Musings from Mundania

[vovat]

I've now finished reading Man from Mundania, the twelfth book in Piers Anthony's Xanth series. It's been a while since I've read anything in this series, but I had trouble finding this particular volume, and didn't want to skip it and read ahead. I did that all the time as a kid (I didn't originally read the Oz or Narnia books in any real order), but I'm less apt to do it now. The Xanth books have never quite grabbed me in the way some other fantasy series have, perhaps because I never got the sense of realism from them that I did from some others, but they're fun for light reading (and I wouldn't be at all surprised if one of them includes a pun on the term "light reading" {g}). I do think Anthony is a bit too keen to work in gratuitous sexuality, what with all of the naked women and mentions of summoning the stork and Adult Conspiracies. Also, he seems intent on coming up with the weirdest couples possible. There probably isn't a need for Xanth fanfic with absurd pairings of characters, because the actual author has already given us a centaur mating with a hippogriff, and a half-human, quarter-ogre, quarter-nymph hooking up with a woman made of brass. And characters tend to pair up very quickly, even when love springs aren't involved. All this aside, though, I like the books I've read so far (some more than others; I can barely remember anything that happened in Centaur Aisle, for instance). Man from Mundania is actually one of the better ones. Grey and Ivy's romance, while admittedly pretty quick and easy, was more believable than some others in the series. I also liked the incorporation of the Time of No Magic and the Magician Murphy (from the second and third books, respectively), and the advancement in the search for the Good Magician Humfrey (which started two books previously, and I think continues for at least the next two). For what it's worth, I believe Anthony has admitted to being a fan of the Oz books, and I appreciate how he managed to incorporate some similar elements (the magic tapestry at Castle Roogna that is quite similar to Ozma's Magic Picture, punny names, just about anything you could want growing on trees, etc.) while not coming across as a rip-off.

I think Man from Mundania was the first book in the series to state that the Xanth books actually exist within the universe of the stories themselves, as tomes written and kept by the Muse of History in Xanth itself, and as fiction in Mundania. That's actually pretty similar to how it works in the Oz books, in which several characters have read about Oz before going there, and L. Frank Baum even came up with an elaborate story of getting news from Oz by means of a radio telegraph. I believe I've heard that Tarzan and Sherlock Holmes also eventually became aware of books being written about their adventures, but I could be wrong. But I think it's usually the rule that people in a work of fiction can't actually read or watch that same work of fiction. In a way, I kind of prefer it when they can, because if they're supposed to be taking place in our own world (which the Mundania and Great Outside World segments presumably are), those works that we assume to be fiction presumably WOULD exist. On the other hand, it can make things too easy if strangers to a place already know a lot about it simply by reading, and the whole concept can come off as rather self-gratifying for the author. ("See? My books are so popular that even the characters in them read them! And if you haven't read all of them yet, here are some titles, worked right into the story!") It's an interesting issue, really.

Comments

[colbyucb.livejournal.com]

I do think Anthony is a bit too keen to work in gratuitous sexuality

As soon as I saw "Piers Anthony" I wondered how many sentences later this sort of comment would come up, heh. I've never read the Xanth series, but I have read about half of the Incarnations of Immortality series. Every chick seems to get at least a page description on their perfectly round breasts, hourglass figures, how the main character in question just can't stop thinking about screwing them no matter what situation he sees her in (I seem to recall this happening at least once for the dead women that Death would collect in On a Pale Horse), and also all the billboards featuring even more buxom female demons to entice men to Satan's side through hot hot demon sex. It got kind of old, but I liked the storylines and ideas anyway.

I wonder if Piers Anthony subscribes to the "when lacking in word count, write porn!" strategy of cranking up the page count/alleviating writer's block.

[vovat.livejournal.com]

I wonder if Piers Anthony subscribes to the "when lacking in word count, write porn!" strategy of cranking up the page count/alleviating writer's block.

Quite possibly. I get the impression that a lot of the porn in the Xanth series is meant to be seen as adolescent discovery of sexuality, but it gets tiresome after a while.

By the way, I think I remember hearing that Anthony wrote a book called Pornucopia.

[annamatic.livejournal.com]

The novel I wrote for NaNoWriMo in '06 was a kind of fantasy parody wherein the characters gradually became aware that they were characters in a work of very badly orchestrated fiction and kept getting mad at the author [me] because of all the dumb shit she'd make them do. ^__^

[vovat.livejournal.com]

When I was in college, I wrote a story in which one of the characters remarked that another one's name sounded like something a crazy college student would make up. I quite liked the joke at the time, but I since grew a little tired of it, and wrote those characters out anyway.

While most of the Oz books show Baum presenting the stories as true history, he apparently couldn't resist working in the occasional author joke himself, like when the Shaggy Man remarks in Tik-Tok of Oz that no one knows what's going to happen "other than the man who's writing this story."

[majellen.livejournal.com]

Hey...

If I want to start reading the "Oz" books, which should I start with, is there an order you recommend, and are they all by Baum?

Figured I'd ask an expert.

[vovat.livejournal.com]

I guess chronological order would make the most sense, although Wizard is written in more of a repetitious folktale style than the later ones, and I know it's bothered some people. If you try that one and don't like it, maybe you could check out The Land of Oz (sometimes called by its original title, The Marvelous Land of Oz), the second one. It's certainly possible to read the books out of order (I did, after the first two), but you might occasionally have some "hey, who's this character it sounds like I'm supposed to know?" moments.

The first fourteen Oz books were written by Baum. After his death, his widow allowed the publisher to find another author to consider the series, and they chose Ruth Plumly Thompson. After her, four other authors contributed to what's colloquially referred to as the Famous Forty, which is generally accepted as canon. Some people only accept the Baum books, though.

[rockinlibrarian.livejournal.com]

The drawbacks you list to the Xanth books are exactly the reasons I couldn't get into them myself, even though I felt like I really SHOULD have enjoyed them, what with the puns and all. At least I know it wasn't just my imagination or the fact that I read them at the wrong time or something like that-- that other people actually see those things too!

I just read a Spiderwick Chronicles book that did the Book Within Book thing-- in fact the authors actually wrote themselves into the book as themselves, which was very funny though I'm not sure how many of the kids who are actually at that reading level would have appreciated it!

[vovat.livejournal.com]

At least I know it wasn't just my imagination or the fact that I read them at the wrong time or something like that-- that other people actually see those things too!

Yeah, I enjoy the series, but I can definitely see how people might be turned off by some of the more annoying elements.