TL; DR
Even though I didn’t read your post because it would take too much work, I still wanted to make a comment that I would probably disagree with what you said. If I read your post. Which I didn’t.
That article more or less describes my attitude. When I discovered the Xanth novels in the early 80s I devoured and loved them. Now I kind of look back at them and wince.
Yeah, I get the impression it’s a pretty universal reaction. It isn’t even just the casual misogyny and possible pedophilia. I also think children have a much higher tolerance for puns, since it’s usually more of a struggle to understand them and thus they’re generally more rewarding, instead of just groan-inducing.
Not being terribly familiar with Florida at that age, I spent a lot of time with the first couple books pouring over maps to try and understand all the location-based puns. I think the 12-year-old me probably missed a lot of the other ones.
Not sure if this was linked in the thread already, but there was a great bit on NPR about a kid that ran away from a broken home to visit Piers Anthony. No, he wasn’t Michael Jacksoned, it was all rather sweet.
I didn’t read it all, just enough to figure out it was doctrinaire RCG grad-school garbage. At which point it’s polite to leave the guy in privacy to fap in peace.
Roman Catholic Guido?
Race Class Gender
I know the sort of thing you’re talking about, and I don’t think that’s a fair characterization of this particular blog post at all. The thing is, I remember A Spell for Chameleon well enough to realize he’s not wrong. There’s a difference between twisting a book to fit a “hidden agenda” that isn’t there, and re-reading a book as an adult and realizing there’s lots of nasty crap that’s really there that flew over your head as a teenager.
Bink does behave like a 14 year old, which fit right in with me when I was reading it at 14. There is a lot of puerile sexual stuff in the book, which again I approved of when I was a 14 year old boy who was desperately fascinated by sex. Chameleon is a Jack Chalker type sex slave fantasy when she’s in her pretty-but-dumb phase.
Wow … he comes off as almost not an absolute creep, lol.
At a certain point kids realize it’s the same book over and over. Ack, magician Humphrey!
Are you going to tell us why we should click that link, or do we just have to guess?
Sorry, there’s a lot to unpack with that link.
First of all, Karl Shuker is a well-known and well-respected zoologist/cryptozoologist. I know, cryptozoology has a reputation for being kinda “woo” or whatever, but anyone who’s even remotely interested in it knows about Shuker. I have many of his books and if nothing else, they make coffee table books. Even if you don’t buy into the plausibility of the subject matter, the art is amazing and he’s a good writer and researcher. Cryptozoology and Fortean phenomena is a huge subject on its own, and it’s fun to explore IMO. Big cats is very popular with the cryptozoology crowd these days.
The other big thing to unpack, which should be fairly obvious to anyone familiar with this thread, is that Piers Anthony a veritable leper, and it’s a huge mistake (IMO) to prop up any of his books without at least some sort of qualifier that acknowleges this. My hope is that Shuker was simply ignorant of all the baggage associated with the whole Piers Anthony thing, and merely remembers enjoying the Xanth books as a kid. I’m guessing Shuker just isn’t a big Fantasy literature reader and has no idea.
Anyway the article is a good read. Totally safe to click on.