Fiction is fiction. I cannot subscribe to the view you folks are presenting here that when an author writes a fictional account about rape, it is because he or she is getting moist at the thought.
Thems fighting words, son.
I’m very unfamiliar with most of Anthony’s work, so maybe someone can fill me in. Does he actually write stories in which rape is glamorized, or does he just play with the idea that it’d be alright for the age of consent for a member of an alien race to be perhaps lower than 18?
It’s certainly not a requirement that they’re transcribing their own rape fantasies, but let’s not be naive and suggest that none of them do that.
Princess of Wands. It’s a lot less bad than any of the other books he’s been primary writer on.
Not that this is a ringing endorsement. But he is worlds above the level of Piers Anthony. Or 90% of the best-selling authors out there, frankly.
I enjoyed the Xanth stuff a lot when I was 12ish.
Interesting concepts, lots of sexuality, but no graphic sex (that I remember).
The rest of it (MacroScope was the only one I remember at all) was not very interesting, even if the sex was more explicit (I do not remember any pedo stuff.)
Normally I’d go along with that sentiment however when the author revisits that theme over and over again, you have to start wondering. Piers Anthony’s heroines are pretty much all lust-crazed nymphomaniacs who get naked at every opportunity. I haven’t read any of his stuff since I was a teenager but I do still remember that.
I liked “On A Pale Horse” back when I was in school, but the series got pretty stupid.
Oh good god, that series got powerful dumb. The last book managed to be more insipid than Dogma in its portrayal of a Christian-ish God figure.
Book 6 has some pretty hot succubus-on-priest rape, though.
Why, you ask, did I read all seven of those novels? Turns out I was 14, and succubi, man!
Same here, most of the novels were dumb, but I remember the first one more fondly than any of the others.
Didn’t the first one have more of a cyberpunky kind of a vibe to it? That was pretty sweet.
Oh man, remembering that series now. The War book - Wielding a Red Sword, IIRC - features an Indian prince who stutters and so he sings everything. Also, he has some sex probably? Aaaaaagh.
If you guys are really excited about getting a glimpse of the whole iceberg, you might want to look into the reasons why Wielding a Red Sword took so long to get published.
Sure did, one of the reasons it was the best of the bunch, IMO.
Link, noob.
link?
I used to be a big Xanth fan, as well as being into the Incarnations of Immortality books. I will say that…um, Killobyte, I think it was, first introduced me to what sort of horrible shit diabetes entailed. So that’s something.
I read like three pages of his autobiography (describing, in detail, his childhood love of enemas…these being the first three pages…) and, yeah, never again.
Totally not linking anything about it because I don’t know where to look, I don’t want to know where to look, I don’t want to know if anything I ever heard about it was true, don’t want, don’t want.
I prefer to imagine that he’s not as creepy as he appears to be. If I’m wrong, I don’t want to know.
I remember when I was about 14 or 15 and read one of his books, and it totally sucked. Then I think I read another one, and it sucked too. So then I reread part of a book I had previously really enjoyed, and it was then that I realized all his books had always sucked, and I was just too young to realize it.
Years later I got in an internet sissy fight with some woman who believed outgrowing Piers Anthony was a bad thing.
Unfortunately, I grew up too soon and never got to read Firefly. I tried, but it was too late and I had to quit.
I find it astonishing that I am here actually defending Anthony to some extent, but there it is.
Anthony’s work for the past couple of decades, at least, has been dreck. Pure total dreck. However, some of his earliest work is actually not bad science fiction. Some intriguing ideas, some not terrible writing. The Tarot trilogy isn’t bad, the Ox/Orn/Omnivore series, Macroscope isn’t bad, a few other early works. Even the first two or three Xanth novels showed some creativity in the same vein as, say, the Myth series.
But then Anthony got what was by all accounts an almost deadly serious case of cat scratch fever. It really destroyed him physically, and imo his writing was never the same. There wasn’t even a decline, it was more like driving off a cliff. He was never brilliant, but he was at least an enjoyable read, but then he went to total shit. And he’s been there ever since. Its just a crying shame people keep buying it and reading it.
Yeah, no kidding. But when you write, in multiple books (it’s in Firefly and the Space Tyrant stuff, and presumably also the Magic Fart), about how great pedophilia is, and you put stuff in the author’s note at the end that is pedophile-sympathetic, well, this isn’t just a character in a book.