100 Things #8

[sholio]

100 Things: 100 favorite scenes from anything (books, movies, TV, fanfic, etc)

Scene #8: Walking on clouds from "Centaur Aisle" (I think) by Piers Anthony

When I was a kid, the way I related to the author Piers Anthony followed a trajectory that will probably be familiar to a lot of you who are about my age. *g* I discovered the Xanth books when I was pretty young, loved them, read a number of other things he'd written (with reactions ranging from of "oh, that was kind of neat" to "WHAT did I just READ?!") and then, as I got a little older, started to hit the OH PIERS ANTHONY NO point, when I realized that his attitudes towards women (among other things ... but mainly women), as expressed in his books, are really really bizarre and not in a good way. (To give you some idea, there is one character in the Xanth books whose monthly "cycle" causes her to transition from being beautiful, stupid and submissive at one extreme, to ugly, smart and combative at the other. In another of his books -- I don't think this was a Xanth book -- one of the female characters accidentally experiences a magical genderswap and, as soon as she becomes male, is seized with lust for her female traveling companion and has to be restrained from raping her, due to the sudden influx of testosterone. These are but two examples in a VERY LONG LIST. I'm not attempting to suggest he's a bad person necessarily -- apparently he does a lot to encourage new authors and could be quite a nice guy for all I know -- but the way that his books handle women ... agh. Even when I was in my staunchly antifeminist teenage years, it skeeved me in a major way; I hesitate to imagine how I'd react now, but throwing the book across the room would probably be a good start.)

But still, having read these books at a formative age, there are a few things that stuck with me -- they really were very inventive and full of neat concepts that resonated with my 8-year-old self, and one of those scenes that I sometimes think about is a sequence that I'm pretty sure comes from the Xanth novel "Centaur Aisle", in which the characters had to get from one place to another, and did it by walking on clouds. They used a magical salve that would cause any treated part of the body to interact with clouds as if the clouds were solid. They rubbed it on their feet, obviously, and also on their hands so that they could catch themselves if they stumbled, because it's a loooong way down. And, because clouds are moving and reshaping all the time, they had to be careful that the particular part of the cloud they were on didn't wisp away to nothing while they were on it, leaving them with nothing underfoot.

There was something very compelling about the way that the whole scene was -- well, realistic is not really the right word, but at least for me as a kid, it did a wonderful, very visceral job of capturing the exciting, slightly chilly, beautiful-but-scary feeling of standing on a cloud, with all that space under your feet and the slightly unsettling awareness that the cloud is only solid when it touches certain parts of your body. I still think about it when I have an opportunity to look down on clouds from above (as from an airplane or a mountain) and I can't help imagining standing on them, and walking quickly just in case your particular cloud starts to disintegrate underfoot.

Comments

[meridian_rose]

I too read Anthony in my teen years, a lot of Xanth and the Incarnations of Immortality series. But trying to re-read them now...ugh. There are some good characters and scenes and clever puns and interesting ideas but the misogyny burns. I loved the idea of people taking on offices of what Pratchett certainly calls 'anthropomorphic personifications' - Death, Nature, Time, etc., but even "On a Pale Horse" was a disappointment when I re-read it.

I dare not re-read the final Incarnations book. Feminist, pagan, me has fond memories the book gave non-pagan, not truly feminist me; the male who has the office of God and has done nothing but admire his own reflection for centuries is deposed by a triumvirate of women. To me this suggests the displacing of the patriarchy by the return of the triple Goddess. However if I read it again, I'm sure there'd be something in there about how it had to be three women because no woman can possibly no the job that one man can (or something equally rage inducing).

So I sympathise. And I remember this scene too, one of those fun moments that sticks in the mind :D

[sholio]

I loved the Incarnations of Immortality a lot -- I think it was my favorite Piers Anthony series for a while, since Xanth had basically started sucking by that point. I still remember the general concept of the series with a great deal of fondness (it really is a cool idea!) but I don't want to wreck my fond memories by rereading the books now.

[torachan]

Oh man, Xanth! Talk about stuff I would never, ever want to reread and taint my fond memories. I honestly never even reached the OH PIERS ANTHONY NO point while I was still reading his books. I stopped reading Xanth because it was somewhere around the twenty-fifth book in the series and I was just like, this is getting old. I remember loving Xanth so much (I even had a Xanth PC game!) and eagerly awaiting each new book. I read a ton of his other books, too, and loved them all. But I know there is sooooo much skeevy stuff in there that I wouldn't be able to enjoy any of it now.

[sholio]

Talk about stuff I would never, ever want to reread and taint my fond memories.

LOL ... yes, that, exactly. XD I do still have fond memories of a lot of it, but I think that one is best left in the past.