israel@umcp-cs.UUCP (10/15/83)
I read Piers Anthony's latest Xanth book, "Dragon on a Pedestal".
DoaP is the seventh in the Xanth trilogy(?). For those of you who
Organization: Univ. of Maryland, Computer Science Dept.
Lines: 58
don't know, the Xanth series is a sequence of books dealing with a
land called Xanth in which magic exists, and every citizen has a
magic power. The series seems to have been mainly written for
Piers Anthony to exercise his sense of humor and his puns. If
you don't like such, don't even bother with the series. Examples
of such include:
o People get most of their clothes and wearing apparel of
of bushes and trees, so you get your shoes off of a shoe-tree.
o One type of deadly creature is called a nickelpede, which is
five times as deadly as a centipede. They gouge little disks
of flesh out of you.
o a certain species of oats that grow wild, when sown, grow
nymph's bodies, beautiful but mindless. So teenage boys
always want to go out and sow their wild oats.
I found DoaP to be the best in the series. I think that around volumes
five and six they started to go downhill, but I enjoyed this book more
than I have any other, with the possible exception of the first. (Its
very hard comparing later books in a series to the first of a series,
I feel, because the first had the novelty quality that the others lack.)
DoaP is about Ivy, the three-year old child of Dor & Irene. Ivy is hit
by a forget-whorl (a spin-off (no pun intended) of the Gap Chasm's
forget-spell) and wanders away from the castle into the wilds of Xanth.
She also happens to run into the Gap dragon, who is just a child now
because he got sprayed and overdosed by water from a fountain of youth.
This may sound bad, Ivy has magician-level magic. Her talent is
enhancement, which means that proximity to Ivy increases the powers and
characteristics of people. This is all dependent on Ivy's beliefs,
though, so since she happens to believe that the Gap dragon is friendly,
strong and courageous (you know how little girls are), he actually
becomes that way. They are also accompanied by Hugo, the
mentally-deficient child of Magician Humphrey and the Gorgon.
I'll leave it at that, but also mention one other thing. In the back,
there is a note from the author thanking some readers for various
suggestions. He mentions that one reader suggested that Dor and
company use the Centaur Aisle to cross over to the author's Cluster
series and explore an Ancient site, but he replies something
like, "Alas, the gap between publishers is even greater than the gap
between genres, so such a book could never get published."
While I'm on Xanth, someone I know was examining the map of Xanth in
one of the books recently. Now Xanth looks like Florida (where Piers
Anthony lives) so she compared the sites of Xanth with an Atlas map of
Florida. It turns out that most of the castles and towns correspond to
sites in Florida. In addition, the map of Florida in her atlas is on
two pages, and the Gap Chasm (which has a forget-spell on it so people
forget it when they are not there) corresponds to the page-break
between the pages.
Anyway, enough rambling. Anyone read yet Anthony's other two new
books? They're from two new series. Care to send in a review?
--
~~~ Bruce ~~~
Computer Science Dept., University of Maryland
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