Stratofanatic's Emporium

So, during my re-read of Piers Anthony's A Spell for Chameleon , I noticed the odd little colophon in the book's corner. It's pretty clearly aping the famous Unicorn's Head colophon from the Ballantine Adult Fantasy Series, and it's signalling the new fantasy line that Ballantine/Del Rey was starting under Lester del Rey in 1977. The question, though, is "What the hell kind of creature is it?  For a while, I was thinking basilisk. That's mostly because of  A Spell for Chameleon, which features a basilisk -- a rare enough creature in fantasy that I thought Anthony's book might have actually inspired the colophon. (Similarly, I suspect that Peter S. Beagle's The Last Unicorn inspired the Unicorn's Head colophon, but there's no knowing for sure.) Then I asked Douglas Anderson , who's pretty savvy with this sort of thing. He's always heard it called a gryphon colophon -- which is odd, since griffins are four-legged beasties, and this cri

Reposted from my social media : In my early teens, I read a lot of Piers Anthony. For fantasy fans of my age group, most of us did.  A Spell for Chameleon was the first "adult" novel I ever read, and I would have been 11 or so at the time. Even by the time I outgrew his novels a few years later, though, I retained a lingering affection for the "Author's Notes" that would conclude most of his books. They were, for the most part, honest and chatty commentaries on Anthony's own life, and I enjoyed them. Sometimes, since he mostly just discussed his life in these Author's Notes, he would occasionally mention his daughters. The oldest, Penny, was about a decade older than me. I then forgot all about Piers Anthony and his books for 20-some years, until very recently, when I was browsing through his biography, I saw that his daughter Penny had died in 2009 from complications from skin cancer. Anthony himself remained alive and well, which means that he had si

So, I started getting tired of reading critical theory for my book proposal, so, almost by accident, I started writing something about A Spell for Chameleon and the different possible ways of reading a text. (I'm viewing this as a reflection on our habits of reading, both through "innocent" or "reparative" readings against critical readings.)  Browsing through the commentary on Anthony, though, and there's a lot of overviews and summaries and so forth. Plus, I saw a few book chapters, mostly from the 1980s, one peer-reviewed article from 1975 in the then-nascent  Science Fiction Studies , and even one short introductory book by Michael R. Collins from 1983. Judging from what I've been reading, I suspect that Anthony -- particularly as his reputation has shifted over the last five decades -- might have been rated higher as an author had he *never* written a Xanth novel. Or even, perhaps, had he even stopped at only one or two. Some of this early commenta

Daaaaaamn . So, I'd somehow gone through my entire life without knowing anything about Terry Goodkind. I read maybe a quarter of Wizard's First Rule back in the early 2000s, but never finished it. Anyway, I started reading his sequel in the Sword of Truth series, Stone of Tears , and I'll comment on that in another blog post. But I looked up some of his GoodReads reviews, and they were brutal . Even more to the point, I also started looking up some of Goodkind's author interviews, and ... . ... oh my god, this dude is  seriously  batshit crazy . He's a complete Ayn Rand Objectivist nut job who doesn't think his novels are fantasy because they're too literary, and Goodkind also believes his novels have forever changed the same fantasy genre that he's too literary to have read himself. Plus, he's offended if someone compares him to Robert Jordan (despite ripping off most of Jordan's world-building). So, for your horrified fascinated, here's a r