Picked up my first Piers Anthony book today when browsing around the Queen Victoria Markets in Melbourne. Looking forward to getting stuck in to this while on my flight home tonight

  • Apeman42@lemmy.world
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    4 days ago

    Piers Anthony has some good moments, but he can be weird in kind of a creepy way sometimes. Oddly-shoehorned-in sexual scenes with fucked up dynamics, underlying misogyny, etc.

    But if you can set that aside, he also tells some pretty entertaining stories sometimes. If you like him, check out his Incarnations of Immortality series, and maybe the Apprentice Adept (sometimes called Phaze) series. Those are my favorites from him. The early Xanth books have some charm, but the constant firehose of puns can get very tiring.

    • HubertManne@piefed.social
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      3 days ago

      My thing is he is an amazing story teller. He has a lot of stuff where he is rehashing things but man he can talk about making breakfast and have it be enthralling.

      • sem@lemmy.blahaj.zone
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        2 days ago

        So, like, does he ever improve as a person and stop writing stuff like that, or are his most recent books just as bad? Asking for a friend who used to read him as a kid

      • Dozzi92@lemmy.world
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        3 days ago

        But it’s this book or OP has nothing to read for the flight. That’s a tough choice, and I know I’m settling on pedo normalization, but I’m not gonna be happy about it.

    • Hazmatastic@lemmy.world
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      4 days ago

      Yeah I liked the Xanth series a lot as a kid. Then i read one as an adult and yeah, dude wrote some pretty creepy stuff

    • LordMayor@piefed.social
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      4 days ago

      I picked up one of his books in middle school and couldn’t get into it.

      A couple weeks later I noticed my dad was reading it. After he got about a third of the way through he asks me “uh, are reading this stuff?” I told him I didn’t like it and had put it down and he was just like “ok, good.”

      • FluidBeef@quokk.au
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        2 days ago

        The attic in my house was full of mad stuff by this guy and other weird sci-fi fantasy authors that my dad had stashed up there. Lord Of The Rings and Book Of The New Sun were good but it was a long way down from there.

    • 0xKesh@lemmy.dbzer0.comOP
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      4 days ago

      Ah true! I’ve never read Piers Anthony’s work before, but have been recommended him in the past as a sci-fi fan.

      I’m interested to see if I pick up on these things too!

  • mesa@piefed.social
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    4 days ago

    Hes a strange one alright. I used to love xanth. But i learned he was one of the ones that went after the internet archive.

    I hope you enjoy the book. Hes a good author.