Apropos of not much, I got to thinking about Piers Anthony yesterday. I actually read a fair number of his Xanth novels, before I was fifteen. I thought the puns were annoying, (sorry) but it contained centaurs and stuff, so that was cool. I was vaguely aware that there was something mildly sketchy about his issues, but since I was about thirteen, this was more exciting than off-putting.

Then I got to The Blue Adept. In the first chapter, the protagonist meets a sexy lady who he agrees to tutor in exchange for sex. (It is explained that exchanging sex for goods and services is common in their society, so that's okay!) Then he discovers that the sexy lady is actually a robot, so he overpowers her and downloads her source code to examine it-- through a port in her ear. "You raped me!" she sobs, and the protagonist reflects that this is true since he did stick an unwanted device in her orifice.

Now, this is all going from memory, since I haven't read this book since I was fourteen-ish, so I could have some details wrong, but as I recall, the sexy lady robot is programmed to be in love with our protagonist, and continues to help him out, despite the rape, but in the next chapter he finds himself on some pseudo-medieval world where a widowed Lady, in the wears-a-point-hat-with-a-wisp-on-top sense of 'lady', throws herself upon him and he decides he's in love with her, since she comes with a castle, and gets the sexy lady robot to help him out in defeating medieval-lady's enemies so that they can be married, or something.

I might have continued to read this, since it was sexier than the usual SF I got out of the library, but I discovered my baby brother reading the second book in the series, and was horrified, which made explicit to me how I felt about Anthony. I think I managed to confiscate the book from my brother. (Why yes, I totally censored the heck out of him!)

Anyway, that was pretty much the end of Piers Anthony for me, even at fourteen, except I remember my writing teacher mentioning that she didn't read SF, since someone once recommended Piers Anthony to her as an example, and I was deeply embarrassed for the genre, and tried to explain to her that he wasn't perhaps the best example.

Well, I also bear him a grudge for preventing me from discovering Pratchett for a long time, since someone once recommended Pratchett to me as "Like Piers Anthony," but that's not quite his fault.

Happy forth of July, those for whom it is happy! My first of July, (which is when us Canadians attempt to have our similar celebration ahead of time, in order to feel like we have won something) was pretty good, and I am seriously pleased to note that Dr. Henry Morgentaler has been given the Order of Canada. There are a great many people whose heads will (metaphorically, alas) explode at this.

I wanted to offer something for livelongnmarry, but I know I couldn't promise fiction, and I don't think there's much of a market for a beta reader (and it's a bit difficult to give people a sample of your beta-reading skills anyway.) Do people think there might be a market for Canadian-picking, though?

Two things I realized I forgot to mention in my review of Moon Called:

( For the record. ).

So, I'm reading "Don't Look Down," by Jennifer Crusie and Bob Mayer. I really enjoy Crusie, in general; she's got a lively appreciation of the absurd. But I really cannot figure out why this collaboration; I mean, presumably because it was a book that could only be written this way and she wanted to write it, but I cannot for the life of my figure out why. It's marketed as chicklit, (take a look at the cover), and Crusie's sections definitely carry the ball, but every time Mayer takes over there's an audible grinding of gears.

I would bet Perez' entire run of Wonder Woman that they wrote this tagging out at the POV switches, because the change in writing style is very obvious.

Digression! If you've ever ventured into Nifty.org, (and I recommend you don't) you will have discovered that there are some very distinctive differences between the stories men who write about men with men write for men, and the stories which women who write about men with men write for women. (You'd think that men and women who like man on man porn would at least have their taste in porn in common, but no!) One of the differences is a (to me) strange fondness for completely extraneous detail. What colour is someone's underwear? Hello, you're having sex! Stop caring about a underwear colour!

Back to the book at hand. In Don't Look Down, Crusie and Mayer write in a tight limited third person POV, using, respectively, the points of view of Lucy Armstrong, director, and J.T. Wilder, green beret. J.T.'s POV sections are full of details I could literally not care less about. An example: "He pulled the trigger back, a lover's caress, and the subsonic round raced down the barrel, out the suppressor, and hit Weight Lifter in the head less than a second later." Why on earth should I care about this? Unless the sentence is "He pulled the trigger back, a lover's caress, and the subsonic round raced down the barrel, took one look at the outside world and turned around to return to its snug home in the magazine," I assure you, I will assume that after pulling the trigger the bullet goes out of the gun without being told so.

Reading Pterry's Lords and Ladies, I have come across the sentence:

'So what you're saying is,' said Diamanda, loading the words into the sentence like cartridges in a chamber, 'that no-one has actually learned anything new?'*

Isn't that splendid? I hope to write a sentence like that in my life.

*For those who haven't read Lords and Ladies, she's speaking to Granny Weatherwax. For those who haven't read Pterry... actually, never mind, there's no help for you other than reading him.

I keep attempting to type "Empire of Ivory" as Age of Empires; what do you suppose this means?

In any case, the following consists nearly entirely of spoilers, so ( UNCLEAN UNCLEAN )

Via Making Light I see that Naomi Novik has won the John W Campbell Best New Writer Award at the Hugos.  This pleases me.

I just read Charlaine Harris' Grave Sight and am wondering: were the brother and sister a little incest-y, or have I sustained some kind of head injury from too much Supernatural?

For Harry Potter, book seven

( Just getting these out into the public so that I may later be wrong or right (I predict right!) about them )