance novels; they activate my gag reflex.
The reasons I can’t read him now are many. I don’t like most humor novels much any more. Small doses of Pratchett or Douglas Adams that poke fun at society and have some insight instead of just jokes are okay, but I can’t live on a steady diet of humor like I did as a kid. Anthony is a “tell, don’t show” kind of author and I can’t mesh with that kind of writing anymore unless it’s non-fiction. I grew to appreciate subtlety and resonance in language more than I did when I was young. I didn’t really appreciate just how damn good Le Guin was, for instance, until I recommended and as a consequence re-read the first three Earthsea books a few years ago. Anthony doesn’t do subtle, or resonance.
I also don’t appreciate puns as much as I used to. My uncle and I used to bond over a good pun session. I used to laugh at groaners like the one he graced me with on my last visit: “I heard that the official drink of the Japanese government is Diet Coke.” It’s good, it’s inventive, it’s tailor made, but I didn’t get more than a snort out of it. Poor uncle. And poor Anthony. Even my uncle can’t get into Xanth since he was past the target age of impressionability when he first encountered it. I tried, but I couldn’t infect him. Maybe that’s for the best.
Got into it by proxy, when my brother had to read Question Quest for class. He fell in love with the series, collected it like mad, so I followed along.
Xanth, to me, is sort of like the Beatles. I knew it was pandering to the lowest common denominator, but it was damn catchy and I couldn’t help enjoying it.
And it didn’t help that I developed a bit of a crush on Trent while reading Harpy Thyme. coughs
Well, for a while his self-congratulatory author’s notes (“YAY ME!!!”) were constantly reminding us that he was writing something like 3 or 4 books a year. However, I haven’t seen much new out of him except for Xanth these days.
I think the main thing that made me lose interest in the later Xanth books (besides the godawful Golem in the Gears, which was an exercise in All-Pun-No-Plot) was that the main characters I liked seemed to no longer factor in, and the new “main characters” were becoming increasingly characters that were less interesting to me. I liked Bink, and Dor, and other descendents of theirs – the other magician-level talents that were the focus of the earlier books.
The later “main characters” were becoming increasingly less interesting… and it was always some character like… Gooblesnort, the half-naga half-goblin half-harpy half-pomegranate three-headed buck-toothed centaur-nymph with a heart of gold… bah.
A clarification: I don’t think Anthony is capable of writing hard science fiction. He’s written some books which are pure science fiction (as in, no admixture of fantasy), but they’re all soft SF. Hard SF may loosely be defined as SF where the author had to do some calculations, and that doesn’t happen in any of Anthony’s work.
The scary thing is, I think there actually was one of these… I once got bored and drew up family trees for every single character in Xanth, and it turns out that nearly everyone is related to Bink or to Humphrey. Most of the non-humans were in the Humphrey tree, and the nagae, goblins, harpies, centaurs, and nymphs all connect to it (as well as the merfolk, ogres, hippogriffs, demons, and I think the nightmares). Oddly, there were no connections between the two trees, but there were a few multiple connections within Humphrey’s tree.
I first read Centaur Aisle in 1982 when I was in 8th grade. I liked it so much that I backtracked and read the previous three books in rapid succession. I then read each book as it came out until Heaven Cent, which I never finished.
I also read the original “Apprentice Adept” trilogy, the entire “Incarnations of Immortality” series, the “Cluster” series, and most of the “Bio of a Space Tyrant” series. I particularly liked the “Apprentice Adept” trilogy, but felt that each of the other series went rapidly downhill (some faster than others). As others have mentioned, I also started getting extremely annoyed by the Author’s Notes in the Xanth books.
The last thing I ever read by Anthony was Pornucopia, which I read in 1991. It had been a few years of not reading anything else by Anthony before I got this book, and upon reading it, I had a flash of insight as I realized that the author was a complete sicko. I, who almost never voluntarily gives up a book (particularly a hardcover), actually sold it to a university classmate, as I knew I would never read the book again.
Note that I do think the Cluster series and Incarnations are his best work, but that pretty much brings them to what I’d consider the “average” level for fantasy/sci-fi. And even in the Cluster books he’s just slightly TOO fascinated by alien reproduction.
Looking through the link above a little more closely, I probably should have held on to that book. Apparently it was one of only 500 books published in Houston, Texas (which is where I bought it), and thus pretty rare and valuable.
Oh well. I only owned the book a few weeks before I sold it. And the book still stunk. Magic smegma, indeed. :rolleyes:
Funnily enough, Golem In the Gears was the first Xanth book I read, that got me to read all the rest of the previous books in the series. In fact, it was the Author’s Notes that got me hooked on the series; To me it was a sort of literary Dial H For Hero type book; you wrote in with your pun suggestions and there was a decent chance that you might see it in print and contribute to the world-building of Xanth, with full mention of your contribution. That was seemingly neat. Like the Harry Potter series that came later, though, I think there was a hands-off editorial decision regarding the books that hurt the literary merits of whatever actual plot and character development there was.
I still think Xanth, in the hands of a thoughtful TV producer, might make for a kick-ass cable miniseries if you were to adapt the original trilogy of books (A Spell for Chameleon, The Source of Magic and particularly Castle Roogna)
Has anyone here ever read Neil Gaiman’s Books of Magic? There’s a couple of lines in there that I SWEAR contains a one sentence assessment of the Incarnation of Immortality series.
So we have a line by Neil Gaiman’s Tim Hunter, the prototypical J. K. Rowling **Harry Potter ** character, seemingly asessing Piers Anthony’s Incarnations of Immortality ** series, which preceded Gaiman’s own Sandman ** and Endless.
used to read Anthony a lot. I got up to Harpy Thyme before I abandoned Xanth. I still like Incarnations (apart from #7) I enjoyed Battle Circle when I was younger, but the last time i picked it up i thought it was a crap-fest. Used to have all the bio of a space tyrant books, but i recently purged them from my collection as I was embarrased to own them, same goes for the Mouvar’s magic set. think I also dropped the Mode books. Agree with everyone about the first Adept trilogy being good (still have those ones)
I thought the series started very promisingly, with a lot of good ideas that Anthony could do well, but didn’t quite get put together right, and then after a few books quickly declined to things that I’m embarassed to read – though apparently a lot of children still like them, so he’s doing something right.
Good things:
(1) The thought he put into magic. The idea that magic in the landscape might ‘naturally select’ according to what made people more likely to make quarries out of it; or the idea that a somewhat precognative magic could affect things vastly greater than itself by feedback, are really cool. Also a lot of diversity is very imaginative.
(2) Puns. I know, I know, but I do like them somehow.
(3) Titillation. Ditto.
But then he went overboard on (2) and (3) and forgot (1) and killed it for me.
I think that sums it up nicely, Shade. And you’re right, even some of the puns were fun at first.
His series tended to have some very good and creative ideas behind them. Specifically, in Xanth, the notion of magic – every human having one magic talent, some could be powerful and some could be the spot-on-the-wall variety. But this was worked very nicely into the plot of the first book – Bink being exiled for presumably not having a magic talent.
But then after too many in a series, he goes overboard the “same-old-schtick” facets, and forgets about the creative ideas and imaginativeness that made it fun.
I think my favorite character was Dor, with the ability to talk to inanimate objects.
That is a very good assessment. I got up to Demons Don’t Dream.. By that time I’d been caught up to the series and reading them as they came out for several years. I think I gave up because they were all just too similar to each other over time – I’d really liked most of what Anthony calls the first trilogy (up thru Golem) – plus I was an adult now with a girlfriend and access to the Internet, so I didn’t need Xanth’s description of thirteen year olds’ panties anymore.
I do owe one thing to Xanth, though. When I was in Boy Scouts in 6th grade there were two high-school age bullies in my troop. I and my tenderfoot compatriots used to hide in our tents so they didn’t beat us up. But one of the bullies saw me reading a Xanth book and struck up a conversation about them. After that, he still beat up the other kids, but I was off limits, and he protected me from the other bully too.
I liked and still occasionally read lots of Anthony’s early stuff. He’s not a great with characterization, but the stuff he wrote up to the early eighties has a ton of interesting ideas.
–Cliffy
I keep hinting around at this: I really do think A SPELL FOR CHAMELEON would make a good cable mini-series. Say, four or five episodes… I realize there’s a IMDb listing for it, but it may not come to pass.
Who would you cast in the lead parts? The only two I can think of:
Good Magician Humphery = Wallace Shawn
Grundy Golem = Danny DeVito
Wow - guess I’m not alone!
I’m pretty sure I made it to Demons Don’t Dream, and I think I only own 4 of them.
I gave up around the age of 13 I think.
Up to that point, however, I would scour the library looking for them. Of course, I read anything and everything I could get my hands on.
I never read scifi or fiction as a kid. I only read murder mysteries ala Christie, Wolf, Marsh, Atwood Taylor, etc. Then I came across the book Macroscope ans fell in love with PA. I have been reading is books ever since, even the bad ones. Even he admits they are often repetitive, but you knew that if you ever read the afterwards in his book.
PA doesn’t write stories, he writes puzzles. He’s not big on empathy. He wouldn’t know a shade of gray if he tripped over it. People are either good or bad.
So of course I made it up to Harpy Thyme and read Zombie Lover just because someone who knew I used to read his stuff handed it to me. You know. Book in hand - read book. It just happens.
Never read any of the Bio or most of the early stuff. Read most of the later series. Just can’t leave a puzzle alone, I guess. I think that’s why I eventually let go. Like Shade said, he started putting less though into the implications of magic and that’s what gave the puzzle part depth.
I also got older. I still kind of like the first few, and the early Incarnations. I’m careful not to re-read any of them, though, just in case.
I had a librarian tell me, once, that his stuff was stolen more often than any other author. That was probably about 28 years ago though. Wonder if it’s still true.
What gets me is that he doesn’t seem to recognize how they’re repetitive. Like, in Faun and Games, he mentions in the Author’s Note that it reminds him a lot of Ogre, Ogre… Because they both introduce a new world (the Gourd and Ida’s moons, respectively). Never mind the whole bit about “Testosterone-overdosed male character goes on a quest for something he’s not sure what it is, accompianied by several nubile young females on their own quests, only to discover at the end that what he was looking for was love all along, which he finds in the first nubile who joined him and who is also the last one to stay with him at the end”.
One other thing I’ve noticed is that no character in any Anthony book ever actually thinks. Ideas generally originate with some other character; if it’s essential for the focus character to come up with something, it always comes from some vine around his head, or some magic smart-pills, or a ring squeezing his finger, or the like. It may even come from the character’s brain, but in that case, the brain is always treated as some sort of bizarre entity separate from the character.