Final Installment: The Piers Anthony Re-assessment

This is it .... the final installment in my re-assessment of Piers Anthony. After reading the initial trilogy in his Xanth series, I wanted to delve more deeply into his other major non-fantasy fiction:

• Macroscope (1969), his best-known SF novel;
• Firefly (1990), a horror thriller about sexual abuse and domestic violence; 
• Tatham Mound (1991), a historical novel about Native Americans.

I ended up having so much to say about Firefly that it got its own post. Now, it's time for my remaining chosen Anthony novels. All in all, they are.... good. Like, really good. Granted, none are masterpieces. The prose simply isn't vivid enough for that, although it's serviceable, and Anthony's work arguably never achieves that essential deep emotional impact that readers crave, and which certainly made me fall in love with writers like Harlan Ellison, Stephen R. Donaldson, Ursula K. Le Guin, and Joyce Carol Oates.

But these novels are all well-plotted, well-paced, and interesting reads by a reflective author with something serious to say. Again, I find it striking just how deeply Anthony's reputation has cratered, though I sadly realize that people like me are partly responsible for that. By the time I graduated high school, Anthony had seemed "unreadable" to me, although I devoured some 30 or 40 of his books by that time. Now, I can only surmise  my evaluation was part of a growing general boredom with genre fantasy during my late teens. Between 1997 to maybe the early-2010s, I honestly didn't read much fantasy. Glen Cook's later Black Company books and JK Rowling's Harry Potter are the only memorable exceptions; also some Dave Duncan.

Macroscope (1969)

Macroscope is a dazzling mix of hard science, social progressivism, astrological thinking, and Jungian psychology that can be best described as a mind-blowing space-opera romp with serious intent. Although I didn't fall in love with the novel, it sure impressed the hell out of me. It was filled with big SF ideas -- including human beings melting into liquid form to withstand heavy G, and then using an actual planet as a spaceship. But Anthony combines these ideas with an extended analysis of maturity and historical progress. From a contemporary theory viewpoint, this concern with progress -- a relic of Enlightenment thinking -- might be where the novel shows its age.

Anthony clearly believes in individual maturity, but he also believes in the maturity of civilizations, even galactic civilizations. That kind of belief in historical progress, so reminiscent of Asimov's Foundation series, was real big in early SF, but it has fallen upon hard times since. Nonetheless, Macroscope is a novel about the essential unity of all things: the distant future with the ancient past, the sub-atomic microscopic world with the macroscopic cosmos. Whatever else you might say about it, Macroscope is a novel that demands contemplation. It certainly made me seek out the academic work previously done on it.

Some notable features:

• An analysis of racism highly in line with 1960s leftist activism
• Some of the familiar light sexism from Anthony's other works (and typical to his era)
• Those dazzling SF concepts, including the melting human beings ... described in truly gruesome yet fascinating detail
• A penchant for astrology, which was an odd interest for an SF writer to have, but some readers apparently rolled with it better than others.

On Goodreads, although the hectic pacing of the novel certainly alienated some readers, there were other reviews -- the two most highly rated ones, actually -- that absolute gushed about this novel. For one, "I consider this book the poster child for 'BIG IDEA' science fiction," and the other admires Anthony's "strong, complicated, [and] proactive [heroine]." Although I don't share the gushing, I'm highly sympathetic to the sentiment.

It's a genuine shame that this novel has fallen from SF consciousness as much as it has .... it's certainly a much better novel that, say, Larry Niven's Ringworld (1970), which won the Hugo the following year. Unfortunately, Macroscope had the misfortune to come out the same year as Le Guin's The Left Hand of Darkness .... intriguingly, though, it placed one spot ahead of Vonnegut's Slaughterhouse Five in the Hugo voting for 1970.

Tatham Mound (1991)

In How Precious Was That While, Anthony considers Tatham Mound the "major novel of my career" (37), the "type of [serious] writing I had wanted to do for a quarter century" (185). When the book didn't do well commercially, Anthony claims that it was due to publisher incompetence: lies, inadequate promotion, shifty management, etc. Granted: Anthony can come off as belligerent when discussing his publishers, portraying them as jackals against whom heroic authors must bravely stand, but the novel could have done better, perhaps. The reviews on Goodreads, for example, are amazingly positive, generally speaking, and I certainly thought Tatham Mound belongs to the realm of quality historical fiction.**

For some background, Anthony based this work off archaeological excavations -- financed mostly by himself -- of the Tocobaga Indians in central Florida. As he acknowledges, he had to make a lot of assumptions when writing this work. Prior to the excavations, for instance, virtually nothing was known about the Toco, but those excavations inspired at least two doctoral dissertations, and Tatham Mound is the popular expression of that intensive research.

Overall, like many other historical novels of its kind, Tatham Mound depicts a male protagonist traveling widely throughout a pre-Conquest American world, helping us remember a vanished way of life -- or, more accurately, vanished ways of life -- prior to the Spanish invasion. The customs of several native groups (the Toco, the Cherokee, the Peoria) are described in fascinating detail, including the Aztecs and Maya to the far south. Unfortunately, I lack the expertise to comment on Anthony's historical accuracy ... but he seems to pass the postcolonial smell test. Although one Goodreads review dinged Tatham Mound for stereotypes, I thought Anthony conveyed Native American spirituality, sexuality, and cultural mores with sympathy and understanding, at least. Likewise, he accurately describes De Soto's brutal tactics, which were familiar to me in outline from similar tactics used by Pizarro and Cortés. Thus, in the absence of detailed arguments to the contrary, Tatham Mound seems like a highly beneficial novel from a political point of view.

In many ways, too, Tatham Mound reminds me of Gary Jennings's Aztec (1980) -- or maybe Daniel Peters's much less heralded novel on the same topic, The Luck of Huemac (1981). Both historical novels were the first to portray the Mexica from a sympathetic native perspective, but whereas Aztec is filled to the brim with sex and violence, Peters's novel is more consciously literary. Still, while both Tatham Mound and The Luck of Huemac emancipate themselves from Aztec's homophobia, misogyny, and vague racism, Gary Jennings nonetheless creates a truly mesmerizing image of pre-Conquest Central America. It is that sense of magic that neither Peters nor Anthony quite manage to capture.*** Did they still write good novels, written from a native perspective? Yes, of course .... but they're not necessarily powerful novels, so Aztec remains the gold standard on that score.

Still, Tatham Mound is a remarkable achievement. Besides the desire to remind us about a "lost" Native American culture, the Tocobaga, the novel's major theme probably centers around Anthony's admiration for what he sees as less rigid cultural attitudes toward sex and sexuality. Despite rejecting the myth of the "wanton native," Anthony emphasizes the allegedly more liberal Native American attitudes to marital jealousy and post-puberty sexuality. Especially after having read Firefly, it's easy to see Anthony seeking to articulate the cultural relativity that underlies many of our assumptions about appropriate sexual relations. The implications of pedophilia are still problematic in Firefly, but it's easier now to see how people can read more into Firefly than Anthony was actually implying. I don't see him as hoping to change our statutory laws (the neighbor does end up dying in jail), but rather to re-direct our outrage onto the people Anthony views as more responsible for Jade Brown's mindset.

Thank God, too, that Tatham Mound emphasizes the issue of consent. As the narrator tells us, "age was not the criterion; the will of the maiden was" (381). Again, this is still problematic for younger people ... but, given that Anthony notes that the average life expectancy then was around 30 years old, this certainly helps explain some of Anthony's earlier intimations.

One further interesting point ... in the Author's Note, Anthony observes that the novel took almost four times longer to write than a typical Xanth novel, and it was clear that this "time to completion" aspect  bothered him, despite his pride in Tatham Mound. He takes equal pride in writing a lot of books, apparently, and, financially lucrative as that may be, it's an unfortunate part of his literary reputation. 

------------------

** Actually, quality realist historical fiction. A number of reviews (including the Wikipedia page) claim that Tatham Mound is a historical fantasy, but that's just a sign of how closely people associate Anthony with Xanth. Instead, although Anthony describes Tale Teller's world according to his beliefs in communicative spirits, nothing that actually happens in the novel is contrary to post-Enlightenment consensus reality. 

*** Let me say, though, that Peters's The Incas was precisely a powerful novel of this type, and I've never been sure why it hasn't been more widely discussed.