Possibly. I don’t remember much about it other than the game selection system (because I thought it was cool) and the fact that they competed naked, for some reason.
What’s wrong with that?
Well, if I remember correctly, it was presented in a pretty-darn-close-to-creepy way. After reading everything else in this thread, and remembering all the little details in the first 8 or so Xanth books I read as a kid, it kind of pushes it over into definitely creepy. The man is projecting his desire to objectify women as receptacles of his lust. I don’t recall the details, but that really is about how it was presented and I picked up on it at 12 or whatever. It’s not like the robot was some sort of mechanical toy; she was presented as pretty much a full person, a partner who the protagonist relied on to succeed (you know, like maybe a spouse), except since she wasn’t actually a person wink wink it was ok for the protagonist to use her however and whenever he wanted.
I remember being in third grade and visiting the library for our annual ‘this is how you look up books’ tour and they ended up moving a couple little spinning racks into our classroom so that we could get the hang of putting things back in order, which they were apparently very concerned about. And a couple of books that got slipped in there by the 8th graders were definitely not supposed to be there. I distinctly remember ‘The Color of Her Panties’ as the title to one of them, which was completely scandalous to us. Only mean boys would try to find out what color your underwear was and here was a guy who wrote a book about it! Eileen Bell, a very vocal little girl, declared it ‘trash’ and the teacher ended up removing it from the classroom. But the fact that Piers Anthony writes ‘trash’ has stuck with me and I never bothered picking up any of his books.
I should send Eileen a thank you!
Look man, a lot of the stuff in this thread and his books is pretty gross, but building a sex robot is a dream as old as time itself, and it was arguably the most important factor leading to the advent of civilization. I’m not about to knock the man for speaking to this universal, primal drive.
… futuristic choggle pants? Piers was ahead of his time.
I read a few of the Xanth and Incarnations books when I was probably 9 or 10. I liked them back then and didn’t notice anything creepy about them, but hey, I was a kid. Kind of scared to go back and re-read them after seeing all of the posts in this thread. Sadly, in my experience, a lot of the books that were great for us as kids just don’t hold up outside of the nostalgia factor. Llyold Alexander and David Eddings were some of my early favorites, I tried to read some of the a few years back and it just wasn’t the same. Gurgi was still annoying though.
Eilonwy is still awesome, you shut your face.
I remember discovering the Bio Of A Space Tyrant books in my junior high school’s library and wound up reading them all since, well, there wasn’t anything else quite like them in the library (except maybe Heinlein and the book with the nekkid illustrations (Number Of The Beast?)).
Damned if I can remember any of it today though, and I don’t think I really want to now.
Hey, I only said Gurgi was annoying :)
I read a lot of the Xanth novels when I was around 12, they started to get progressively worse as I got older. I remember my favorite was “Ogre,Ogre”, but looking back on it now, from what I can remember, there was probably some ickiness going on with the Ogre and Tandy. Read the first Bio book, all of the Apprentice Adept series, Anthonology…damn, except for Anthonology I seem to have ignored or not noticed a lot of his creepiness.
I definitely recalled there being a lot of sexual content in his books, but as a horny adolescent that was just fine by me. Any creep factor was not registering.
I’ll play devil’s advocate here. Y’all are pretty outraged by stuff you had to have pointed out to you, because you never read these books, or are remembering stuff from books you read voluntarily. Anthony didn’t somehow reverse rape your childhoods, or whatever.
The main appeal of the Xanth books was not the sex. 90% of the fun is his depiction of a land where everything (trees, rocks, houses ect) is sentient and magic. If they were pedo/rape tracts it must have gone over my acne scarred head.
Honestly, if 13 year old nerdy me knew of the existence of truly dirty sci fi, I would have sought it out like a smut seeking missile. I did come across a 2nd hand copy of Philip Jose Farmer’s Image of the Beast which is feeeeeeeeaallllllttttty, much to my delight.
I’m sure Farmer was trying to be transgressive, and, without reading them, or knowing anything about the chap, I’d bet Anthony was doing the same thing in the more extreme examples above, successful or not. Or maybe its because I went through a serious William S. Burrough’s phase, but I’m think folks are getting their panties awefully twisted over some bad fiction.
Re-read Robert E Howard or get unedited versions of H.P. Lovecraft stories and you’ll be able to find all kinds of rapey and racist unpleasantness.*
*EDIT - that went over my head as a kid, but I see now with my adult eyes. And most Lovecraft has the truly hideous racism edited out these days.
Except the hero didn’t “build a sex robot” to play with in the story. I may be misremembering, but I think he didn’t even know she was a robot til later, then once he found out, it was all about “hey now I can just do whatever I want to you!”. It’s a single piece of a puzzle to the author’s psyche, that, with all the other pieces detailed in this thread, doesn’t add up to a very healthy whole.
Yeah, I think Alexander’s stuff holds up quite well. Especially the Westmark books–I love that series.
I’ll give you that. As an adult, the fact, though, that he seems to be consistently promoting the depraved stuff, which he does and that there is a rather large customer base to continually consume it is the alarming part for me. I do not have to had read it to be alarmed by the the content. That was my only point.
BTW, I read Farmer’s Dungeon series and, no, I was not harmed by it. I have no idea if anything naughty is in it. If someone pointed to something, I would not automatically feel I had been harmed in some way, but I would still be concerned about my kids reading it. Not sure if that is fair or not, but it is my feeling at his point in my bumpy road of life. :)
But is he actually advocating? There is a difference between artist and art.
BTW, I read Farmer’s Dungeon series and, no, I was not harmed by it. I have no idea if anything naughty is in it. If someone pointed to something, I would not automatically feel I had been harmed in some way, but I would still be concerned about my kids reading it. Not sure if that is fair or not, but it is my feeling at his point in my bumpy road of life. :)
Well, you are a smarter media consumer than your parents were, and I’d bet your kid is a smarter (or will be) than you are. I would give my kid The Lion the Witch and the Wardrobe before I gave them Xanth stuff, but a discussion about some of the creepy stuff in Xanth might be even more beneficial for them in the long run.
Ahhh, OK.
Never read him and so glad I did not. What freaks me out is his how prolific he is, how he still gets published and how many reprobates must buy his books. This thread makes me feel very unclean.
Well, sometimes I head over to e.g. alt.sex.stories, and I’m astonished that the majority of the stuff there are incest stories. If you took all those out and threw out the rape stories as well, there’d be hardly any stories at all.
shrug I dunno why. I blame Leia kissing Luke in The Empire Strikes Back.
I wonder if there are any posts in this very thread where people address this point. I should click on buttons which allow me to look back at previous posts and see!
…
Or I can assume that there probably aren’t. That’s way easier. Oh well!
Rest assured Ogre, Ogre is perfectly fine and your childhood remains intact. I bought a used copy from the library book sale and there’s a kiss and then a sex scene of 1 sentence consisting of something along the lines of he thought it was even more wonderful than an ogre tantrum. Or something as equally innocuous.
There’s wasn’t much stuff in the earlier Xanth books that I picked up and I got Ogre for my sons to read someday. Same thing with Blue Adept and not stranger than any other SCIFi (granted I haven’t read that in 20 years but I’d buy the first 3 again.
I thought he did a pretty good job of a firewall between his wacky crap and his fantasy aimed at young adults. I have no idea what’s going on in Xanth these days but the earlier stuff was fine to me.
Just to reiterate, in the afterword he wrote for Firefly he explicitly advocates for adults having sex with pre-pubescent children. His rationale is that children are sexual beings and that we cause the irreparable harm by not acknowleding that BY HAVING SEX WITH THEM.