Book Challenge #99: Piers Anthony’s Xanth Series

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The next item on my reading list is Piers Anthony’s Xanth series. It starts with A Spell for Chameleon, published in 1977. I knew this was a long series, but I had no idea that there are 39 of them, and several more still forthcoming. These books were always staples at my local used book store, but I never picked them up. Something about getting into a long series like that is incredibly daunting.

Luckily after the last book I read for this challenge, this one doesn’t take itself seriously at all and is a light, vaguely pleasant read. Well, most of the time. Spoilers ahead!

Also TW for discussion of a rape trial.

The story follows the (mis)adventures of Bink as he tries to establish a place for himself in the magical realm of Xanth. As an aside, the map of Xanth in the front of the book looks suspiciously like the state of Florida, and is the first clue that this book is going to poke some fun at fantasy tropes. In Xanth, if you can’t demonstrate some form of magical ability by the time you come of age you get exiled out into the mundane world where the rest of us humans supposedly live. Bink is trying to avoid this fate, so he sets out on a quest to discover if he has a power and what that power is.

The story takes a few interesting turns, but unfortunately it lost me fairly early. If you enjoy humor and fantasy you have probably read at least one book by Terry Pratchett. If you haven’t, stop what you’re doing and go grab one. Small Gods is a good one, and in fact is farther up on this reading challenge list. In any case, Terry Pratchett has spoiled me a bit on other fantasy humor, because not only are his novels funny, but they are often packed full of biting British satire so potent that you often laugh to release the explosive pressure of all the snark. That’s the bar that has been set for fantasy humor. Piers Anthony’s humor is funny (sometimes) for its own sake, and lacks the sharp edge that I enjoy from laughing at something that is funny because it is shedding uncomfortable truths.

The main uncomfortable truth laid out in A Spell for Chameleon is that Piers Anthony’s depictions of women are abyssmal. His humorous touches were entertaining most of the time, but when it comes to any interaction between Bink and a female character, human or otherwise, the jokes could have been written by a horny 14 year old boy. I suppose that’s who this series is really aimed towards, since I have several friends who read them when they were young and seemed to have fond memories. Heck, I probably wouldn’t have had much problem with it when I was younger, and that thought makes me deeply uncomfortable. The women in this novel are horrible caricatures of the worst stereotypes of women. The one who seems most like a person, the initial love interest of Bink, Sabrina, gets written off as heartless and traitorous early on because she doesn’t sacrifice her entire life to try to save or to be exiled with Bink. The centaur woman Bink meets is smart and capable in some ways, but her whole reason for existing in the plot is to “temper” the hot headed male centaur and to get “accidentally” groped by the protagonist. That was where the book lost me, 10% in according to my Kindle. After that we get treated to a disgusting sham of a rape trial, a power mad older woman who uses illusions to appear younger, and the pinnacle of the book, Chameleon.

Chameleon is a woman who changes over the cycle of (surprise!) a month. At one peak of her cycle, she is beautiful but completely devoid of intelligence, while at the other end she is very smart but also very ugly. I am not even going to start unpacking that here. But Bink decides that this is exactly the perfect kind of woman for him. Basically this book gave me insight I didn’t want into the mind of Piers Anthony, and probably millions of men like him. Insight like how they think a rape case is as bad for the victim as for the defendant, and that if you know each other ahead of time it couldn’t really have been rape anyway. Insight like thinking women who won’t reshape their lives to suit yours are cold and unworthy, but ones who try to reshape your life to theirs are grasping and evil. And insight like the the assumption that no man could settle for a smart “ugly” woman or even a moderately smart, moderately attractive woman when they could also have a beautiful idiot. Let’s not even mention the fact that beauty plus brains seems to be an impossible combination.

This book did have some genuinely funny moments too. Outside of its treatment of women it was mostly fine. Some other stuff happens in the plot but honestly by the time that happened I was so checked out I couldn’t really tell you. If you like sophomoric humor and gross stereotypes about women, there’s 38 more where this one came from including one charmingly titled “The Color of Her Panties”. For anyone else, you’re better off skipping this series.

TL;DR:

A Spell for Chameleon by Piers Anthony

Rating: 2/5 stars

Verdict: I would have enjoyed this more and probably given 3 or so stars when I was a kid. Now I’m old and cranky and think the way it treats women is supremely gross.


Book Challenge #99: Piers Anthony’s Xanth Series

Hand Update

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This isn’t going to be a terribly amazing blog post this morning, but I still feel like I need to put one up.  Yesterday did not involve an awful lot of gaming, though I did manage to move the needle forward a little bit on the Warrior class hall quest.  Largely I was in a holding pattern waiting for my wife to get home from work, so we could decide what we needed to do about her hand.  During the course of the day it had gotten worse.  When she went to urgent care on Wednesday night, they drew a margin around the red area.  They said that if it crossed that boundary, she really needed to get to the emergency room and get some IV delivered antibiotics.  Well during the course of the day yesterday it crossed that line…  and then the school nurse drew a new line…  and by the time she got home from work it had crossed that boundary as well in several places.  Neither one of us really like going to the doctor, but my wife specifically abhors it.  So to contemplate going to the emergency room was almost a bridge too far for her.  Thankfully we live in a smallish suburb with an ER that isn’t too heinous, but I assumed as the night went on it would get considerably more busy.

The long story short is that they did in fact hook her up to an IV and let a bag of some sort of high powered antibiotic drip into her for about thirty minutes.  As of this morning there was really no noticeable change, but they did also tell us that the redness wasn’t really the big warning sign.  If she started having shooting pain up her arm, or red streaks traveling in that direction… then it needed to be taken seriously.  The worst part of this whole thing however is now my wife not only has one hand that is partially functional but the other one is going to be bruised up more than likely from the IV and also not completely functional.  The other worst part is that by the time we got out of the hospital at 9 pm last night we were both starving, and decided that since they took a lot of blood work that we would have some red meat.  The frustration of the whole situation is knowing that what you are going for isn’t that critical, but that it is also literally the only way to get IV antibiotics.  I have no clue why urgent care places can’t do that sort of thing, because it seemed silly to actually have to go to a hospital.

In any case… by the time I got upstairs I was zoning out pretty hard and ultimately went to bed around 10:30.  I would have gone earlier but I was trying to allow Luna some snuggle time with mommy before carrying her upstairs to sequester her up in the office over night.  I hate that my wife is having to go through this, especially considering like a week and a half before I had the exact same thing happen to me… and my cat bite healed just fine.  I guess after a couple decades of having cats, it was bound to happen to one of us.  I just wish it had happened to me, because I am used to being malfunctioning.

Battered Paw

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The last twenty four hours has been interesting for a few reasons…  most of them not terribly good.  A few days back I introduced you to Luna, and to say her integration into our family has not been going swimmingly is an understatement.  She is quite possibly one of the sweetest cats we have encountered… when it is human to cat interactions.  However as she has gotten more comfortable in the house, she has also become less tolerate and more willing to straight up fight our other two cats.  We are trying to work through this, but occasionally one of us has to try and break up a fight.  Yesterday my wife attempted to break up one of those fights by trying to remove our youngest from the situation.  In a highly stressed and freaked out state Kenzie bit the shit out of her hand.  Now this same sequence of events had happened a few weeks earlier to me… but this time Luna bit me.  For me everything seemed to be fine once I stopped the bleeding because four puncture wounds can really produce a lot of blood.  For my wife however she is having some adverse effects… namely that her hand is swollen, red and fevered.  Yesterday after work she went to an urgent care place here in town, and they too were concerned giving her a shot of antibiotics, and a ten day course.  They also drew a boundary around the effected area saying, if the redness breaks this line… to get to the emergency room because my wife will need a course of IV antibiotics.

Needless to say I am now doing a lot of things for her, given that it is painful to grip anything in her primary hand.  I’ve latched a couple of bras and opened a lot of pill bottles and pretty much anything else that requires grip strength.  I would post a picture of her poor battered “paw” but honestly I am not sure the comfort level folks have with seeing injuries.  When I posted my knee, it looked questionable but there were no open wounds.  This on the other hand feels like it would cross some invisible internet line.  Needless to say it looks bad, and thanks to the irregular line around it…  and the swollen nature of the area… it kinda reminds me of a jellyfish.  On the Luna front, what is ultimately happening is that we have built her a little suite of sorts in my wife’s office with litter, food and water and some comfy places to chill.  She is ultimately staying there when we go to bed around midnight, and then getting back out when we are physically home and able to intervene if needed.  The problem with this is that when I let her out each night she is starved for attention, and it just makes me feel horrible for doing it.  That said I don’t want either side of this squabble to injure themselves further.  Both Luna and Kenzie/Allie have several battle scars already from the past scuffles.  Nothing yet that needs a trip to the vet thankfully, but still I don’t want to encourage more unsupervised “encounters”.  Additionally when we are at home we try and make sure there is one of us on each floor of the house… so that there are clear safe zones that they can stay away from each other.  I just am not sure how we get past this current situation and get to one where they at least tolerate being in the same room…  if not hopefully someday are friends.

Battered Paw

As far as the game goes, last night was a night of doing so many World Quests.  Early in the evening I unlocked a set of quests… the first was to do 30 World Quests, and the second was to collect 30 Demonic Runes.  Somehow I managed to actually complete both of these last night during my extended play session.  With my wife in her current injured state I purposefully tried not to get into anything that I could not also get out of rapidly.  There are so many little things that she just needs help with at the moment, and I didn’t want to inconvenience her or my party by getting into group content.  So I spent the majority of the night running around doing these little vignettes of action, and I guess I caught it at exactly the right time…  because when I finished the first round there were a handful of new ones up popping which allowed me to complete the 30 in total.  This is not the sort of thing I will do often, as in try and do “all the quests” but it was fun to do it at least once.  One of the things that I like the most about World Quests is that I don’t have to worry about collecting a quest… and if I get interrupted having it stranded in my quest log that I will then have to abandon to pick up something else of importance.  I get to enjoy the action while it is happening and then forget about it if I need to get pulled away.  The real shocker of the night however was that I did one of the PVP quests…  admittedly without really intending to.  I was bouncing around the map and noticed that there was a nearby quest with good rewards…. and it was only after I had killed a few mobs did I realize that I was now apparently flagged.  It took a lot of deaths…  not to PVP but just to the density of the mobs, but I managed to complete it and get my shiny bauble.  All in all it seems like these are a way more reasonable and enjoyable form of potential PVP for me…  it is doing an objective that has a clear reward at the end… rather than just killing players for the sake of killing players.

World Quests and the App

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World Quests and the App

More than anything for me Legion seems to be the expansion where Blizzard learned a bunch of lessons.  One of those lessons was apparently that putting a mobile game system in a desktop client… was not actually all that fun.  The Garrison system more or less was an upkeep and timer based mobile game system, designed to be fiddled with constantly, however the problem is that this same system often times prevented you from actually going out and engaging in the world.  With the advent of Order Halls, and missions… it was my ultimate fear that this system would be extremely similar.  However over the weekend at Pax West they announced the mobile client, and with it launching yesterday…  it improves this side of the game so much.  Not only do I get notifications on my phone when a mission has completed, and can then collect the rewards and queue up for another mission… it also allows me to check to see what world quests are available.  Yesterday this allowed a few of my friends and I to plan our goals for the evening, of knocking out a handful of larger world quests before diving into dungeon madness.  We saw that there were several group quests available that rewarded gear, and after dinner we gathered to knock them out.  The only negative so far is that when you are using the app it appears to log you out of the game.  It was my hope that it would be a true “companion” app like the Bungie website that allows you to fiddle with things while playing the game… and prevents you from actually having to go back to your order hall while the action is happening.  That unfortunately is not the case, which makes me wonder if there were some odd technical limitations here preventing that.

World Quests and the App

What the game really provides for me that has been lacking, is a larger shared purpose of things that I can be doing out in the world… to keep improving my character.  The World Quest system is almost exactly like Diablo 3 bounties, in that it provides a bunch of bite sized objectives that you can then complete to somehow move that needle forward.  In my case at least I am largely focused on the items that give me physical gear upgrades, or artifact power… but I am certain after time I will begin caring about order resources as well.  Essentially it is Garrison missions… but turned into fun combat missions where YOU are the person actually going out into the world and doing things rather than simply commanding from a table.  Ultimately to keep me engaged a game needs to function in two different ways.  Firstly it needs to provide me a constant source of things I can do by myself to keep feeling like I am progressing.  I can’t handle constant interaction, and there are large swaths of time where I need to quietly do my own thing.  World Quests give me this option because there is a constantly regenerating source of new missions popping up that I can go after.  A game also needs to give me both small and large group play that lets me spend time doing relevant stuff with my friends, and so far the dungeons have been this… and I am sure at some point in the near future raids will provide the large group interaction.  So long as the game can keep moving these paths forward…. and does not for some reason decide to let one simply die, I might be happy here for a long while.

World Quests and the App

Last night something odd happened.  We were wrapping up a set of world quests when we got a message stating that “Azeroth itself recoils as <name> unleashes an ancient evil.  Kosumoth the Hungering walks the land once more…”.  Ashgar quickly looked this up and found that it is apparently a world boss that spawns in the Eye of Azshara sub zone, just to the south of Dalaran.  I finished my combat, and hearthed to Dalaran and then took a leap of faith… hoping that the Goblin Glider would be able to get me to the Island.  There were a few tense moments as my fatigue bar managed to get down to 15 seconds… before reversing course completely as I seemed to be through the dangerous area.  I landed just feet away from the flight path, which I ran over and grabbed… but by the time I got there the boss was apparently dead.  It seems like the world boss is one of the minions of the old gods, hanging out in the middle of the Island.  From everything I am reading it seems extremely puggable, and has a chance of dropping both an underwater mount and a pet…. though from the grumblings last night over say in the area it seems like nobody actually got either.  On some servers friends over twitter were talking about it destabilizing the zone, to the point where the flight master was not responding.  Thankfully my hearthstone for Dalaran was up, so I simply hearthed out to move on about my business.  However it seemed like this event spawned on all of the servers at the same time, which is an interesting new dynamic if that is the case.