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A review by sarapittock
And Eternity by Piers Anthony
2.0
Back in high school, I read Piers Anthony’s And Enternity. I don’t remember much about what I thought about it, except that I was incredibly irked at the ending. Afterall, it slammed in the face of everything I believed. Nowadays the ending isn’t that irksome, it’s all the events that lead up to it. The God of And Enternity is a clockmaker god, one who has turned in on himself and abandoned the rest of the world. The Incarnations must elect a new god to take his place, but they must find one even the Incarnation of Evil will approve of. I realize now that this fictional god isn’t the same one I believe in, so that aspect of the book doesn’t bother me. Anthony sets out to remake Heaven into a better place for basically good people, but his logic is flawed.
I will give Anthony credit for creating vibrant, mostly well-rounded lady characters for this book. Orlene, a recent suicide, has legitimate emotional baggage rather than the usual “Oh, I’m overly emotional because of my ovaries” that I found in With A Tangled Skein and Being A Green Mother. Jolie is a refreshingly wise ghost, having..uh…died through several centuries. Vita I liked at first, as I have a soft-spot for rough-and-tumble characters. She’s a runaway and a kid prostitute, caught in the middle of sex trafficking, but managing to come off as strong and independent. Well, at least she does until she meets the judge.
After that point, she becomes the stomach-curdling vixen of every pedophile’s dream, and the judge secretly fantasizes about bedding underage girls. Then they hook up, with two ghosts sharing Vita’s body eventually deciding it’s okay because it’s “consensual.” If Anthony’s point is to prove that all people are basically good, this is NOT the way to do it.
Then there’s the scene where the Incarnation of Night, or Nox, turns Orlene into a man, causing her to lust after Jolie and nearly rape her. Orlene has a revelation that men are helpless against women’s wiles and their violence is just natural/em>, and can’t be helped. I gagged.
One refreshing scene came soon after, in which Nox had our heroes reason between different creation myths: Creationism and Evolutionism. Reconciling the two isn’t really news today, but it might have been when Anthony published this book, so he gets points for that. In my opinion, it doesn’t redeem the rest of the book by a long shot.
I will give Anthony credit for creating vibrant, mostly well-rounded lady characters for this book. Orlene, a recent suicide, has legitimate emotional baggage rather than the usual “Oh, I’m overly emotional because of my ovaries” that I found in With A Tangled Skein and Being A Green Mother. Jolie is a refreshingly wise ghost, having..uh…died through several centuries. Vita I liked at first, as I have a soft-spot for rough-and-tumble characters. She’s a runaway and a kid prostitute, caught in the middle of sex trafficking, but managing to come off as strong and independent. Well, at least she does until she meets the judge.
After that point, she becomes the stomach-curdling vixen of every pedophile’s dream, and the judge secretly fantasizes about bedding underage girls. Then they hook up, with two ghosts sharing Vita’s body eventually deciding it’s okay because it’s “consensual.” If Anthony’s point is to prove that all people are basically good, this is NOT the way to do it.
Then there’s the scene where the Incarnation of Night, or Nox, turns Orlene into a man, causing her to lust after Jolie and nearly rape her. Orlene has a revelation that men are helpless against women’s wiles and their violence is just natural/em>, and can’t be helped. I gagged.
One refreshing scene came soon after, in which Nox had our heroes reason between different creation myths: Creationism and Evolutionism. Reconciling the two isn’t really news today, but it might have been when Anthony published this book, so he gets points for that. In my opinion, it doesn’t redeem the rest of the book by a long shot.