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As a teen, I loved Piers Anthony’s Xanth novels. Magical creatures, happy endings and an entire world powered by puns – it was the perfect place for a budding nerd to spend her afternoons.
“Board Stiff” is the 38th book in Anthony’s popular series and marks 36 years of the fantasy author’s life spent cranking out pun after pun.
Sadly, it’s not very good.
Anthony’s books have always been a bit sexist and it doesn’t take much to figure out that he’s a dirty old man – it’s not uncommon for his older male characters to find clever ways around age restrictions so he can date an underage girl.
When it comes to sexist, thinly veiled soft-core writing, “Board Stiff” was pretty awful, even with the near-pedophilic novels factored in. On every page of the book, a female is stripping down to her bra and panties to seduce a male, or at the very least flashing an eye-full of cleavage.
The main character, Irrevelant Candy, knows she’ll make some man a great wife, but she’s too pretty, no one can concentrate on her words because she’s just too darned hot.
Once, she tried shortening her name to iCandy, which caused a bunch of disembodied eyes to follow her around and try to look at her naughty bits.
Anyway, Candy goes to get help from a wishing well, which turns her into a wooden board. Candy in board form becomes the beloved weapon of a big strong man named Ease – a dude whose magical power (everyone in Xanth has one) is for everything to be easy for him. Candy is a trusty weapon by day and whenever Ease falls asleep, she turns back into herself, except she’s naked and can’t resist making Ease stroke her naked body while he’s unconscious. Also her only goal in life is to make Ease fall in love with her, even though he is the sort of guy who tries to sleep with every woman he meets, is a bit dumb, and doesn’t know she exists.
Aside from Ease and his board, the cast of characters also includes a female basilisk-turned-human who is desperate to find a man to make her happy, a girl with anti-gravity hair whose sisters locked her in a tower because her hair was too unruly for any man to love her and the guy who ends up loving her.
But that’s Anthony’s go-to formula in his Xanth novels:
Main character feels a void in his/her life and seeks advice, the advice leads to a seemingly unconnected quest, during said quest the main character will find true love, that love will fill the main character’s void and all will live happily.
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Oh, and then they request a baby from the stork. Always.
It’s been a long time since Anthony has deviated from that formula, which is sad because some of his best novels eschew those tropes completely, including my favorite “Dragon on a Pedestal” – which stars a three-year-old girl and a baby dragon.
Another thing about the books that is becoming almost impossible to overlook is the lack of non-hetero couples. It’s very obvious that Anthony has no beef with mixed race couplings. Centaurs, skeletons, zombies, golems, merfolk, humans and a veritable host of other creatures interbreed ad nauseam. Every one of them, though, is an opposite-sex couple – even the artificial intelligences in the books have a gender and mate accordingly.
I know Anthony is an almost 80-year-old white male, but books with hetero-only relationships, women who only wear skirts, and men whose eyes glaze over when a pair of panties creeps into view is just not OK anymore.
The worst part is that Anthony is a good writer. He just seems to be stuck on a sexist, unrealistic fantasy that most people don’t want to be a part of anymore.
Board Stiff
By Piers Anthony
Published by Premier Publishing
ISBN-10: 1624670865
ISBN-13: 978-1624670862
