Wednesday, April 25, 2012

Spirits With a Twist on the Rocks

Back in my day, there really wasn't such a thing as YA books yet. So those of us inclined toward reading, at least those of us with a sense of humor often found ourselves reading light SF and Fantasy. That's probably why I still have a bit of a soft spot for those genres despite how dull many books within them are.If you thought I was reaching far back with Colin Coterrill who has like seven books under his beltat this point (and I was reading middle of the first series. He has a second now) you'll be delighted to know I'm reaching back even farther today to one of the guys who helped transition me from Bruce Coville to Neil Gaiman. Errr, transition me from Bruce Coville to.... Tim O'Brien. Yeah. That's the ticket. By the way, if you're wondering why master meta-fiction literary novelist Tim O'Brien's site is not linked, it's because the damn thing is hideous and largely useless anyway. Tech wise, he's kind of old school. And if you seek out his page on your own, you'll note it was created in 1996. Despite supposed updates, it still looks like it was made then. Visually hateful. I wonder if he cares. I also wonder when his next book'll be out.  And whether it'll be more Things They Carried or more Tomcat in Love. 'Cuz unlike most of his fans, I can go either way in a heartbeat.

In any event, later elementary school was riddled with Narnia and Redwall, and middle school was full of Craig Shaw Gardner, Robert Asprin, and of course the very poster boy for guilty-pleasure I-can't-believe-something-this-dumb-is-enjoyable-aren't-his-fans-basically-at-the-very-bottom-of-the-geek-hierarchy himself, Piers Anthony. To put this in perspective, his big Xanth series started back in the 70s. And it's still going. I read about half of it, which meant like sixteen books because that's what existed when I was fourteen. I once tried to re-read it, sped through like ten of 'em and OD'd on airy puns. Not to mention ballooning casts. Plus the characters tended to skew young, as if after th first few books he and his publishers noticed that the readers were all fourteen, and immediately dumped Bink, the hero of the first two books for his son Dor and never featured main characters over 18 ever again. Not gonna lie. That makes the romance parts a liiiittle awkward. When I started reading him 15 years ago and those characters were older than me, no. Today? Yes.

On the other hand, the Incarnations of Immortality, while by no means great literature, is a hell of a lot of fun and holds up slightly better for the non-teen audience. In a nutshell, the premise of the series is simple. Mother Nature, Time, War, Death and even God and the Devil are just jobs. They require unique individuals and each job has a unique method of selection, but none were born into it and none would do the job forever. So each book is effectively about a new comer learning their job in a crisis situation. The first book in the series, On a Pale Horse, stars death. It was always my favorite, but that may not be fair since it's the only one I read more than twice. Other favorites, though it's been years so it may have changed, were Bearing an Hourglass (Time) For Love of Evil (The Devil) and And Eternity (God). Because of the nature of the books, there were lots of ghost type things floating around. Obviously, Death dealt with them constantly, but others showed up periodically, and with fairly interesting usage. The Devil for instance was, if memory serves, a sorceror's apprentice (...) and when his "twoo wuv" died, he bound her soul to...something and she stayed with him as a ghost basically forever. Touching and creepy. I approve. The best way to touch people is to be creepy.

Wait. That came out wrong.

Anyway, it's a significant sized series. I encourage you to read one. If you like it, you'll like the rest. If you don't like it, the others won't be any better. But I've always been a fan of having SF and Fantasy elements portrayed in a relatively realisitc way, in a world that seems logically coherent, and with a cast who can't just shrug and say "Oh, oh, oh, it's magic. You know?" So I love the setting and concept and thus want other people to see how it's possible to make these books without having a weird, nebulous world or spending thirty years inventing the elvish language and writing the obscenely complex history of your fantasy world.

That said, no matter if you're an actual die-hard fan of Piers Anthony, I'd caution away from Total Recall. There's another one of those book-is-always-better-than-the-movie arguments. If that's true, then the movies are always better than the novel adaptations. And Totall Recall was already based on a Philip K. Dick story. So it went from paper to screen and back. Anthony did the novelization and...well, in the copy I got (quadruple hand from someone's elderly aunt) there were entire sections that were duplicated, but slightly different. It was obvious that two versions of the scene were written and somehow both made it into the final draft. What amateur bullshit. How many people, editor, copy editors, proof readers, production managers, did that slip past? Licensed novels, man. What a joke.

Well, join me Friday for our Spirt Twist conclusion in "Chainsaw Boogie" or "Only the Good Die Jung."

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