Never read that series but have read much of the “Incarnations” series and “Bio of a Space Tyrant”.
Really creeped out by “In the Barn”.
Seems a little wrong to sneer at Anthony’s “Are you thinking of this book? 'Cause that other book you mentioned doesn’t have it” answer. I don’t remember any underage sex elements in On A Pale Horse and asking him to explain/defend it is like asking Judy Blume to defend the sexuality in Superfudge. Clarifying what book the guy was asking about sorta seems like the right response.
This podcast http://idontevenownatelevision.com/a-spell-for-chameleon-w-jesse-dangerously also talks about Spell for Chameleon. Worth a listen…
IIRC, the Grim Reaper is astonished to find that a youth about to die in a burning building is in danger of an eternity of hellfire because he’s somehow accumulated so much sin; it turns out that said kid has been having sex with an older woman; Death figures the kid deserves a second chance and so saves him from the fire.
(Also, isn’t it a plot point that Luna was quote-unquote fornicating with a demon back when she was underage, because she wanted to learn black magic like her dad?)
I’m not really familiar with Slashdot Q&As, but I just looked up the one with Anthony (the link in the AV Club article didn’t work for me) and this wasn’t a chat session where the original questioner, a user named konstant, could respond. Slashdot users had submitted questions in advance and ten were chosen for Anthony to read and respond to. So suggesting that konstant, who specifically said he had recently reread On a Pale Horse, must have been thinking of a different book seems more like dodging the question than clarifying it.
The AV Club didn’t quote the portion of this Q&A that seemed the worst to me. Konstant’s question included this:
The older man in this book was actually a judge and not a priest, but otherwise this is to the best of my recollection an accurate summary of this storyline in And Eternity…a storyline which I personally found so offputting that I never read anything by Anthony again.
Anthony’s response was:
This is definitely dodging the question. Konstant didn’t say anything about the two ghosts who helped the teenaged character – a girl who ran away from home after being raped by her stepfather and was forced to support herself as a prostitute – escape from her pimp. He objected to the depiction of this girl’s later sexual relationship with a much older man, one who IIRC was serving as her guardian at the time, as being perfectly fine and healthy and only seen as “evil” because of unjust age of consent laws. That’s the “salvation” Anthony is referring to: an underage, abused former prostitute having sex with an authority figure old enough to be her father.
I’d forgotten about that.
Ironically, the “message” there seems to be that the victim in the relationship indeed shouldn’t suffer the guilt/sin/blame of it but the real answer is that I just plain forgot about it.
Yeah, I remember that one. IIRC, the in-book justification was something like “Well, she’s screwed up anyway already, nothing I do is going to make it any worse, so we might as well”.
It’s my recollection that it’s explicitly stated that since the girl isn’t a virgin (again, because she was raped by her stepfather and then forced into prostitution) then it’s not like more sex is going to hurt her.
I was only about 16 when I read this book, and even at that age I took the girl’s eagerness to have sex with the first older man in her life who didn’t abuse her as a sign that she was seriously messed up, not as evidence that she was ready for a healthy adult relationship. I had seriously expected that this storyline was heading for a resolution where the girl learned that she didn’t owe anyone sex and that it was possible for a man to care about her and want to help her even if she didn’t have sex with him, but no. The “moral” instead turned out to be that age of consent laws are wrong because they prevent old men from having sex with hot teenagers.
I’d somehow almost forgotten this, but I believe this is the same book where an adult woman is briefly transformed into a man, becomes both very aggressive and very horny, and tries to rape her friend. All this happens because the women needed to be taught a lesson about men: it’s really difficult for them to restrain themselves, and women should be grateful that most men heroically manage not to go around raping women all the time. Again, it’s my recollection that this is explicitly stated when the characters talk about what they’ve learned from this experience.
Plus, as a kid of that age, I knew girls who wanted to date at least college age dudes, and a few who actually did around that age–really popular girls, too. As an adult, I’ve encountered a lot of fans of Degrassi (the new one) who defended the teacher/student relationship.
In other words, a lot of kids don’t see it as nearly as wrong, as long a the older guy is someone they think is attractive. It’s only once you get older that you realize the huge gulf. For kids, it’s often “age discrimination” because they want to be thought of like adults.
I’ll admit to barely remembering And Eternity, given that it was just terrible all around. I struggled to finish it the first time and had no desire to ever read it again.
I am, generally, less troubled by the inclusion of such themes in the Incarnations series than I am in the Xanth novels since the Xanth novels seem skewed towards a younger demographic. This doesn’t mean that I think the Incarnation series handled them well, just that the intended readership is older. Likewise, I think Firefly was miserable and should make good people want to take a shower after reading it but I wouldn’t be opposed to my kid reading Castle Roogna just because of Firefly. I’d be less excited by Castle Roogna having a principle female character whose magical skill is “sex appeal”.