From: djdaneh@pbhyc.PacBell.COM (Dan'l DanehyOakes)
Newsgroups: rec.arts.sf.written
Subject: Re: Piers Anthony
Date: 14 Sep 92 18:01:57 GMT
Reply-To: djdaneh@PacBell.COM (Dan'l DanehyOakes)
Organization: Pacific * Bell, San Ramon, CA

In article <1992Sep14.035830.18164@kakwa.ucs.ualberta.ca> aaron@space.ualberta.ca writes:

>I will hereby declare intent to flame mercilessly all those who make more snide
>anti-Anthony comments in response to that earlier post.  Those who have not yet
>read this post >not< excluded.
>
>You have been warned.

This is not a flame, and I shall attempt to not be snide during the length of
this posting (though, Ghod knows, I've done more than my share of Anthony
snidery in my time).
 
Aaron/Alfvaen, you make the excellent point that not everyone wants stuff
that makes them think.  Not everyone wants an intellectual experience from their
SF -- though I can't help wondering what brought them to the genre in the first
place.

That's fair enough, and indeed there are damn few people who want deep int.
stuff from _every_ book they read.  Almost everyone wants to sit down and
relax with a "good read" now and then.

My claim -- and again note, this is neither snide nor a flame, but a simple,
bald statement -- is that Anthony is *NOT* a good read, because he doesn't
merely not stimulate the intellect, he actively insults it -- both in the
normal sense, and in the medical sense.

"How?"  The bemused and irritated Anthony supporter asks, so I'll give three 
relatively simple examples.


1.  Well, first, there is language abuse.  I don't mean puns; if puns were good
enough for Homer, Shakespeare, and James Joyce, I guess they're good enough for 
anyone without a stick up his ass.  I don't even mean calling series of ten
or more books "trilogies."

I mean clumsy prose that means what it doesn't mean to mean; I mean agrammatical
hodgepodges; I mean a complete lack of any sense of the way words sound.  Try 
reading a few paragraphs of Anthony aloud some time and see how clumsily they 
stumble off the tongue.  

Then try reading some of his fiction with a dictionary near to hand -- look up 
some of the less-familiar words he uses and see if they make any sense in the 
context he uses them in.  Oh, I grant that some and maybe even most will:  but 
there's enough that don't that it's clear that he's using words _he_ doesn't 
understand, and propagating his misunderstandings to minds that, precisely 
_because_ they're engaged in the purely passive activity of enjoying a "read," 
have their critical filters down.


2.  There is a thing I call "overexplaining."  This is hard to explain without 
an example, and I don't exactly keep Piers Anthony's books close to hand in my 
office, so I'm going to have to keep it in the abstract.  

Essentially, this particular "literary crime" consists of telling the reader, 
often over and over, what she already knows.  For example, a character says 
something, and the writer explains what motivated her to say that.  Which would 
be fine, except that the "explanation" is a summary of what happened three 
chapters back.  

The only plausible reason for this, is that the writer thinks his readers are 
all morons who can't remember what _happened_ three chapters back.  Very 
insulting indeed.


3.  Anthony habitually uses what James Blish liked to call the "idiot plot," 
which is a plot which only takes place because the protagonist (and often 
everyone in the tale) is an idiot.  

The classic example of this is the film ALIEN, whose plot can be summed up as 
follows:  "There's a really deadly monster, of unknown but vast killing power 
and no known vulnerability, lurking somewhere on the ship.   Let's split up and 
wander through the darkest corridors."  

This isn't completely fair to ALIEN, but it *does* explain what an idiot plot 
is.  

Anthony's characters rarely show more common sense than this, and when they *do*
come to a sudden realization of something the reader had figured out half a 
novel ago, Anthony presents it as a brilliant insight on his character's part.  

The reader can react to this in one of two ways:  either by shallow self-
congratulation on having been so smart as to realize this incredible thing for 
him/herself (which I think is the reaction Anthony depends on:  a form of false 
flattery, which is one of the worst insults of all), or to throw the book at the
wall in disgust at the sheer idiocy of it all.


		The Pavlov dog and the Schroedinger cat
		Side by side in my forebrain sat
		With Shakespeare's monkeys crowding in behind. . .
		. . . it's all in your mind.
			-- Visual Purple

Dan'l Danehy-Oakes, Net.Roach
My opinions do NOT represent Pacific Bell,
Professional Development, or anyone else.
But I'm willing to share.