Talk To Xanth Creator Piers Anthony

Not only is Piers Anthony one of the world's most popular fantasy authors (his books have been science fiction and fantasy staples for decades) but he has been using Linux and StarOffice 5.2 for the past year. This is your opportunity to ask Piers about either the technical aspects of using Linux and StarOffice to produce fiction or about his upcoming work (new Xanth novels coming soon!) or almost anything else. We'll forward 10 of the highest-moderated questions to Piers tomorrow, and will run his answers (verbatim, as always) as soon as he gets them back to us.

Which OS?

[Art_XIV]

Which operating system do you feel is most suitable for automating the summoning/conjuring of demons?

Child Molester-sounding book titles?

[tommck]

The day my friends came over for a party and pulled The Color of Her Panties off my shelf and started taunting me (it still hasn't stopped and its 8 years later), is the day I stopped reading the Xanth novels. It didn't help that there was a little girl of about 7 years old with plaid panties on the cover!

My Question: Can you continue to write novels so that nerds can read them without the title causing them to get their asses kicked more than already happens?

T

A technical question for Piers.

[Doktor Memory]

As you appear to be a fan of Open Source Software, when are you going to release the code to the perl script you've apparently used to crank out the last fifteen or so Xanth novels, and will the code be GPLed or BSD-licensed?

Re:Any more Apprentice Adept?

[Anonymous Coward]

Piers, any plans to work in the Apprentice Adept universe again? [...] although it seemed to get stretched in the later novels. ...

s/Apprentice Adept/Xanth/
s/stretched/worn thin/

s/Xanth/Incarnations of Immortality/

s/Piers/Anne McCaffrey/
s/Incarnations of Immortality/Pern

s/Pern/Crystal Singer

[...]

Re:Literary Scope

[Anonymous Coward]

I enjoyed many of your books when I was much younger, and I found that they had a fantastic impact on my vocabulary and imagination. However, at around age 14, I started to feel that the newer novels that you were producing (this was in 1990 or so) were much more commerically oriented (I particularly recall that making the Brown Adept a lesbian seemed out of character and gratuitously sexual.) I'm now a much more mature reader, and I generally eschew the fantasy and science fiction genres for their immaturity, prefering works with more developed characters. My question to you is:
Will using open source software help you become less of a hack?

Re:Literary Smoke

[Anonymous Coward]

Will using open source software help you become less of a hack?

Hey now! Maybe that's a little rough. I mean, nobody ciriticizes a surfer who manages to ride a wave in all the way to the shore. Of course, at that point surfers DO usually step off the board and either start looking for a *different* wave, or call it quits for the day. Hrm. Wrong metaphor.

Let's see ... Open Source programming! Yeah, that's it. He's *re-using* his code! Polymorphism. He's simply overloading his plot methods.

Besides, he's always been pretty forward about that he includes puns and opther contributions from fans. Many eyes make shallow jokes.

my xauth question

[The Pim]

Finally, the guy I've been looking for!! How the hell should I set up X so that when I su, I can run X programs as root?

Re:Motivations for the switch?

[PacoTaco]

I'm sure he appreciates the excellent cut and paste features of StarOffice.

Hard on the Eyes?

[lexDysic]

Mr. Anthony,

I first would like to thank you for helping me discover SF/Fantasy. Books like A Spell for Chameleon, Macroscope and Tarot introduced me to characters who solved their problems by thinking critcally about them--a trait I consciously tried to mimic and have never lost. (Since then, my critical thinking has led me to vastly different conclusions than yours on many fronts, but that's a different matter.) :)

Anyway, this being a technical web site (nominally anyway) I will ask a (nominally) technical question. As a Linux user and sometime writer, my biggest problem has been with the quality of the fonts. As someone who spends hours a day staring at the screen (4? 6?) I would think this would be more of an issue for you. Do you find that fonts under Linux are lower quality than under Microsoft? If so, is it enough to bother you? What font and size do you typically write in?

Thanks,
Jason

Re:Child Molester-sounding book titles?

[gid-goo]

You were trying to argue that romance novels aren't book with a Piers Anthony book on your desk? Holy pot - kettle - black. Piers Anthony had a couple of ideas sometime in the 80s. Since then he's been beating that horse for every penny that it'll produce. He probably uses Linux to run the computer program he wrote to write his novels for him. I stopped reading them around the age of 13 because I realized they were all the same!

Re:How Do I Get Published?

[Maggot75]

Well, I think I speak on behalf of parazoo-cum-daemon-philes (paradee's for short) everywhere when I say:
Don't knock unicorns humping the devil until you've seen just how far a unicorn's horn can actually reach up a demon's butt. Unicorns are hard to please and demanding lovers, while most devils are polyamourous sluts that will sleep with everything.
Your criticism of unicorn-demon-sex is just to be expected from a narrow-minded society of unispecieist cretins. One day, you will be the weird ones, and believe me, we'll laugh at you then.