The acceptance of violence and rejection of sex puts me in mind of an old George Carlin routine. Here’s one version: Sex and Violence
I saw a mention of her name in a list of “risqué but masterful writers you must read” and figured her books would be “oh dear, my knickers!” sort of Victorian-Era titillating prose. I think the first one of her stories I read was a “fun” necrophilia romp. Ugh. Yeah. Her stuff’s definitely rough.
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It strikes me that there’s a huge difference between a writer using pedophilia as your go-to example of a deviant person… and a writer being, themselves, a pedophile.
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“There she lusted after her lovers, whose genitals were like those of donkeys and whose emission was like that of horses.”
On another note: a lot of the comments above are about how when they were teenagers, they had no difficulty finding books with sex in them.And neither did I, but I’m not the target audience here (Personal reading habits aside, junior year in high school my English class read The World According to Garp, though not quite with administrative approval). The target audience are people living in houses full of books they they can borrow, they aren’t people already in the habit of going to the library and exploring the children’s section on their own. A lot of kids read, at most, what their teachers tell them to. Usually not even that. Unfortunately, that generally means everyone in a class has to read the same thing, which in regards to sex runs into the problem @Little_Rat brought up.
Also, real question, how many kids today can actually get to a library when/if they want to? Without a parent to drive me, I couldn’t have gotten to the public library. My schools had libraries, but I never used them after elementary school (when would I? They were only open during school when I was in class, and for anyone who had study halls on their schedule, those were held in the cafeteria).
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I’m not going to call the guy, literally, a Pedophile. But in retrospect it came up pretty often across different series, older men having sex with younger women.
I will own being a little hyperbolic in my usage of ‘deviant’. But finding a book in the ‘young adult’ section of the library which contains sex with prostate massage is ‘advanced’ if anything.
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Sorry, I didn’t mean you had; others in the thread literally called him a pedophile, which is what spurred me to comment – but I agree with you that he does tend to use the topic (and apparently other sex scenes) for shock value more often than others. But he’s definitely an author who has no qualms about mixing sex into light fantasy.
Not just shock value:
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Yes, those examples were brought up in the other link as well. Seems to me that given his sheer volume of work, two stories that involve underage characters isn’t exactly evidence to say that Mr Anthony is himself a pedophile – that’s quite a stretch and an unfounded accusation. He also writes about magic; is he a magician?
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I haven’t read all of his stuff, and haven’t read him since a teenager, but I reckon my count is at least 5 based on my hazy memories.
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It isn’t just those two stories; those are just the most graphic. An appreciative leer at objectified underage sexuality is a continuing theme throughout his work.
There are also the defence-of-pedophilia author’s notes and his habit of corresponding with imprisoned pedophiles. And there’s this:
Pedophilia is hardly an unknown thing within the SFF community, and Anthony has been waving a red flag and a flashing siren for decades.
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I remember hearing that easy access to boys was the reason that Arthur C. Clarke lived in, Ceylon, I think?
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Possible, but unconfirmed. He was openly gay, he was doing the British-expat-in-the-colonies thing, and there were rumours. But it’s uncertain to what extent the rumours were based on reality, or if they were instead motivated by homophobia.
MZ Bradley and W Breen, however: no doubt at all about those two.
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Still remember checking out Anthony’s Blue Adept from the local library when I was a younger teenager. Had some scowling old biddy librarian give me the dirtiest look she could possibly manage because of the cover when I checked it out. While I was waiting for my family to finish their selections, she slowed her checkouts to a crawl so she could continue following me around the library with her hatchet-faced glare, until I finally escaped outside to wait in the 100+ degree August heat instead.
Never went back to that library again, except to drop off that book in the overnight bin. So good job there, you old bat. Kept an avid reader away from the library based solely on your opinion of a mildly racy book cover.
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I mean, it’s one thing to write a character who is an underage prostitute. It’s another to have some variation on that character occur over and over in your work.
I gave up on Anthony with the first book of the Fractal Mode series, when he describes a female character as wearing jeans so tight that one can see every fold of her genitalia. My first thought was “jesus, that would be uncomfortable” and my second was “that’s not how jeans even WORK” and just like that all the misogyny clicked for me. I think I was 13 or 14.
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Because she was an incredible and gifted writer coming from a feminine perspective?
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To be fair, not like he’s unique in that. Throw a rock and you can find some literature written by a man about an older man having relations with a younger woman. In films, too. Woody Allen comes to mind. Some men are obsessed with bedding a young woman.
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When I was a kid you could still find BeeLine Books and other written smut. Of course, I was already a voracious reader already, but it was “forbidden” and that made it all the better. When the stuff with pictures was tame, it was an a much more debauched alternative.
From the stuff I’ve seen from him thanks to this thread, it seems pretty apparent he’s into the idea of sex with kids… You’re not conflating paedophilia with actual child molesting, by any chance?
I’m saying that there’s a huge difference between a writer expressing the voice of characters in their books and saying those things in their own voice. I don’t know Mr Anthony outside of his books, and don’t think it’s fair to assume his personal desires based on what his characters do.
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there’s a huge difference between a writer expressing the voice of characters in their books and saying those things in their own voice
Yes.
I’m not going to run out and claim that Anthony was an important and great author that everybody should read, but this tendency towards denouncing him as a pedophile because some of his characters expressed frankly sexual views really sums up why YA eschews sex. What people might find erotic and what they actually choose to do are not the same – and that’s actually something that some of his books touch on. If you can’t explore such themes in fantasy, where can you?
Throughout Anthony’s long career he has consistently put his own personal life forward, through autobiographical writings and voluminous correspondence with his fans. There’s was a moving piece on This American Life about how he helped a young fan which is well worth a listen. I don’t know the man, and I don’t love all his books, but to casually call him a pedophile on the internet is wrong.
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