Who Goes There?

Maybe Piers Anthony hits the spot if you’re really horny and/or are not a very discerning reader; in other words, if you’re in your teens. I am very much not in my teens anymore (although some of my peers would say 27 is still babby) so Anthony’s writing just kind of osculates between boring and repulsive for me. I hear Macroscope is supposed to be good but that’s one novel from an author who has, over the course of six decades, written dozens—many of them series entries. Speaking of which, Sos the Rope is the first entry in the Battle Circle trilogy, and having just finished the last installment I can see how it would lend itself to a sequel—not that I wanna read more. I was awfully slow finishing this, not because it was a difficult read exactly but because I didn’t like it and I kept putting it off.

Placing Coordinates

Part 3 was published in the September 1968 issue of The Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction. You can find used copies of the Battle Circle trilogy as an omnibus if you feel like it.

Enhancing Image

First things first, I cannot tell if there was a printing error in Part 2 or if Anthony somehow forgot to write a whole scene, but the recap section of Part 3 tells us about something that we are straight-up not told about in the previous installment. Last time, you may recall, Sos and Sol enter the battle circle to see who gets Sola and Soli, Sol’s wife and daughter (by way of adoption) respectively, and that is where it ended. We were not told the outcome of the fight at the end of Part 2 (indeed it ended just as the fight was about to start), but before we get to Part 3 proper we’re told that Sos had lost his fight with Sol. I was greatly confused becausse it made me think that I had somehow forgotten what had happened at the end of Part 2, but no, I did not miss anything; we’re just told about a scene in the recap that we did not get to read for ourselves. This is clearly bullshit.

Anyway, Sos lost the fight OFFSCREEN and now, in shame, he goes to “the mountain” to commit ritual suicide. I feel for him. His pet bird Stupid (still not funny) stays with him out of loyalty and sadly freezes to death as they climb the mountain, although Sos himself ultimately just loses consciousness before being rescued. It’s here that we’re introduced to the ssecond major female character of the novel and yet another reminder that Anthony cannot write about women for shit. I’m calling her Sosa now as opposed to later for the sake of my sanity, because you guessed it, she does not have a name at first. Sosa is a very short but very athletic woman who challenges Sos to be his wife, stealing his bracelet and making him work for it. I have nothing against short girls, but I have a creeping suspicion of what Anthony is trying when he repeatedly describes her as childlike and “Elfin,” and I don’t like it. I don’t like fanservice when it’s this creepy and manipulative.

Gonna go on two rants for the price of one here. The first is that I still can’t get over how fucking stupid the naming convention in this novel is. Women do not have names unless they have a husband, whereupon they take the husband’s name, just slightly altered. Is it patriarchal that the custom for marriage in Anglosphere involves the woman taking the man’s last name? Yes, but at last the woman had a name of her own to begin with. How would anything get done in the world of the novel if half the adult population is nameless and presumably unable to own or transfer property? We are told, of course, that things aren’t the same everywhere—that, for instance, things in South America are apparently not as dire; with that said, we’re given such a dim picture of life in this post-nuclear future that it actually strains one’s suspension of disbelief. I know the idea is that “the Blast” sent mankind (at least in North America) back to the stone age, with only small pockets of civilized humanity left, but women were able to carry titles even in the time of Richard III. This future society is untenable, which seems to be the point somewhat, but it’s also utterly implausible.

The other thing is that even if we’re to put the mechanics of the novel’s world aside, Anthony’s third-person narration cannot help but exhibit a profound distrust of women that goes beyond world-building. I sometimes wonder if I’m too easy on misogynistic writing in old-timey SFF, or if young readers are too harsh about such a matter; it’s fine, everyone has a different threshold. With that said, Anthony crosses my threshold repeatedly, to the point where I’m not sure what a defense of it is supposed to sound like. Early on Sos ponders what would’ve happened had that bitch Sola not entered the picture and complicated his totally platonic relationship with Sol, not even Sola in particular but the idea that a woman ruined everything. “It was not the particular girl that mattered, but her presence at the inception.” I wonder if people who complain about Robert Heinlein’s sexism (which is certainly valid to criticize, mind you) would survive if they encountered Anthony. I personally can’t stand this shit; I think it’s grotesque.

Anyway, we’re at the “hero’s lowest point” part of the narrative and so Sos, now weaponless (oh right, he gave up the rope as the result of losing his fight with Sol, ALSO SOMETHING WE WERE NOT TOLD ABOUT UNTIL AFTER THE FACT), has to regain confidence by fucking the shit out of Sosa, now his wife by getting to know the people of “the mountain,” which are not exactly crazies but who are considerably more civilized than the nomads who roam the wasteland. Sosa and others convince Sos he has to head back down the mountain, to “come back from the dead” as it were, and claim his spot as the true leader of Sol’s empire. Keep in mind that Part 3 is about twice the length of Part 2 and that despite the difference in length there’s about as much plot meat on the story’s bones; in other words there’s a lot of (bad) dialogue and not much real action here.

There Be Spoilers Here

Sos returns and meets up with some of his former homies, having done something I honestly would’ve expected to have seen earlier: go full barbarian class and adopt fists as his weapon in the battle circle. It’s a gamble, but after training Sos is really able to kick ass in the circle, gaining tribes and chipping away at Sol’s ground one battle at a time. Why Sos feels the need to do all this is not made clear, even to himself, which is something Anthony will probably elaborate on in the sequels but which I fortunately don’t have to get into. Sos’s biggest challenge once again is Bog, the big dumb club-swinger from before, who remains the best character simply by virtue of the fact that he likes hitting things and does not care about the big picture. Unfortunately their fight does not go how Sos had wanted and he ends up injuring Bog irreparably by breaking his neck accidentally. “If he survived it would be as a paralytic.” So Bog gets mercy killed.

Sos then narrowly beats Sol in their rematch, with Sol giving Sola over to Sos (as the two are still in love, God knows why) but keeping Soli. Father and daughter wander to the mountain where they may or may not be taking in by the people there. Sos thinks Sosa (whom he had left behind) will gladly accept Soli as an adopted daughter, but I have my doubts. Now if thousands of men at his disposal, both in name and in fact, Sos figuratively looks to the horizon and wonders if this empire of his will prove to save humanity or repeat the old mistakes—if he is “the hero, or the villain.” I mean clearly the villain here is Piers Anthony, but who am I to judge. The back end of Part 3 was a breezy read for me if only because the fight scenes kept going in one ear and out the other, as it were. It could just be that my deep ambivalence to the characters and nature of the novel’s world made the action uninteresting, but if I had a watch I would’ve been glancing at it.

A Step Farther Out

Can I go home now?

Thus far Sos the Rope is the worst thing I’ve reviewed for this site, narrowly beating out Lovecraft’s “The Dreams in the Witch-House” because of the length and because its woman-hating is so rabid. There are many bad serials out there, though, and covering one of those turkeys was inevitable. I went in hoping the experience would change my mind about Anthony and I have to say it really did not. For better or worse the next two entries in the Battle Circle trilogy did not see magazine publication, which means I don’t have an excuse to cover them here or to read them ever. Unfortunately, because Anthony did have a few other novels serialized early in his career, I’ll be at some point compelled (or rather coerced) to cover those…

See you next time.