I'm assuming this would be about his "Firefly," (not to be confused with the TV series) and the fact that he not only advocated for and defended child molesters in that book, but had a convicted child molester write part of it. Link with more details here, approach with as many trigger warnings you'd expect, then double that number.
It came out when I was in...7th grade, I think? I didn't read it because it was shelved in the adult fiction section, like the horror books (and the cover made me think it was a horror novel, or something, and I was generally too scared to read horror), unlike things like Xanth or Apprentice Adept that were shelved in the sf/f section. Unfortunately, given that all the creepy things went whoosh right over my head when I was in middle/high school (I tend to be an unusually dense reader and was even more so back then), I'm not sure I even would have caught the bad things when I was in 7th grade. I think I will just settle for being glad not to have read it.
It actually was a horror novel, so the cover was accurate, FWIW. And I can assure you that no matter how unusually dense you might have been, there's no way this would have gone over your head. There was a bloody afterword explaining his views, even. But yeah, definitely be glad not to have read it.
I never read Firefly, or even heard of it till it came up in a thread on rec.arts.sf.fandom, but the creepy pedophile vibe running through the Xanth books got harder and harder to ignore, and shows up in some of his other novels as well.
Yeah, I'd half-given up on Xanth when I was in high school during books 7-9, so most of the stuff in the previous book didn't overly bother me, since I was at an age when sexually-tinged scenes between thirteen-year-olds felt like exactly what I wanted to read, and once he gotten more overtly creepy, I'd moved on.
(As that essay and the comment thread notes, there was plenty of creepiness throughout just about everything he did starting in the mid-80s).
Firefly definitely was the last new Anthony book I ever read. But it's far from the first time child sex entered into his plots. Bio of a Space Tyrant is rife with it. So was Phthor and the Battle Circle series. It goes waaaaay back.
Yup, I remember those, too. Well, Phthor, at least (BC was out of print when I was growing up), which I'd also found so dull I never really was able to make my way through it. I remember reading Bio in high school and thinking how fucked up the incest stuff there was, but it really took Firefly (and the four years between them; I wasn't the most discerning teen) to get me to stop reading him.
If you have the stomach for the comments in that thread, you'll see that the Incarnations series also went off into extremely creepy territory, too. Wish I'd gotten bored before then myself.
(That said, OaPH remains one of my favorite concepts, undoubtedly helped by the fact that I was The Golden Age of Science Fiction when I first encountered it.)
I only read the first few (3?) Incarnations books. I was 24 when OaPH was published. I thought it had the Best. Cover. Ever. (I always was a car freak.)
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james_davis_nicoll) wrote2014-06-10 09:02 pm
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(As that essay and the comment thread notes, there was plenty of creepiness throughout just about everything he did starting in the mid-80s).
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I read the first few Xanth books and a few other things (On a Pale Horse), but then wandered off and he mostly wasn't interesting to me at all.
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(That said, OaPH remains one of my favorite concepts, undoubtedly helped by the fact that I was The Golden Age of Science Fiction when I first encountered it.)
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