Oh piers anthony no

Books, comics, TV, music
81

Is that the one where the main character is an ambassador to a rather unusual culture? If that’s it, I remember too many specifics of that story 20+ years later.
Anthology really skeeved me out. I was young and was a big fan of Anthony with the early Xanth books and I enjoyed the first 3 blue Adept and when On a Pale Horse came out.

These were all pretty creative worlds and fun reads. Then I read Anthology and was a bit freaked out.

I stopped reading Anthony for years but I still have some of the first few Xanth books that are fun for a quick, brain dead read.

82

You guys completely surpassed my exposure to skeevy sci fi as children. I think the worst i read was one of those Robotech novels where some male character kept hitting on his neice or cousin, i can’t remember which. I do remember hiding under the bed when reading it because i knew it was wrong then!

83

The early Xanth books were my introduction to fantasy novels as a kid, but I think I dropped the series after… Man from Mundania, I believe? Once the internal continuity started to completely break down and become inconsistent.

In retrospect, a LOT of Anthony’s work just doesn’t hold up, even aside from the creepy sex stuff. On A Pale Horse was great but the rest of the Incarnations books were a comparative letdown. Of all his books, I thought the Battle Circle novella trilogy was a great example of worldbuilding but had a horrible execution, and that Macroscope was one of the few “hard sci-fi” books I actually liked, but the plot lost me multiple times.

Then I came across Firefly and Tatham Mound and even as an overly-hormonal teenager who’d watch scrambled cable in the hopes of seeing a blurry nipple in between distorted static, I thought “Okay, this is way too creepy for me.”

John Ringo is at least aware of his horribleness and is willing to laugh at it. Piers Anthony takes himself WAY too fucking seriously, and doesn’t have the chops to back up that kind of hubris.

84

Ah, the book where Eddings and his wife figure out Ctrl-C and Ctrl-V.

85

That’s a plot.

KG

86

Like many here, I read some of the Xanth series at a young age. I recall being quite entranced by A Spell for Chameleon. The series steadily went downhill in quality and I think the last book of the series I bothered reading was Dragon on a Pedestal. I also though On a Pale Horse had good concept, and was good read. I read the rest of the series, but they weren’t really that good either.

After that, I pretty much gave up on Piers Anthony. A friend recommended Macroscope. I don’t remember a darned thing about that book aide from being bored by it.

Later on, I read about his skeeviness which is offputting. Combined with a lack of enjoyment with most of his books meant I never bothered reading any of his other material.

87

Piers Anthony at his best (the first volume of Xanth, or Incarnations of Immortality, say) is like Axe Cop or Silver Age comic books – really fucking inventive and lots of fun, but without a lot of traditional literary virtues.

Piers Anthony at his worst, of course, is much worse.

88

Eddings’ problem was that he kept writing the same books and characters, over and over again.

For all that, the original five Belgariad books were a pretty good read. Even the sixth, Guardians of the West might be deemed enjoyable.

Books 7-10 were the original series, just re-written over again. He then went on to do the same thing with the other series he subsequently wrote (or so I heard - I think I read one-half of the first book in the Elenium and said “Enough: I’ve read this before!”).

For all that, the original Belgariad was pretty entertaining fantasy. I have no trouble recommending them to people - especially to relatively younger readers. Problem was - those five books were all that Eddings had to give. After that, he ended up just writing a pastiche of the Belgariad - time after time.

As for Piers…well. I read the Xanth series in the early 80s. Tarot, The Apprentie Adept, and a few other earlier series from the 60s and 70s which were far less “commercial” as I recall. In one story, I recall that he wrote some wierd alien sex scene where this species had sex by rotating a ball between them with their lower musculature. It was pretty odd.

At a younger age, Piers seemed entertaining enough and the first few Immortals series had their moments too.

Bio of a Space Tyrant in the mid-80s was my permanent parting of the ways with Piers Anthony. It wasn’t the sex thing at the end with the girl. That was tame and imo, depicting a sex scene with a sexually mature adolescent is a very different matter than depicting it with a pre-pubescent child. (At least - my recollection was the girl in Bio was 14 or 15 - something like that). Point is, one story is clearly pedophilia while the other is not. (Sorry to American posters but the world doesn’t necessarily share your squick factor on depicting teenaged sex as being “inherently wrong”).

No. What got to me was the simplistic Right-wing political allegory that runs throughout Bio of a Space Tyrant. It was so ham-fisted that I realized (I was about 19 or 20 at the time) that this author was intended for adolescents - not adults.

That was the end of me and Piers Anthony. Never read another book of his and never will.

Now - all this stuff about sex with ten year olds and six year olds is, admittedly, quite creepy.

89

Apart from all the examples others have cited, two bits I remember from his Space Tyrant series:

  1. The protagonist is supposed to beat and rape his Space Pirate Fiance because it’s the Way of the Traditional Space Pirate Courtship; but he’s so uncomfortable with the rape part (even though everyone tells him it’s just their way and his fiance is totally expecting it so that makes it OK) that he just beats her then gets her to beg him to rape her because she wants him so bad - because hey, then it’s not non-consensual, right?

  2. The protagonist’s teenage ward - and best friend to his daughter - falls in love with him and seduces him through some virtual-reality exchange thing, but it’s totally OK for them to have sex in real life because she made the first move and it’s not like he’s a responsible adult who should know better than to have sex with a minor half his age, amirite? There’s even a scene where the protagonist’s daughter is horrified and tries to dissuade her friend, but she convinces her that no really she does love him so it’s OK and eventually the daughter relents.

And frankly, everyone else makes it sounds like that’s his G-rated material.

I’d ask for examples, but I don’t want what little fondness I still have for his stuff from the `80s to be completely destroyed. :-(

90

I remember the retarded woman with no tongue whose vagina was so loose from getting fucked by a massively endowed retarded man-stud that he couldn’t get any friction fucking her, but none of these other stories from Anthonology you guys are alluding to. Maybe it was in another book too? Can someone please quit being coy and just post a synopsis of On The Uses of Torture? This thread is already not for the squeemish.

It’s amazing to me how little I remember of any of this. I know I read a ton of Xanth books and the Mode series and Battle Circle, but I honestly can’t recall anything about them. Except, obviously, for the story about the human cow. That was fucked up enough to be burned into my memory apparently.

91

Briefly, a sadist prison guard gets made an ambassador to a planet where all diplomatic relations are conducted by torture. The rest of the story involves increasingly graphic and horrible depictions of torture, and after enduring so much torture that like 3/4 of his body is cut away, ends up being the ruler of the planet or something.

92

Every duplicative part of the body was destroyed…ie 1 eye, 5 fingers, 1 hand, lung, testicle, etc. And there were 5 different ways of doing it…crushing, flaying, animals, burning and I thankfully forgot the 5th.

And just to complete the charm, the guard’s girlfriend accompanies him and he has her subjected to just a bit of torture at the end b/c that’s the way things are done.

93

I’m getting flashbacks to Terry Goodkind.

Thanks though.

94

I had a response to this, but it was just too wrong to really post.

95

Sweet merciful crap, the human cows. I had suppressed the memory of reading Anthonology, but now it’s back. Thanks guys. Thanks a whole fucking bunch.

96

I’m really glad I missed out on all the Piers Anthony stuff when I was a kid. The worst I ever read were the non-explicit BDSM scenes in the Wheel of Time books, which is extremely light fare in comparison to any of this.

97

Yeah, I haven’t read anything by Piers Anthony, and it doesn’t look like I’ll be starting to now.

98

Same. I was always scared by the sheer amount of books with his name at Waldenbooks. That apparently has saved my soul.

99

I read the first 5 Xanth books, and after #3 each one gets progressively more and more sexually creepy. I did like A Spell For Chameleon and The Source of Magic quite a bit though. It utterly relieves me that I stopped reading when I did.

100

Just went to his Wiki and saw that his daughter Penny (I remember him dedicating much of Xanth to her) died in 2009 from surgical complications from melanoma.

Since it has been 30+ years since I first read Spell for Chameleon, I ventured to the Wiki entry for it and found this:

Chameleon’s intelligence and beauty vary inversely according to the time of the month and she has been unable to find a man who is willing to be with her through all 3 phases

Wow.