Stratofanatic's Emporium

I've been studying Keith Justice's Bestseller Index , which compiles information from two separate bestseller lists -- New York Times Book Review and Publishers Weekly -- up through 1990, and the results are ridiculously fascinating. For instance, you wanna take a stab at which SFF author has the most individual books appear on a bestseller list? No, it ain't Heinlein, Clark, Herbert, or Asimov. It's not even Terry Brooks or David Eddings. No, the answer is Piers Anthony ... and even if you somehow pulled that name out of thin air, you'll still never guess how truly dominate Anthony was. Up through 1990, he had more than double than number of distinct bestsellers than Anne McCaffrey, the next most frequent bestseller. Whereas Anthony had an astounding  21 different books appear on a bestseller list, McCaffrey had "only" 9.** Now, caveats. These numbers need to be taken with one (or two) grains of salt. For instance, although Anthony had 22 two distinct bo...

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 read...

After reading the initial trilogy in Piers Anthony 's Xanth series , I really wanted a more thorough exploration of his work ... something to help me understand just how badly underappreciated he has been. So, for this project, I wanted to avoid fantasy as "been there, done that." I also wanted to avoid novels that I'd read as a teenager. Eventually I settled on the three notable titles: 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 that Anthony considers his best. Basically, for someone who's written 150+ novels, it seems like a sad stroke of misfortune that critics -- usually hostile critics -- seemingly know only Xanth , which Anthony himself dismisses as popular entertainment. Overall, critics have simply never made the same transition for Anthony that they afforded Michael Moorcock, who began as a pulp author who ended writing...

In my quest to avoid working on my monograph, I've recently wandered down a Piers Anthony-sized rabbit hole. At some point, I might comment on his two fascinating autobiographies, but for now let me focus on his first Xanth "trilogy" -- A Spell for Chameleon (1977), The Source of Magic (1979), and Castle Roogna (1979). Of course, these three books are no more a trilogy than my cat, Sawyer, is a trilogy. That designation was a Del Rey/Ballantine marketing ploy, pure and simple, and today nobody would question that Xanth constitutes an open-ended series with stand-alone novels that feature, especially after Bink and Dor, brand-new protagonists for each new book. Still, last month I accidentally re-read these first three book as a cluster, so let me mention some general thoughts on this "trilogy" before offering more specific commentary on the books.** General Remarks -- Xanth, Oz, and World-building As a teen, I never realized how closely the world-building betwee...

 A few weeks ago, I posted a lengthy blog entry on the mysterious colophon implanted by the Del Reys onto their new line of Ballantine fantasy books in 1977. Thanks to reading Anthony's  A Spell for Chameleon,  I thought the colophon a basilisk at first but after consulting with Douglas Anderson, we concluded that it was probably a  cockatrice ...  which I found interesting because Doug, apparently, had always heard the symbol referred to as a griffin, even though griffins aren't two-legged critters. Anyway, after some more digging, I found a few other tidbits. In Piers Anthony's second autobiography, How Precious Was That While,  I found the following passage (p. 134): So, one of the unanswered questions from my original post was, "Why did Lester del Rey apply his signature colophon to certain fantasy novels but not others?" The answer, apparently, turns out to be spite . After checking Donaldson's book covers on the ISFDB, Anthony's story check...

NB: see  Update on the Cockatrice Colophon  for more on this subject. ------------------------------------------------------------------------------------ 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 signaling the new fantasy line started by Lester de Rey (i.e., Ballantine/Del Rey) in 1977. The question, though, is "What the hell kind of critter is this?" 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 prett...

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...

So, here's a memory that takes me back -- during my research trip to UC Riverside, I read many issues of Star*line , the official newsletter (and poetry publication) of the Science Fiction Poetry Association. This association was founded by Suzette Haden Elgin, so, as one might imagine, I saw her editorial work and poems everywhere. Quite an interesting figure, too -- after raising a family of 5 kids, she went back to school to get a PhD in linguistics, and her efforts in speculative poetry all came towards the latter part of her career. Also wrote a fair number of SF novels, too. Anyway, one of her side projects was a book called The Gentle Art of Verbal Self-defense (1980). What makes that title interesting is that, amazingly enough, I remember hearing about that book back in high school . The connection is the SFF writer Piers Anthony. I used to really like Anthony -- A Spell for Chameleon was the first fantasy novel I ever read. All told, I read about 30 or 40 of his book...