Talk To Xanth Creator Piers Anthony 439
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.
Re:How Do I Get Published? (Score:3, Informative)
'The Change" (Score:4, Informative)
In your copeous Author's Notes, you mention how you wrote these books with adults in mind, and were surprised to find that the Young Adult market was where you were selling most of your copies.
I'm curious why, upon learning this, you started pandering to that market? Each successive Xanth book became more pun-laden and slapstick, even when it got in the way of the actual story. Despite saying in nearly every Authors Note that you wouldn't accept any more reader-submitted puns, you go ahead and do it anyway, taking loose soap-operaesque plotlines and filling them with frivolous wordplay to tie them together.
Granted, the series seems to do okay, considering that you keep adding to it, but I wonder why you abandoned the style and quality of writing that won you the Nebula Award, in favor of Xanth installments like "Color of her Panties," irritating those readers who loved the Piers who wrote quality work?
Sadly, the decline of Xanth (around books 3 through 5 and on) can also be seen in most of your other series, including Incarnations of Immortality (after Being a Green Mother), and the brilliantly begun Apprentice Adept series (after the first trilogy).
Is the changeover to Linux and StarOffice responsible for this change in tone and direction?
Re:Paedophilia (Score:3, Informative)
For further pedophilic evidence, see Firefly, in which he all but comes out and says that it should be okay to have sex with little kids, as long as the little kid wants it. That was about the point where I finally became fed up with Mr. Anthony and his apparent fetishes, and shoved my two big boxes full of Anthony books deep under my bed.
It's sad, too...he did write some pretty good stuff back in the early days. Early Xanth, early Apprentice Adept...I think that Bio of a Space Tyrant was what first caused me to start questioning the political views that my parents had handed down to me. I thought the firewood-splitting short story ("Wood You?") was cute, Prostho Plus and Hard Sell were inventive, and Macroscope was amazing. He had some great ideas, back in the day.
Re:Literary Scope (Score:3, Informative)
Well...I believe a lot of Mr. Anthony's characters are gratuitously sexual...but that's the style he writes in, which suits the target audience very well: relatively lighthearted, scifi/fantasy, teasingly sexual stories, usually with puzzle-based plot resolution a la Star Trek.
You can't deny that he's done a good job of producing his target market what they want, right?
That being said, I wouldn't mind a more serious, less sexual variant of Killobyte. There are too few authors that really understand (or go to the trouble of researching) the tech in their tech stories and have the guts to make things relatively plausible. When you run across something like this (I believe someone earlier mentioned Neal Stephenson, who did a particularly good job), it's absolutely glorious. You can read through the book without constantly wincing at factual errors or impossibilities.
Finally, whether you like the plots or writing style or not, one thing that cannot be denied is that Mr. Anthony has come up with an incredible variety of very original settings. He has produced an enormous number of fantastic worlds (especially when considering that he's a single author). I find that most of the interest in his books comes not from the character-character interaction, but from in absorbing the worlds he's come up with.
For example (spoiler warning):
Xanth, a peninsula which somehow overlays various peninsulas in our world (Florida, Italy).
The Apprentice Adept series, where a technological world exists in parallel with a fantasy world, each of which has a similar social structure and characters. The tech society is heavily based around the playing of a massive game.
The Incarnations of Immortality series, where humans in a modern society both technologically and magically advanced take on roles similar to those of beings in the Greek panetheon. The rules governing these beings are complex and where most of the content in the story comes from.
Killobyte, Mr. Anthony's attempt to do for VR something like what Wired does for the Internet -- predict social impact and changes. (This may sound dry, but it's in fact a quick-moving bit of fiction).
The Mode series, where characters stream through a rapid succesion of worlds that Mr. Anthony creates.
The best series to prove my point is Firefly. Perhaps someone has different feelings on this book, but I read it and found it pretty awful. Why? It's one of the few (the only?) books done where Mr. Anthony worked within the confines of our existing world, and didn't create his own. Removing the fantastic worlds, you're left with some semi-plausible characters, less than incredible dialog, the mandantory gratuitous sexuality...not that great.
I'd actually love to see a collaboration where Mr. Anthony does all the setting design and someone else does all the character and dialog work...Patricia C Wrede would be a good choice, as I like her upbeat dialog and character work).