Game 145: Companions of Xanth (1993) - Introduction

By IlmariI must have been twelve years old when I picked up a copy of Golem in the Gears from the library shelf. My motives were pretty clear: it looked like fantasy and it said so on the back, so I was bound to try it. It seemed hilarious at the time, with the hero of the story being essentially a man smaller than a frog, riding a monster under the bed.

I can still recount many of the more intriguing sections of the book. Take the time when the heroes were trapped by the evil machine called Com-Pewter (notice the pun?) and had to fight for their fate in a game reminiscent of old text adventures. You see, Com-Pewter could change the structure of its immediate reality with text prompts, and the heroes were supposed to enter their own prompts, with the goal of getting out of the lair in a set number of turns. Noting that Com-Pewter had countered their move of finding a safe passage without any dragons by introducing a dragoness, the heroes made a cunning plan. This time, they stated that they would find an exit with nothing dangerous in it and particularly no egrets, and when the Com-Pewter inevitably answered that there was an egress waiting for them, thinking it would be a mean female egret, the heroes could simply take the egress, which is just another word for exit. Besides, egrets are just harmless birds.

I think what finally sold me was the ending. I mean, how many fantasy books spend time explaining what the Prisoner’s Dilemma is all about and how to solve it?! Being those days an avid fan of the works of Douglas Adams and Monty Python, with their, let’s say, more refined type of humour, this seemed like more of the same kind.Golem in the Gears was the eighth published Xanth book and next after that I read the thirteenth book, Isle of View (notice the pun in the title? If not, try saying it out loud to someone you hold dear – or to take it a step further, your worst enemy). I never managed to read all the earlier books, since they weren’t really available in the local libraries or bookshops, and to this day, I have never read book 6 of the series, Night Mare, nor book 12, Man from Mundania. What made it even worse, Piers Anthony kept churning up more and more of these novels so that any chance of getting a complete view of the Xanth oeuvre was never a real option. Despite the spottiness of my reading record, I never really had any difficulty in understanding what was going on, since if any major changes had happened during the books I had not read (and major changes did not happen so often), the author went to great lengths to explain over and over again what exactly had happened.

The more pressing problem was that nothing really important seemed to happen in the course of these books, but after more eventful books in the beginning, an eternal status quo had seemingly taken over the land of Xanth. Indeed, the more I read the books, the more I saw them following a distinct formula. They all began the same way, with a young person as a protagonist with a problem that they proceeded to solve by making a pilgrimage to the Good and seemingly all-knowing Magician Humfrey (and Humfrey’s castle always had three problems to be solved before getting in). Humfrey never gave any comprehensible answer, but appointed the protagonist to perform a seemingly unrelated task. Usually by this time the main character had managed to gather a group of people to travel around with, and one of these people – a young person of opposite sex – had an antagonistic relation with the protagonist, and unsurprisingly, by the end of the book they had become a romantic couple. After a jolly sauntering in the Xanthian countryside and a few mostly harmless adventures, the seemingly unnecessary task set out by the Humfrey linked up with the original question of the protagonist, and often also the fate of the whole Xanth was saved.

Come to think of it, reading many of these Xanth novels felt in many ways a similar experience as reading the later Oz books, which consist mostly of a group of adventurers taking a tour around all the familiar major attractions of the land of Oz. Just like with L. Frank Baum, the main motivation of Piers Anthony for continuing his Xanth career seemed to be nothing more meaningful than to keep his cash flow regular. I am not going to moralise the author for making a profit with his books. Indeed, if people are willing to pay for what you’ve written, go for it. What I do moralise a bit is the author’s laziness in writing them. The man hasn’t even made his own puns for a long time, because he is steadily supplied with new wordplays by his fans (I know this, because from a certain point onwards all the Xanth books end with an Author’s note consisting mainly of a long list of thanks for those fans).

This might have been all I had to say about Xanth novels and their author. But once upon a time, I had a bright idea of googling what that Piers Anthony fellow was up to and whether he was still churning up those Xanth books. With the help of the World Wide Web and to my great surprise, I found out there was quite a controversy going on around him. I cannot really say whether this controversy is just a recent thing, but I do remember Pelit, the local Finnish computer game magazine, mentioning in their Companions of Xanth review that Anthony had had some trouble with what the reviewer colourfully called the typical American prudishness (their words, not mine). Little could I have known what actually was hidden behind those words.Well, some of this “antiprudishness” was quite obvious even from Xanth books. Admittedly, with the exception of especially the first book Spell for Chameleon (more on that book later) and perhaps a couple books immediately afterwards, the novels were very careful on not using even any explicit words concerning the more intimate matters of life. Still, Piers Anthony had a clear tendency to walk at the very thin line of implying heavily what he wouldn’t say out loud. Thus, at least at a certain phase of the series, the male characters were obsessed with the magical power of panties (with one book even named The Colour of Her Panties), and the young protagonists of the books spent much of their time trying to uncover the secrets of Adult Conspiracy and especially the ritual of Stork Summoning (yes, in Xanth babies are brought to their parents by storks).

As a tween/teen, nothing of this felt any peculiar. Indeed, reading about a bunch of sex-obsessed youngsters eager to be introduced to the joys of adult life seemed just a pretty accurate reflection of what most of my peers were going through. In fact, Xanth seemed to have its own prudish streak, since all its escapades usually happened in a very traditional setting, with a marriage ceremony preceding any sessions of Stork Summoning. If I had really thought about it, it might have felt weird that it was a relatively old guy who was writing about all of these young people hooking up. Then again, it could have been quite possible that Mr. Anthony just knew his demographics so well and was aware that plenty of would-be-adults were eager to pay some hard cash for any hint of a peek behind parental guidance.

Of course, I hadn’t read any of the author’s works intended for adults. Or actually I had read, since there was exactly one collection of his short stories available in the library (more on that later). But I hadn’t even heard of the book Firefly, in which Mr. Anthony incorporated a sexual fantasy of an imprisoned child molester and in his Author's note to the novel suggested that the 5-year old girl in that scene was perhaps not harmed by the incident. I won’t go so far as to suggest that Piers Anthony is a pedophile himself (others have taken that leap for me). Still, even the most neutral observer must inevitably come to the conclusion that the man has a rather nonchalant attitude toward questions of consent.

There’s even one example of this nonchalant attitude in the Xanth series, and more particularly in the first book, Spell for Chameleon (I promised I’d get back to it). You see, the book includes an infamous rape trial, or more precisely, pre-trial hearing. The proceedings themselves are rather odd, with the anonymity of the defendant and the plaintiff ensured by them being inserted in their own three-membered panels, nodding in unison whenever something is asked of them. The result of the hearing is that the judge declares that rape charges won’t be officially made, since the plaintiff knew the defendant and did not cry for help, so the whole thing might as well have been consensual. Seems I’ve heard that line of defense before.

All of this, together with the blatant sexism in some of Anthony’s work, has been discussed to death by other people. In order to make this blog post at least slightly unique, I am going to turn to a not so much considered, but equally disturbing topic in Anthony’s writings, namely, bestiality. This is surprisingly something that crops up even in Xanth novels. You see, Xanth has these things called love springs – although judging by their effects, it’s more an aphrodisiac than a source of genuine love. And, well, if you’ve ever wondered how centaurs, harpies and other hybrid species have come about, everything’s possible in a land full of magic. What’s even worse, Spell for Chameleon (that book really is something) suggests, in that same nonchalant attitude, that some people might even prefer to do it with other species (there’s even a scene where village boys are eager to have their way with a centaur filly).

Stock footage of a centaur

Xanth is a magical land, and maybe even its animals are self-aware and capable of assenting to interspecies dalliances, right? I hope this would be the case, but… Let me bring the discussion back to the short story collection I mentioned way back then. I only remember one story in that book, “In the Barn”, but boy what a story that was. Its premise is rather clever: what if we lived on a planet where instead of other animals, we’d have humans with the intelligence of a cow as livestock? This setup could be used to show our double standards, when we are shown how the way we treat dairy cattle feels horrible, when the animals have a human face. This is evidently the point Anthony is aiming for, but then he has to ruin the analogy by introducing the inevitable scene where the protagonist leers at all the milk-swollen mammaries in the barn and finally decides to take advantage of one of the animal-like female humans. This turn of events is played just for laughs, since the protagonist soon notices that their equipment are just too incompatible: the dairy females have had numerous pregnancies, in order to keep the milk flow steady, and this has also made them so loose that they require a literal bull of a man to keep them satisfied.

I think this is quite enough about the peculiarities of the literary work of Piers Anthony, although just to get a balanced view, I’d like to share at least one link to a slightly more positive read of the now rather infamous Spell for Chameleon (negative reviews are easy enough to find on Goodreads and other parts of the web). Only one very difficult question remains: would I follow the recommendation of Digital Antiquarian that children should be steered away from reading even the Xanth novels? As a parent, I well understand the need to make some restrictions on what kind of movies and video games young people are consuming, since vivid experiences provided by these media can be traumatising (heck, some of what’s out there could traumatise even an adult of my age).

But when it comes to literary works, I begin to hesitate, especially as with kids these days the problem lies not in what they read, but in that they do not read at all. Remembering some of the books I myself had access to at that age, I wouldn’t be too concerned with a child reading a few Xanth novels, especially as I assume most of the fans of the series read it – not for the articles, but – for the puns. Instead, I would encourage parents and other adults in kids’ life to generally discuss with them what they like to read, and if necessary, to challenge the inherent assumptions of some of their favourite books, to gently prod them to try a variety of genres, styles and authors, just to make them appreciate the richness the literary world possesses, and to provide a friendly ear in case they find something disturbing in what they’ve read that they want to hear your opinion about.

That's a naga, a human-snake hybrid. Don't even think about how that coupling happened

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