Piers Anthony

Piers Anthony (born Piers Anthony Dillingham Jacob, August 6, 1934, Oxford, England) is one of the most prolific working American science fiction and fantasy authors of the past sixty years, with more than one hundred sixty published novels across roughly two dozen series and seven decades of continuous publication. He moved with his family to the United States as a young child and has lived for many years in central Florida, where he runs his own publishing company Hi Piers and has maintained a famously detailed monthly newsletter to his readers since the 1980s.

His debut novel Chthon (1967) was nominated for both the Hugo and Nebula Awards and was followed by the sequels Phthor and Plasm. The Of Man and Manta trilogy (Omnivore, Orn, and Ox) explores food chains, evolution, and interspecies cooperation across three contrasting alien ecologies, and Macroscope (1969) is a Hugo-nominated standalone novel about a consciousness-expanding telescope that can read galactic-scale cultural patterns. His Cluster series of five novels (Cluster, Chaining the Lady, Kirlian Quest, Thousandstar, and Viscous Circle) follows a Kirlian-aura transfer technology that lets minds inhabit alien bodies across the galaxy.

His best-known work is the Xanth fantasy series, a long-running comic fantasy set in a magical analog of Florida shaped like the Florida peninsula, beginning with A Spell for Chameleon (1977, winner of the August Derleth Fantasy Award), The Source of Magic, and Castle Roogna. The series has run to more than forty volumes and is one of the longest sustained fantasy series in print. His other long-running series include the Apprentice Adept (the Split Infinity trilogy and its sequels), Incarnations of Immortality (seven volumes beginning with On a Pale Horse), Bio of a Space Tyrant (five volumes), the Mode series, and the Battle Circle post-apocalyptic trilogy. He has been an early advocate for indie and electronic publishing and maintains one of the longest continuously-run online evaluations of small-press and electronic publishers under the title Internet Publishing on his website.

A note from Richard: I think I have read more of Piers Anthony's books than any other author. The Of Man and Manta trilogy (Omnivore, Orn, and Ox) really caught my attention. The first three Xanth novels are incredible. The Chthon trilogy (Chthon and the two novels that go with it) is wonderful, and the Cluster series, which I think is five novels, is one of the best things he has done. I have read Macroscope probably three or four times over the years. Unfortunately, Macroscope is so dated now that it is almost unreadable. The premise still works, but the surface details of the world around the characters have aged badly.