6. Piers Anthony Discussion

[Philip Overby]

Number 6 on the Top 100 List is Piers Anthony. Almost any reader of fantasy at least knows the name if they've not yet read him. His Xanth books are probably his best known work, but he's been so prolific over the years, it's almost impossible to keep up with everything he's done. One nice comment I got once was "Your writing is very similar to Piers Antony." Having never read Anthony, I still thought this was quite a compliment. But then I realized that in some critique circles, saying "This is like..." is just a cop-out way to not have to elaborate further.

That said, I have never read a full Anthony novel. Which is pretty sad considering what I've read of him I liked. He seems to have sort of a quirky imagination, which is something I value greatly. I downloaded a sample of the first Xanth book a while back and I hope to get back into it whenever I get around to reading the 100 things I have in my queue.

Anyone who has actually read a full Anthony book or story have any comments?

 

[Ireth]

I'm a fan of his Xanth books, especially Night Mare. The whole series basically runs on puns, some of them funnier than others. Not quite the level of funny as Pratchett, but still pretty good. Sadly I've only read some of the earliest books, not the latest ones. I hear the quality has rather deteriorated over time, but I can't judge them for myself.

 

[Feo Takahari]

In his prime, Anthony was an eccentric genius, sometimes uncomfortably so. He created strange and fascinating new worlds, and populated them with characters who were intended to be likeable, but often did things that seemed completely bizarre. As best I can tell, the key to it seems to be that he assumed most (all?) men were as lustful and perverted as himself, constantly struggling to control deviant urges--to compensate, he gave his heroic men rigid codes of honor that they never deviated from, and they did all sorts of strange things to avoid breaking these codes. (For instance, mind control was perfectly acceptable if the alternative was breaking a promise, because good men never break promises.) His women, not being lustful and perverted, were free to act like normal people, but he seemed to have been a touch sexist in his early work (not so much his later stories), so it's six of one and half a dozen of the other. (If you ever want to see just how warped a story can get when a great author is left unedited, and you don't feel like going OH JOHN RINGO NO, look up Anthony's Firefly sometime.)

It's a bit of a moot point today, now that Xanth has, essentially, stopped being a story series. All Anthony does is take reader submissions for puns and create a thin pretense of a plot to string them together. The infuriating part is that he still has some really, really clever ideas that he uses in the framework, sometimes things I wish I could have come up with myself--he just doesn't develop them or do anything interesting with them, beyond using them to set up more puns.

(I'm saying all this as someone who actually liked his early books--just the fact that I made it through Firefly should be proof enough that I used to be a fan. He's #2 on my list of good authors whom I feel let down by these days, behind Orson Scott Card and ahead of R.A. Salvatore.)

 

[ecdavis]

I'm a big fan of the Xanth novels and there are a bunch of them. I read probably 14 of them before I moved away from Fantasy books in the early 1990s. As Ireth said, puns are the name of the game here. For example, A Spelling Bee is a bee that spells. It sounds rather silly, but they are lighthearted and fun. Don't expect High Fantasy from these series, he does a lot of tongue-in-cheek things here. Anthony lives in Florida and Xanth looks like -- you guessed it-- Florida.

As for the content of the books, I've not read any of the later ones, but the earlier ones are very well done. 'A Spell for Chameleon' is the first in the series and one of the best. 'Ogre Ogre' and 'Night Mare' are very good. 'The Source of Magic' gives you a view of why this place exists -- I won't spoil the source, but if has a very dark source.

In Xanth, every being has one thing they can do that is magical. The sky is the limit here, but everyone has a magic talent. They get into all sorts of crazy adventures, and the way the world is set up, you really never know where the stories are going.

Each book is more or less independent of the others in the series, though some characters reappear in multiple books and it is probably best to start at the beginning.

I'd recommend the series just for some fun reading that really is pure fantasy. Again, don't expect High Fantasy here, it is almost a fairy tale for adults. If you liked the 'Shrek' movies , you'll like the books, as they are rather similar in the 'feel' of the world.

 

[brokethepoint]

I really enjoyed reading Piers Anthony when I was young, haven't read him in a long time.

Xanth was always fun. When I was reading him I thought the best book was On a Pale Horse from his Incarnations of Immortality series.

 

[Steerpike]

I agree that Piers Anthony has done some very interesting work, particularly early on. I enjoyed the first number of Xanth books, and after that I felt the quality started to drop off. Among my favorites from that series are A Spell for Chameleon, The Source of Magic, Nightmare, Ogre Ogre, Centaur Aisla, Castle Roogna, and anything with Grundy in it. Probably missed a few as well. Check out some of his pre-Xanth work to find more diverse offerings, including stories about individuals with psionic powers.

 

[faze]

The early Xanth books were great at the time, having re-visited them as an older reader I find them to actually be quite weak and lazy. I tried some of his other efforts and found them difficult to read and overbearingly constructed and heavy handed in the delivery.

Simon