What’s the deal with Piers Anthony?

[Worm of Despite]

No, nobody (not even I) would turn the money down.

[Fist and Faith]

Foul, you should read Ayn Rand's Fountainhead. The main character is an architect, rather than a writer, but the idea is the same. This is my heart and soul. I can only do it one way - the right way. If it makes me money, wonderful. But I'm not going to compromise an inch just to make money. You've never seen anyone's sense of self, and sense of what's right, tested more. But it's not really a test for him. He doesn't question it in the slightest, or consider changing. Not for an instant.

And, since it's my very title, here's a couple quotes from it.

"A house can have integrity, just like a person," said Roark, "and just as seldom."

"In what way?"

"Well, look at it. Every piece of it is there because the house needs it - and for no other reason. You see it from here as it is inside. The rooms in which you'll live made the shape. The relation of masses was determined by the distribution of space within. The ornament was determined by the method of construction, an emphasis of the principle that makes it stand. You can see each stress, each support that meets it. Your own eyes go through a structural process when you look at the house, you can follow each step, you see it rise, you know what made it and why it stands. But you've seen buildings with columns that support nothing, with purposeless cornices, with pilasters, moldings, false arches, false windows. You've seen buildings that look as if they contained a single large hall, they have solid columns and single, solid windows six floors high. But you enter and find six stories inside. Or buildings that contain a single hall, but with a facade cut up into floor lines, band courses, tiers or windows. Do you understand the difference? Your house is made by its own needs. Those others are made by the need to impress. The determining motive of your house is in the house. The determining motive of the others is in the audience."

"Mr. Janss, when you buy an automobile, you don't want it to have rose garland about the windows, a lion on each fender and an angel sitting on the roof. Why don't you?"

"That would be silly," stated Mr. Janss.

"Why would it be silly? Now I think it would be beautiful. Besides, Louis the Fourteenth had a carriage like that and what was good enough for Louis is good enough for us. We shouldn't go in for rash innovation and we shouldn't break with tradition."

"Now you know damn well you don't believe anything of the sort!"

"I know I don't. But that's what you believe, isn't it? Now take a human body. Why wouldn't you like to see a human body with a curling tail with a crest of ostrich feathers at the end? And with ears shaped like acanthus leaves? It would be ornamental, you know, instead of the stark, bare ugliness we have now. Well, why don't you like the idea? Because it would be useless and pointless. Because the beauty of the human body is that it hasn't a single muscle which doesn't serve its purpose; that there's not a line wasted; that every detail of it fits one idea, the idea of a man and the life of a man. Will you tell me why, when it comes to a building, you don't want it to look as if it had any sense or purpose, you want to choke it with trimmings, you want to sacrifice its purpose to its envelope - not knowing even why you want that kind of an envelope? You want it to look like a hybrid beast produced by crossing the bastards of ten different species until you get a creature without guts, without heart or brain, a creature all pelt, tail, claws and feather? Why? You must tell me because I've never been able to understand it."

It's these kinds of thoughts and feelings that he is unable to ignore, and, therefore, is unable to compromise his work.

[aTOMiC]

What originally prompted me to start this conversation was a thread concerning “what books are you reading now”. Comments on numerous authors were offered but nothing about Anthony or his works. I became curious and as I navigated the site I realized there was no mention of PA at all. The first few books I read in the fantasy SF realm were: The Hobbit, Splinter of The Minds Eye, LFB/TIEW/TPTP and A Spell For Chameleon. Anthony became an instant favorite of mine. After reading the first five Xanth books I seemed to lose interest in the series and have rarely revisited those books since. Other books by PA such as Prostho Plus and The Battle Circle books (Sos The Rope, Var The Stick, Neq the Sword) were very clever and interesting stories. On that basis I hold PA up as an accomplished author. That he has taken to writing for a quick buck is irrelevant to me. If SRD suddenly began churning out novels solely to cash in on the Lord of the Rings movie craze, it wouldn’t diminish my appreciation for TCOTC. PS. I don't in any way mean to imply that Donaldson's Last Chronicles has anything in any way shape matter or form to do with the LOTR films. I just meant if SRD went nuts and started popping out stories every couple of months and...well you know what I mean.

[Ryzel]

Just for the record, my favorite Xanth book is Castle Roogna, but I cannot now remember why that was. I just remember that after reading like 20 Xanth books I eventually decided that Castle Roogna was the best of them and that the series had now become too silly to continue reading.

[[Syl]]

Heh. I think other than Chameleon, one of the best would be Crewel Lye. It was just so completely separate from the other books.

[duchess of malfi]

I think I like the Death book from Incantations of Immortality best of his stuff that I've read...Spell for Chameleon might be my favorite of the Xanth books, though i have not read all of them by any means...

[Zahir]

To answer your original question--I think a lot of us don't much care for most of his work. Me included.

[matrixman]

I read his Apprentice Adept series while in my junior high days in the early 80's. But I have forgotten most of the names, including the main character's. However, I do remember getting a kick out of the story at the time: something about a conflict between magic and technology? Our intrepid hero had to find a solution. He was given guidance by an intelligence that straddled both worlds: on the magical side, this being took the form of an all-knowing Oracle, while on the technological side, the being manifested itself as a supercomputer.

Shades of the Matrix!!

I was charmed by Anthony's ideas about how magic and technology interacted, but the story never profoundly moved me, and his writing was never anything special in my mind, even at the time. As for the foreshadowing of the Oracle: hey, we know the Wachowski Brothers absorb stuff from everything around them. Look hard enough and you'll probably swear there are references to Drool Rockworm in The Matrix movies.

Anyway, the Apprentice Adept was an entertaining romp, nothing more.

Unfortunately for Piers Anthony (yes, admittedly he has a cool name), I had begun reading in earnest The Chronicles of Thomas Covenant around the same time. Poor Anthony didn't stand a chance. As Stephen Donaldson took up permanent residence in my imagination, Anthony got evicted.

Piers Anthony had his time. I just don't take him seriously anymore...

[aTOMiC]

MM, judging from your comments I'm guessing you are probably about 2 or 3 years younger than I am. I went through about the same phase with PA when I discovered SRD. I didn't read any Adept books until years later. I started with Xanth and some of his less known works. Anthony didn't get evicted in my mind, just subordinated. I don't think I'd pick up a recent novel from PA. Like everyone here I'm ravenous for anthing by SRD. I guess that is a clear indication of the difference.
By the way. Welcome to KW!

[Tomcatter]

I have read a couple of Peirs books.

Part1 and part2 of Bio of the Space Tyrant. I found those book to be very good. Even though the events in book1 does make it very hard to continue reading. (talking about the event when the Pirate keep attacking the refugee ship).

Part 2 seems good, but sadly these are now out of print and i can not find them. Was hoping for some electronic version on the web, but no luck, does anyone know if there is any Electronic versions of books on the web?

Tomcatter

[danlo]

I did read the first half of The Blue Adept and sorta liked it and I did have a poster of Xanth on my wall for 3 months...pretty cool poster, btw...

[matrixman]

edit

[Roland of Gilead]

I must admit I haven't read all of this thread, so I apologize if I'm repeating others, but I never pass up an opportunity to voice my Piers Anthony thoughts.

At one time, I was a huge fan. Anthony's earlier works, like Chthon, Macroscope, Mute, Bio of a Space Tyrant, Battle Circle, were excellent. Imaginative, clever plotting, fascinating characters, sometimes breakthrough speculative thinking. I bought anything and everything Anthony wrote.

Then along came Xanth. Now don't get me wrong. The first couple were pretty good, and Anthony's use of puns was very amusing. Then Xanth became enormously popular and Anthony knew a goldmine when he discovered one, and he started cranking them out at breakneck speed. The result was lesser and lesser quality and more and more repetition. Then he let this negative factor slip into all of his other work, too, with the result that he fell into self-imitation and self-parody.

One day I realized I was just reading the same thing over and over again. I think the last novel of his I really enjoyed was Split Infinity. So I dropped the guy from my reading list.

Years later, I thought about trying him again. I made the mistake of reading a book he had "co-authored" with a scientist, called Spider Legs. Well, it was painfully obvious that Anthony was now just slapping his name onto others writers' fledgling efforts for a fee, because his famous genre name would help sell the books. Spider Legs was absolutely atrocious, one of the worst novels (and I use the term very loosely) I've ever had the misfortune to read. If Anthony actually wrote two paragraphs in that piece of garbage, I'm a Jedi Knight.

So I'm probably done with Anthony, which is a shame, because at his best, which perhaps is long behind him, he was a very fine author.

[aTOMiC]

Roland, I completely agree with you. Practically to the last detail. I continue to be a fan of Battle Circle in particular. After reading the 5th or 6th Xanth books I resigned myself to reading only PA books from the past. If I label myself a PA fan its because of his work from the 1960's to about 1980.

[Reisheiruhime]

I love those books!!!! As some of you might know, I'm not a fan of reading books in order. Just a few points though:

Spoiler

Plaid underwear??? For a merwoman, Mela has strange tastes. Naldo Naga must have even stranger tastes.
Centaurs. Winged centaurs. I dunno, hasn't that been done before?
One of my favourite characters is Metria Demoness.
The bit about Princess Rose going to Hell in a handbasket is pretty funny.
-All things mentioned are from The Color of Her PantiesThe title is misleading.

Observation: Why do all the covers have half-naked people on them??? I'm beginning to have to make my books wear book-covers.

[Dragonlily]

Part 2 seems good, but sadly these are now out of print and i can not find them. Was hoping for some electronic version on the web, but no luck, does anyone know if there is any Electronic versions of books on the web?

Check Amazon under "Bio of a Space Tyrant." You can see an extensive listing of the series, but I don't see any ebook versions. Looks like they are available secondhand.

I have Bio #3 POLITICIAN, which I bought in 1985 and never read. I know I read the #1 REFUGEE, and probably #2 MERCENARY, but obviously wasn't inspired with eagerness.

I've only considered one Piers Anthony book to be a keeper: ON A PALE HORSE. The only one besides that to stick in my mind was VISCOUS CIRCLE, and that partly because he said he wrote it while he was semi-out-of-his-head with cat scratch fever. It was certainly weird enough, but imaginative in a good way too.

It must be almost 20 years since I read an Anthony.

Re Orson Scott Card, I still think some of his books are written from inspiration, and others for money. Medical bills didn't seem to result in good stories, so far as I could tell. Haven't read the most recent ones, but I liked ENDER'S SHADOW very much.

In this discussion of authors writing their ideas into the ground, presumably for money, does anyone want to mention Jack Chalker? WELL OF SOULS was fantastic.

[Variol Farseer]

Foul, you should read Ayn Rand's Fountainhead. The main character is an architect, rather than a writer, but the idea is the same. This is my heart and soul. I can only do it one way - the right way. If it makes me money, wonderful. But I'm not going to compromise an inch just to make money. You've never seen anyone's sense of self, and sense of what's right, tested more. But it's not really a test for him. He doesn't question it in the slightest, or consider changing. Not for an instant.

Which is SRD's attitude exactly. He's obviously been influenced by Rand in some respects, because he very nearly quotes The Fountainhead when he talks about his aesthetic standards and writing methods. This from an interview he did in 1991 with A.A. Adams:

The ideal balance in a book is that absolutely everything is aimed like a laser at the climax of the book. Despite the length of my work, I think of myself as being a very tight writer, there is actually nothing extraneous there. It may take up narrative space but it is not extraneous. That's because I am striving always to make sure that whatever I do is leading us there. I use the analogy of architecture: the structure I am building needs justifying in that particular way: any lintel or cornice or joist or roofing slate that doesn't fit that purpose must be disposed of, which is one reason we got rid of Gilden-Fire. It violated the whole narrative integrity and it wasn't necessary.

It's the exact opposite to the Charles Dickens method, where you throw in all kinds of unnecessary details to pad out the story because you're being paid by the page. Robert Jordan is a Dickensian author; SRD is a classicist; and that, at bottom, is why I like SRD's books better than either Jordan's or Dickens'.

The unfortunate thing about writing solely for money is that you run out of things to say, and start spinning out surplus wordage like Dickens and Jordan. It hasn't stopped either of them from being enormously popular authors, but it damages their trademarks, as it were, by putting their names on an awful lot of second-rate work.

[Xar]

I think I like the Death book from Incantations of Immortality best of his stuff that I've read...

To me, the Incarnations of Immortality series was intriguing, although I have to admit that it started degenerating towards the end. "On a Pale Horse" was very likely the best, because of the way it introduced us to the Incarnations, the novelty of the idea, and the lack of complications. "Bearing an Hourglass" could have been interesting but was much damaged, in my opinion, by the whole "fake interstellar travel" part, which I didn't feel like belonging to the IoI cosmos. "With a Tangled Skein" was a much more pleasant read; "Wielding a Red Sword" was also interesting, and admittedly the way Mym deals with Satan at the end is... unorthodox, at the very least; "Being a Green Mother" was probably the one that felt the least like an IoI book, given that Orb, after all, doesn't become an Incarnation until almost at the end of the book.
"For Love of Evil" was quite enjoyable, and it was interesting to see events of the previous books from the eyes of Satan; the fact that

Spoiler

Satan is actually "good"

could be taken both as an intriguing twist or as a horrible let-down though. "And Eternity" was... well, perhaps not fully on par with the others, but I liked the concept that

Spoiler

Orlene, who had been chosen by Nox as her candidate for Godhood, was tricked into visiting all the Incarnations and seeing how they worked, thereby realizing the need of an active Incarnation of Good

.

All in all, though, the last two books were less satisfying, mostly because they dilute the concept:

Spoiler

whereas in the first three books we know of seven Incarnations, and the fourth and fifth introduce us to a small number of lesser Incarnations (which, however, does not really change the fact that the greater ones are only seven), the sixth and seventh book plainly describe how there are dozens, if not hundreds, of greater Incarnations that represent all deities still believed in. Where were all these Incarnations in the first five books? Why do we hear nothing about them at all? What about Nox herself?

That's the part I liked the least...

[Ainulindale]

maybe he's too simple? Maybe he's not interesting? Maybe he's just not very good

D. all the above.

[onewyteduck]

Jumping in a little late here and having just skimmed through, forgive me if this point has already been brought up and I overlooked.....

Isn't part of the problem serialization? (Is that a word!?!?) And not just in books? If a novel or movie is sucessful, the push for the sequel (Ka ching, ka ching, look at the bling, baby!) usually leads to something inferior to the first. Let's see, it's soooo much easier. No new world to create. No new character develpment.......

It's so rare to find a series that maintains quality throughout the whole. Robert Jordan's Wheel Of Time? It's far away from it's original premise and I gave up on that one a long time ago. Star Wars, anybody? As for Piers Anthony, I really like On A Pale Horse....I read the next two books in the series and called it quits. I'm not familiar with any of this other work.

Just my two cents.......