Oh piers anthony no

Some of you will remember the badly written books by John Ringo a couple of years ago, covered by a little blog on Livejournal that used the words “OH JOHN RINGO NO” each time a horrible passage was transcribed onto the site. The same site has since covered a bit of Piers Anthony, an author with a terrifically bad reputation whom I’ve had the fortune of never reading.

I always knew he was a skeevy motherfucker, but I never thought his writing would be this bad, though I’m sure Angie Gallant’s read a few of them.

Some of you folks may recall that a while ago I mentioned that the curious thing about Piers Anthony, to me, is that while people often dump on Anthony for being weird, skeevy, disturbing, and that sort of thing, nobody doing so ever mentions the stuff that I find to be really disturbing. (And remember, when we say “Piers Anthony” we’re talking about the guy who wrote protoplasmic sex scenes and a story with a dude boinking a mentally retarded woman who was hooked up to a milking machine.) This is odd as hell, because I remember glancing at the book when it first came out, doing a massive double-take on reading that passage, and thinking, “Holy dogshit, this’ll get him run out of town on a rail.” Curiously, that never happened.

I’m referring to TATHAM MOUND, in which Piers Anthony’s hero boinks a ten-year-old girl, using honey for lube.

Thereafter he had the favors of many maidens, some quite young. In the Castile tribe a girl was not supposed to indulge in sexual activity until she was married, which could be some winters after she was fully developed. Here she was free to do it the moment her breasts formed, or even somewhat before, if she felt inclined. Already he had learned enough to know that age was not the criterion; the will of the maiden was. A man could not force a woman, unless he was married to her; he could only do what she wished. Among them was one who seemed to be hardly ten winters old, and her body was not yet developed. She had no prior experience. But she desired the favor of the handsome visitor, and he was obliged to render it. She alone came to him purely for love; she was smitten with him, and afraid he would depart before she grew old enough to attract him, so she came now. It was his first conquest of a genuinely inexperienced girl, and he had the wit to proceed with caution, so that she would not be hurt. In fact, he moved so slowly that she grabbed his penis impatiently and crammed it into her cleft, which was overflowing with honey. In her naïveté she had used too much. Honey squeezed out and got all over everything, but it did make the penetration easier. He was afraid that it was hurting her even so, but she seemed not to care. Everything was clumsy. Evidently he succeeded in initiating her appropriately, despite his misgivings, for the following evening Mouse Pelt returned, and expressed her pleasure with him in a most thoroughgoing manner. What a difference experience made!

AUUUUUUGGGGGHHHHHHHHHH. OH PIERS ANTHONY NO.

How does this stuff even get published?

WTF. 5

Mouse Pelt? wtf

I imagine mentioning this to Angie would be something like going up to someone else and saying, “Hey, did you ever hear of this guy, Jerry Lee Lewis? He was kind of wierd.”

Bwahahahaha!

According to his website he also wrote a piece of erotic fantasy entitled “The Magic Fart.”

Awesome. I’ve never read any of his books, but it was only because I’d heard he was a mediocre writer. I hadn’t heard a thing about this!

As a kid I belonged to the science fiction book club. I had some of his books which I got for free. My adult self is glad I never read any of them. I feel like I cheated my dirty-minded kid self. Or saved him, based on that passage.

Anthony has written so much stuff that I’m sure some of this gets overlooked. Outside of the Xanth series, anyway.

Besides, if this example is so bad, how do you rate the rape in the first Thomas Covenant book?

His stuff isn’t bad for 12 year olds. The Xanth stuff was great when I was a kid. Smart and weird and a little sexy. The first 5 were great, and after that they got terrible.

Honey as lube would also most likely result in all sorts of funky infections for Mouse Pelt. Seriously, WTF?

MORE LIKE PISS ANTHONY AMIRITE.

When you’re a 12 year old boy, you’re not so bothered by the pedophilia (this isn’t a slander; Firefly has an explicit, nearly authorial-voice, defense of pedophilia), because you are 12 and you are interested in the sex, so hey. As an adult, it’s really goddamn creepy.

I read the Xanth books when I was twelve as well and agree with DoomMunky and mkozlows. Couple of the other series were interesting (at the time) but not as fun. Doubt I could stomach any of it today and have avoided recommending or mentioning any of it to my daughter.

He visited Dark Carnival Books once in the 80s (Berkeley). I found out he would be there at the last minute and I had brought nothing with me for him to sign. Most of what they had on the shelf was stuff I’d read already (didn’t occur to me until later that it’s OK to own a second, signed copy of something) so I grabbed something random that I’d never heard of, Steppe. I will never forget the look of utter disapointment and disgust that he wore when I handed that piece of crap to him, and he said “You want me to sign this??”.

Well, I can sorta see that. When I was 14, I met a 14-year old Swiss girl in Florida, who was naturally gifted with a cup size that predicted multiple trips to the chiropractor prior to her 23rd birthday. No one would think twice of me lusting of her then.

But today, the same girl? Perfectly normal. (She aged too, you twits.)

I read a couple of the Xanth books when I was a young teen. I stopped reading him when I got to the Bio of a Space Tyrant series. I seem to remember the main character having sex or wanting to have sex with his sister. That was enough for me.

To quote The Big Lebowski, “Eight year olds, dude.”

To be fair to John Ringo, his replies to the blogger pretty much admitted that the book was terrible, he had never intended to publish it much less under his own name, and that all of her criticisms are spot-on.

Ringo is actually one of my favorite authors-as-person. It’s a shame that he’s been pigeon-holed by his own success into writing the same kind of book over and over again, because the book that I felt was his best ever was also his worst selling.

…which was?

Firefly (origin of the above mentioned “protoplasmic sex scenes”) broke me of the Piers habit in my late teens. I gather they later made a short-lived TV show out of that one.