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What do you get when you take a rather witty American author, create an Fictional Counterpart of the entire state of Florida (with the small change of everyone having magical powers — a Magic Kingdom, geddit?), and fill it with various parodies of fantasy tropes (as well as literally hundreds of reader-submitted puns)?
Xanth, in a nutshell.
Xanth takes place in a small Florida-shaped realm that is sealed off from the rest of Earth. On Xanth, magic is real, with its own physical laws, often based on reader-submitted (and credited) puns. Billions, and billions of puns. For example — Pineapples? They're essentially hand grenades — based on the old military slang. Cherries (Cherry bombs) are smaller, but still dangerous. Tulips (two lips) will kiss you if you get too close. Boot Rear is a fuzzy soda that, when drunk, causes you to feel a swift kick to your bottom. And beware the Catastrophe — a plaque with half a cat stuck into it (a Cat-ass-trophy).
Yes, you're allowed to groan after reading some of those.
One important rule for Xanth is that every single native-born Xanth human has a unique talent — a magical quirk that only they can do. This can be anywhere from changing their hair color, to being able to talk to certain animals, to being able to rewind time or warp reality in their nearby vicinity. Talents are unique to the person who has them — no two talents are the same, but some are so similar that they are more or less identical.
The first book, A Spell for Chameleon, was written in 1977, and the series continues to this day, recently entering its 2nd trilogy. In typical Piers Anthony fashion, he declared the first trilogy over after the 27th book (3 Cubed, aka, 3^3, is 27). Xanth has even inspired a "fan book", a novel-length work of collaborative fiction that Piers Anthony has even mentioned positively in his official newsletter.
Xanth has long been criticized for being a novel series for young teens that does not shy away from (rather frequent) depictions of nudity and slightly sexual situations despite his character's typical younger ages, to the point that his harshest critics have called him an outright pedophile. Anthony has waved off such criticisms as being nonsense, pointing out that most teenagers do not openly talk about "naughty things" with adults but are certainly not as innocent and pure as most adults would like to think, and while his books are written for the young adult market they can be read on several levels, so whereas the youngest readers wouldn't notice anything, older readers might get the more subtle jokes.
Mr. Anthony even included such criticisms into his novels directly, with a conspiracy on Xanth called "The Adult Conspiracy" (to keep interesting things from children) — a magically enforced censorship effect affecting anyone under the age of 18 on Xanth. Strangely, this affects underwear but not nudity, which plays into Mr. Anthony's near naturist-like views on the human body (as well as a Take That to the critics who had more problems with underwear and curse words being mentioned than half naked centuar women).
Despite the fanservice, Xanth attracts a large number of female readers, due in part to the extensive and imaginative world and the fact that more than half of the main characters are assertive female protagonists. Mr. Anthony has mentioned that he gets almost 4 times more fe-mail than male-mail, and wonders if the market for fantasy / scifi novels for young women is as barren as conventional wisdom dictates.
As an interesting aside, Mr. Anthony talks frequently about his experiences in using the Linux operating system to write novels, which earned him an interview with Slashdot . Another small point is the Jenny Elf character — one of his fans' parents wrote to him to talk about her daughter being paralyzed in a car accident, she's recovered, slowly, over the years — he wrote her into the series and spends a few pages in most novels' author notes talking about how her life has been lately. He even collected his letters to Jenny in a book — ''Letters to Jenny''.
A movie based on the first Xanth novel was scheduled for release in 2008 by the same team that did Troy — but according to Mr. Anthony's newsletter at HiPiers.com no work has been done on it, and it remains in limbo. (In his most recent December 2008 newsletter, he mentions his novel series Split Infinity is (actively!) being made into an Anime, and "On a Pale Horse" is being made into a TV series, while Warner has let the option to make the Xanth movies lapse. Chances of these actually seeing the light of day are roughly the same as getting a Xanth author's note under the double-digit page count.)
The Xanth novels (32 as of this writing) contain examples of the following tropes:
- Amazing Technicolor Population: "Coloured" people, Immigrants from Earth circa the civil rights movement, whose kids (due to the rule of pun) grew up with every skintone under the sun.
- Ancient Conspiracy: The Adult Conspiracy.
- Author Appeal: Many people have accused Piers Anthony of enjoying having his younger female characters end up naked more than would be considered healthy.
- Lampshaded: The Adult Conspiracy is a magical censorship spell that prevents anyone under 18 from hearing curse words, seeing panties (nudity is still fine, however), or generally figuring out anything about sexuality. Added after a reviewer complained about nudity and sexuality in Xanth.
- Two to the Fifth takes this and just runs with it — the hero gets a 12 year old girl princess chasing after him, so he tries to let her down easy. Mistake! She's a sorceress, so she artificially ages herself long enough to force him into a love spring and er, seduce him before the artificial age magic wears off. Love springs have the side effect of forcing the two people affected by it to mate, and making it guaranteed to work. This leaves him stuck in love with her, just in time for the stork to deliver their new child...
- Oh, and the Adult Conspiracy makes an appearance as well, a few hours too late — his new "wife" forgets all the details right after the age magic wears off.
- Author Filibuster: A variant - Piers Anthony includes a chapter's long Author's Note after the end of every novel he writes, in which he talks about whatever was on his mind while he was writing the novel.
- All Myths Are True: Lots of mythology references, including some silly ones — for example, Summoning the Stork — which is literally how babies are made in Xanth: After a certain ritual, the Storks fly in a baby to the new parents.
- Body Surf
- Born Lucky: How Bink's magic talent seems to manifest itself to observers.
- Breaking The Fourth Wall: Over the course of the series, the Fourth Wall slowly deteriorates; by the fourteenth book, it's pretty much dissipated completely, probably so that Piers can use more Visual Puns...
- Changing Of The Guard
- Children Are Innocent: See above comment about the Adult Conspiracy.
- Contemptible Cover: One book has the awkward title The Color of Her Panties. (This one was Lampshaded before the book even appeared in print, which is a pretty good trick to pull off).
- Contractual Immortality: Lampshaded. Being a Main Character of a Xanth novel (see Literary Agent Hypothesis below) ensures that one will eventually get a happy ending, because that's how magic works.
- Curse
- Cute Monster Girl: Almost every non-human female is considered vastly more attractive than her male counterpart. Except for Harpies. Harpies are ugly. They prefer it that way; they work at being ugly the way human women work at being beautiful. (The few male harpies that exist are handsome, however.)
- For goblins this was actually justified, as the women were cursed to prefer nasty, ugly men, which after generations bred those traits into the species for the male goblins.
- And the curse was lifted during the "time of no magic", so there are a few male harpies, good looking harpy women, and handsome goblin men now.
- Evil Cannot Comprehend Good: In Spell For Chameleon. Trent's willingness to trust Bink with his sword while he sleeps convinces Bink and Chameleon that he is not really evil; an untrustworthy man would not have trusted them in turn.
- Fetish Fuel: Half Human Hybrids. Nudist Mermaids. Metallic Skinned
Android Golem Girls. Crazy Magical Curses and Items. Rolling around naked in chocolate cake frosting.
- Fractured Fairy Tale: That evil dragon? He's actually a nice guy who breathes steam and is trying to keep you from falling to your doom. The damsel in distress? Only staying captured cause she's hoping to attract a nice prince to marry her. The "evil magician"? He's a nice guy, just happens to be from the opposite political party from the current king.
- Funetik Aksent: Volev vpeak with a livp (Voles speak with a lisp). They, however, hear othersss asss having hissssing accsentsss.
- Gentle Giant: Lampshaded with Smash Ogre with Tandy saying she and the other girls don't find him scary at all
- G Rated Sex: "Summoning the Stork" is actually just hugging and kissing, naked, until the "..." appears.
- Good Is Dumb: The Dastard the genius villain who carefully calculates his every move turns good upon geeting his soul back. His talent is to have stupid ideas making him an idiot
- Half Human Hybrid: Many. There's centaurs (half-horse), nagas (half-snake), harpies (half-vulture), mermaids (half-fish), and probably several others, too. Some of them have magic that allows them to transform into fully human and fully animal forms in addition to their normal hybrid shape.
- Happily Ever After: Lampshaded. Being a Main Character of a Xanth novel (see Literary Agent Hypothesis below) ensures that one will eventually get a happy ending, because that's how magic works.
- Hurricane Of Puns: Considering their frequency, Great Red Spot of Puns might be more accurate...
- Im Not Hungry
- Incredibly Lame Pun / Stealth Pun (Your Mileage May Vary): The series thrives on these, however, they are mostly submitted by young readers, which Mr. Anthony thanks at the end of every book at the end of his author notes (which takes an entire chapter).
- Innocent Fanservice Girl: Most of the Half Human Hybrids don't wear clothing, and as a whole, nudity isn't treated as a big deal in the setting. Lampshaded by a woman who chose to become a Centaur to live with her beau: She's still getting used to the whole "no shirt" thing, but she's doing her best to fit in — with the Centaurs, that is. Most of the main female characters end up naked at least once in any given book, with little emotion given to it other than annoyance.
- Intentionally Awkward Title: The Color of Her Panties — to say nothing about the various PunnyNamed titles.
- Isle of View is another example, with Anthony warning about the possible awkwardness of saying it out loud to strangers in the Author's Note.
- Kill Me Now Or Forever Stay Your Hand: Trent with Bink and Chameleon in A Spell For Chameleon
- Lawful Stupid: Most of his heroes are Lawful Stupid. Trick one into giving his word not to oppose you and he will just watch as you commit atrocities.
- Piers Anthony believes it's right to be Lawful Stupid, as he explains in his Author's Notes.
- Like Brother And Sister: Ted and Monica. But no one knows for how long.
- Literary Agent Hypothesis: The Xanth novels are written by one of the Muses of Greek myth, and a certain writer has been sneaking copies of them to Mundania.
- Loads And Loads Of Characters: Mostly a result of the series simply being so long and spanning multiple generations of the same royal family. He also (usually) comes up with ways to keep the older characters from dying of old age.
- Love Potion: Mostly subverted. If you drink from a "love" spring, you will be compelled to
mate with summon the stork with with the next compatible mate you see. That wouldn't be too bad in itself, except that next compatible mate means "whatever creature happens to be in front of you". Centaurs, for example, were the result of the first explorers of Xanth leading their horses to drink, the magic of the spring made it work. More traditional love potions, which cause love instead of lust, also exist, but are less common.
- Magi Tek: Magical Items tend to react in very specific, predictable ways, on which civilization in Xanth has come to depend. For example, in lieu of hospitals, Xanthians keep a few healing potions in their homes.
- Mary Sue: A fair few, but nowhere as bad as the three princesses introduced later - "Rhythm", "Harmony" and "Melody". Whereas characters previously had a limited talent, which was used in a clever way to solve a plot roadblock, the three princesses have the talent to (described in-text) literally "Do Anything" by using their ~ Summonable ~ instruments. Any inventive solutions to plot roadblocks were thrown out the figurative window, as the princesses (who showcase in most books) will solve the problem by themselves with no intervention by the main character of the story.
- The moons of Ptero also count in a way, as a convenient dumping ground for pun libraries and easy character solutions, due to the presence of "alternate" plot characters and convenient havens for happy, age-inappropriate romances.
- Maybe Magic Maybe Mundane
- Meaningful Name: Many, and they're usually a Punny Name as well. For example, there's Evil Magician Murphy, whose talent is making things go wrong.
- Mermaid Problem: Just how do mermaids summon the stork anyway?
- Ms Fanservice: Several, but Demoness Metria stands out even among the others - and she knows it.
- My God What Have I Done: Jordan had a revelation along these lines when he realized he'd been Xanatos Sucker'd into bringing about Xanth's dark age.
- New Technology Is Evil: After the writer got annoyed by automated spell-checkers and a PC crash destroyed work on a novel, the evil Com-Pewter appeared in Xanth.
- No Hero To His Valet
- The Obi Wan: Humfrey.
- Offstage Villainy: "Evil" Magician Trent did many bad things as a young man, before the start of the series, but he has already reformed by the time of the first book.
- One Gender Race: Male harpies are extremely rare (and were in fact extinct for the longest time); female harpies reproduce by mating with males of other species, which always produces female offspring.
- Once Per Episode: In every book, at least one character will go to Good Magician Humfrey's castle, where they must win through three challenges in order to be able to ask him a question. (Which they must then pay for with some sort of significant service; the Good Magician's time ain't cheap.) This pattern was maintained even during a period of time when Humfrey had mysteriously vanished from Xanth.
- Our Zombies Are Different: Generally, no, Xanth's Zombies aren't different. In the seventh book, however, it's "revealed" that if you show a Zombie love and affection, they'll slowly turn more and more human, until they're nearly indistinguishable from a normal human.
- Pandering To The Base: Xanth is read mostly by hormonal teenagers (of both genders), and Piers Anthony is distinctly aware of this — and includes a weird combination of fanservice and strong female characters for both sides. See Author Appeal and Fetish Fuel, above.
- The Phoenix
- Power Perversion Potential: Hypnosis, reality warping, scrying, shapeshifting, control over your own clothing. If you can't think of any use for those, you haven't been reading the books closely enough. Then there are powers like undressing women with your eyes or making people bare. Barring an attack by evil garments, I doubt these powers will get much legitimate use.
- Pretty In Mink: In the fourth book, Irene is given a fur garment, with a silver lining sewn in.
- Real Life Writes The Plot, Tuckerization: Jenny Elf, as noted in the introduction.
- Recursive Reality: Princess Ida of Faun And Games has a baseball-sized moon orbiting her, which has another Princess Ida with her own moon, and so on.
- Reality Is Out To Lunch: The Region of Madness
- The Red Sonja: a recurring theme is women who need to be 'tamed' (or at least seriously need to grow up.)
- Running The Asylum, Sure Why Not: Readers send Piers Anthony enough suggestions in fan mail that Xanth novels now consist almost entirely of such material. Piers Anthony acknowledges these contributions in his chapter-long Author's Note at the end of every book.
- Sapient Steed
- Shallow Love Interest: Nymphs are literally the incarnation of shallow meaningless...'stork summoning'.
- Single Woman Seeks Good Man
- Sliding Scale Of Idealism Versus Cynicism: The series started out somewhere in the middle, and steadily got more and more idealistic.
- Spin Offspring: The first Xanth books starred Bink. Most of the next few starred Bink's son, Dor. After that it was Dor's daughter, Ivy, then his son, Dolph. A few involved Good Magician Humfrey's line, but we didn't know that until after the fact.
- Spock Speak: Centaurs, who are much more educated than your average human peasant.
- Super Empowering
- Superpower Lottery
- The Problem With Licensed Games: Averted. The Adventure Game based on one of the novels managed to be at least halfway decent.
- Except the novel is based off of the game that is based off the novel. It's maddeningly recursive on Your Head A Splode levels. Basically, in the novel, the protagonists are playing the game that is now out, based on the novel, making it a bit of I Wish It Were Real, as well.
- The Author's Note straightens this out: Anthony wanted to make a Xanth computer game, but lacked the expertise to do it himself. He wrote the novel to show Legend Entertainment what the Xanth game should be like, and they went and made it for him.
- Unfortunate Implications: Chameleon's talent is that she shifts from beautiful, but stupid to smart, but ugly, and back, every thirty days. In other words, a monthly cycle... (Which is also the first appearance of the recurring "Smart People Are Insufferable Jerks" theme)
- She is still considered the perfect woman by Bink, who like smart woman and beautiful women, but has had a bad history with smart and beautiful women, and doesn't trust them. He appreciates the fact that Chameleon encompasses both, but not at the same time.
- Theoretically, yes, but later books suggest he frequently goes wandering while she's in her smart/ugly phase and doesn't come back till she's shifted back.
- Well, she does tend to be a touch verbally abusive during the phases when she's more intelligent then Bink is...
- It's been specifically stated in several books that Bink likes her best in the "Dee" persona, which falls around the middle of the cycle, leaving her at average levels of beauty and intelligence.
- Welcome To The Real World: Mundania, the world outside of Xanth in which magic does not exist, is supposed to be the same place that the reader lives in. Characters sometimes travel between Mundania and Xanth. (The nature of the border between Xanth and Mundania is complicated.)
- What Kind Of Lame Power Is Heart Anyway: referred to in-story as "Spot-On-The-Wall talents"
- When Trees Attack: Tangle Trees
- Writer On Board: When the "Colored People" accidentally arrived in Xanth they were specifically treated as equals, and several pages are spent talking about this. (They're still called "colored people" — but now those colors include blue, green, red, yellow, pink, etc., etc...)
- Mr. Anthony's views on sexuality (it's not bad, and it springs into our minds a lot sooner than 18 or even 16 years old) and nudity ("Some time we'll have to discuss why the sight of a naked woman as God made her should be considered to harm a child, but that's another issue") appear as a subtext in nearly every book. Even "worse" with the nonhuman characters, who, almost as a rule, have little or no nudity taboo.
- A further writer on board thing deals with how his centaurs reject magic as obscene. This is then directly compared to humans rejecting nudity and bodily functions as obscene. (In Book 2 - The Source of Magic - for those who are about to say "WHEN?")
- Xanatos Roulette: Just about everything the Good Magician Humfrey does counts as this. He is the Magician of Information, after all.
- Xanatos Sucker: In the eighth book, there's Jordan, who not only blundered into a journey being promised as a prophesied hero. The whole thing was a huge Xanatos Gambit by Magician Ying-yang to bring Threnody to him to marry so he could become king. This brings Xanth into it's Dark Age for four hundred years, until Trent shows up.
- You Can't Fight Fate: This is essentially how Bink's talent works - no matter how you try to use magic against him, bizarre circumstances will prevent him from being hurt.
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