Piers Anthony: Miscellaneous Notes twenty-five years later
One of my brothers wrote me today that Piers Anthony has come out with a new addition to the Bio of a Space Tyrant series. Wow. I have not read the first five in so many years I would not remember much. I am still a little freaked out by the combination of aberrant sex (kissing scars, the possibility of incest with his sister, sex with the disabled, sex with a retarded girl) and pedestrian writing. It's a weird combination. Usually writers who write about aberrant sex are either very good (e.g. Pauline Reage) or very sickening (e.g Peter Sotos, a disgusting 'man' whose murder would make me laugh). But to be a bland writer like Piers and write about aberrant sex is rather disturbing. I guess Ann Rice/ A. N. Roquelaure did that OK, though.
Having great (but not uncritical) sympathy with the Mexicans immigrating into the US, I liked the analogy with the USA but it was quite a bit too obvious. Not subtle at all which makes me think he is writing for a mass audience of functional illiterates who cannot unlock a metaphor or simile without the author making it obvious.
The problem with Piers is that he is either not a careful writer or not a skilled one -- or both. His early stuff was interesting and exhibited craft, care, thought, and some skill. I still think the Battle Circle trilogy (Sos the Rope, Var the Stick, Neq the Sword) was quite good: the first one was even excellent and very thought-provoking. The third one started to lag when Piers allowed himself to indulge in surrealism with a scene in a forest in which people were hallucinating. His surrealist bent has never pleased much. The prissy ending sucked too.
The Xanth books were complete crap. They came out fast and furious and they only got worse as time went by and Piers knew he could almost literally shit into a typewriter and it would sell millions. The puns were horrible. The books were suited only for an adolescent or child who had finished the Oz books and the Hardy Boys and wasn't quite ready for Steven King but was starting to notice girls, and all the sex in these books is G-rated and suitably adolescent for that audience.
The Omnivore/Orn/Ox trilogy was thought-provoking and better-written than most; the first with the Agent Subble was quite good. The life of the agents after their missions, in which they are permitted to relax but their memories are completely wiped of what they did, was poetically thought-provoking; the massive fiery apocalypse at the end of Omnivore impressed me and surprised me. Piers drew fairly well his trio of protagonists. Poor little Cal, limited to drink human blood because of an undescribed privation endured in his mysterious past. We all loved Aquilon but needed to know why her smile was so awful (a wonderful conceit, that). Veg was boring; only his vegetarianism made him different from your average 1970s American Dork.
The Proton/Phaze books ("Apprentice Adept" -- what a stupid series title) were half good. But then the newness wore off. There is a planet where the slaves are allowed to play something called the Game in their free time, a sport or pastime which is so cool that people voluntarily enslave themselves to play it. The mechanics of the Game are delineated imaginatively. All of that was interesting. But when Stile, the protagonist, finds a portal to another planet, full of unicorns and wizards and gay crap like that, the stories go WAY downhill.
The book Mute had good notes but suffered from lengthiness and self-indulgence; it was clearly written before Piers realized that he needed to write fast. There was a remarkably sick counterfactual future scene that still disturbs me. The way the protagonists communicated with Morse code by flexing their pubic muscles while fucking was amusing -- they could not speak aloud because of transmitters everywhere.
I think some of Piers' most striking work was in Harlan Ellison's edited volume that perhaps was called Dangerous Visions. An excellent defense of vegetarianism appeared in that book in the form of a sci-fi story. Also unforgettable was a fine though repellent story about a society (on an alien planet) which makes those who seek to rise to its governance endure years of (graphically. lovingly described) torture to prove their resolve and spirit, and the Earth guy who tries to be an Earth ambassador to the planet sees the hoops he will have to jump through in order to be respected, jumps through them, and then decides at the end that he prefers the value system of the torture society to that of Earth. It made you think.
But those were kind of few and far between compared to the vast mediocrity of his work and repetitive crap with giants and elves and all that.
So in view of all that (and of my own massive reading load in Latin and ancient Greek) I don't know if I would read the new Hope Hubris book, but I will be curious to see if Anthony has reformed his lazy ways somehow. Or perhaps he will outlame himself and put his Mexican immigrant politician protagonist on a magical world with faeries and goblins. Perhaps someone (who is critical of Anthony) will tell me.
Having great (but not uncritical) sympathy with the Mexicans immigrating into the US, I liked the analogy with the USA but it was quite a bit too obvious. Not subtle at all which makes me think he is writing for a mass audience of functional illiterates who cannot unlock a metaphor or simile without the author making it obvious.
The problem with Piers is that he is either not a careful writer or not a skilled one -- or both. His early stuff was interesting and exhibited craft, care, thought, and some skill. I still think the Battle Circle trilogy (Sos the Rope, Var the Stick, Neq the Sword) was quite good: the first one was even excellent and very thought-provoking. The third one started to lag when Piers allowed himself to indulge in surrealism with a scene in a forest in which people were hallucinating. His surrealist bent has never pleased much. The prissy ending sucked too.
The Xanth books were complete crap. They came out fast and furious and they only got worse as time went by and Piers knew he could almost literally shit into a typewriter and it would sell millions. The puns were horrible. The books were suited only for an adolescent or child who had finished the Oz books and the Hardy Boys and wasn't quite ready for Steven King but was starting to notice girls, and all the sex in these books is G-rated and suitably adolescent for that audience.
The Omnivore/Orn/Ox trilogy was thought-provoking and better-written than most; the first with the Agent Subble was quite good. The life of the agents after their missions, in which they are permitted to relax but their memories are completely wiped of what they did, was poetically thought-provoking; the massive fiery apocalypse at the end of Omnivore impressed me and surprised me. Piers drew fairly well his trio of protagonists. Poor little Cal, limited to drink human blood because of an undescribed privation endured in his mysterious past. We all loved Aquilon but needed to know why her smile was so awful (a wonderful conceit, that). Veg was boring; only his vegetarianism made him different from your average 1970s American Dork.
The Proton/Phaze books ("Apprentice Adept" -- what a stupid series title) were half good. But then the newness wore off. There is a planet where the slaves are allowed to play something called the Game in their free time, a sport or pastime which is so cool that people voluntarily enslave themselves to play it. The mechanics of the Game are delineated imaginatively. All of that was interesting. But when Stile, the protagonist, finds a portal to another planet, full of unicorns and wizards and gay crap like that, the stories go WAY downhill.
The book Mute had good notes but suffered from lengthiness and self-indulgence; it was clearly written before Piers realized that he needed to write fast. There was a remarkably sick counterfactual future scene that still disturbs me. The way the protagonists communicated with Morse code by flexing their pubic muscles while fucking was amusing -- they could not speak aloud because of transmitters everywhere.
I think some of Piers' most striking work was in Harlan Ellison's edited volume that perhaps was called Dangerous Visions. An excellent defense of vegetarianism appeared in that book in the form of a sci-fi story. Also unforgettable was a fine though repellent story about a society (on an alien planet) which makes those who seek to rise to its governance endure years of (graphically. lovingly described) torture to prove their resolve and spirit, and the Earth guy who tries to be an Earth ambassador to the planet sees the hoops he will have to jump through in order to be respected, jumps through them, and then decides at the end that he prefers the value system of the torture society to that of Earth. It made you think.
But those were kind of few and far between compared to the vast mediocrity of his work and repetitive crap with giants and elves and all that.
So in view of all that (and of my own massive reading load in Latin and ancient Greek) I don't know if I would read the new Hope Hubris book, but I will be curious to see if Anthony has reformed his lazy ways somehow. Or perhaps he will outlame himself and put his Mexican immigrant politician protagonist on a magical world with faeries and goblins. Perhaps someone (who is critical of Anthony) will tell me.
posted by Timo-t at 12:52 PM
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