Who Goes There?

Piers Anthony is a totally uncontroversial and universally beloved author whose genre fiction, often aimed at a younger audience, has inspired generations of readers with wholesome Christian values. Whereas some fantasy authors are content to rely on gore and fanservice to boost sales, Anthony, in the more than half-century that he’s been active, would surely never stoop so low as to pander to a horny and passively misogynistic base of teen boys with boobs as the carrot at the end of the stick!

I cannot keep doing this.

Look, I know that for people of a certain age (i.e., people old enough to have bought Titanic on VHS), Anthony may or may not have been a part of their formative years as young impressionable readers—ya know, when they were not old enough to have acquired taste yet. With that said I have to wonder how promising a guy can be whose books have such lovely titles as Roc and a Hard Place (very funny, Piers) and The Color of Her Panties (I feel dirty just for typing this one). And then there’s the one ecounter I had with Anthony prior to all this, which was “In the Barn,” his story for Again, Dangerous Visions, one of the most disgusting pieces of writing I’ve ever come across. I’ve read Blood Meridian and American Psycho, and I will gladly take those (which are, after all, pretty great novels) over “In the Barn.” When something is compared to “In the Barn” it should serve as your cue to run in the opposite direction. Not a great first impression.

Sos the Rope was Anthony’s second novel, and by this point he was a Hugo finalist for his first novel, Chthon, which everyone I know loathes; well somebody must’ve liked it. I try to be the optimist, but assuming the quality doesn’t change then Sos the Rope looks to be the first bad serial I’ve covered for this site, which I get was inevitable; there are more bad serials than good. Oh, but how bad can it be? It’s not as bad as “In the Barn,” but…

Placing Coordinates

Part 1 was published in the July 1968 issue of The Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction, which is on the Archive. I advise against downloading this one as for some reason the PDF compression messes up this particular issue pretty badly; so I went and used the print copy I already had! Although, as if to warn me of what I was in for, the front cover nearly completely tore off and had to be taped together. There is a somewhat recent paperback edition from Planet Stories (not the magazine), but if you’re feeling brave and wanna read the whole Battle Circle trilogy, you can! There’s an omnibus containing all three novels (which are mercifully short) and while out of print it can be found used for pretty cheap. If you daaaaare.

Enhancing Image

We start with the most confusing of dynamics, in which two men have the same name—Sol—and fight over who gets to keep the name. We have Sol the sword and Sol of all weapons, with the latter proving to be the more skilled warrior and robbing the first Sol of his name and weapon. Let’s retrace our steps a bit. In this far future, adult males in this part of the world base their livelihoods on their ability to beat others in what are called battle circles, “heart of the world’s culture.” The rules are simple: whoever gets thrown outside the circle loses. There are many reasons for these fights and indeed they mirror somewhat the duels noblemen would have in olden times, although from what I can gather fights in the battle circle tend to not be fatal. A man has his name, which apparently he can change in much the way we change shoes (put a pin in this one), and his weapon of choice, which becomes part of his name. Thus, if your weapon is the sword (never mind if it’s a short sword, long sword, etc.), your name might be Sol the sword; or in the case of the Sol who wins the fight at the story’s opening, you’re a jack of all trades who goes by Sol of all weapons.

I have too many questions, but we’ll get to some of those.

Sol, because he’s such a nice guy, not only gives the former Sol a new name but also recruits him to be his right-hand man, despite being weaponless temporarily. Sol wants to build an empire, recruiting dozens of men over a span of months to form a tribe that in time will hopefully form a new civilization; the criterion for recruits is trial by combat. The former Sol is now Sos, and the two men are quickly joined by a woman residing at the hostel they fought at, who “marries” Sol and takes on his status as well as the name of Sola, the “a” at the end denoting her as Sol’s property. There isn’t even a ceremony for a marriage; only a bracelet is required, and it can be removed presumably with the husband’s consent at any time.

Before I go on a rant about how marriage works and how women are treated in the world of the novel, I do wanna give Anthony a point for bending genres here a bit—in the spirit of Jack Vance of all people. Reading the opening stretch, you may think that Sos the Rope is a fantasy novel not too removed from the likes of Vance and Robert E. Howard, but like Vance at times it soon reveals itself to be science fiction masquerading as fantasy, the setting being a post-apocalyptic America a good century after some vague nuclear holocaust. Mankind has devolved back to the stone age, with the only spots of civilization (as far as we know) being hostels that are scattered throughout the land and which are run by “the crazies,” people who somehow are able to remember (probably by way of an oral or written tradition) what the beforetimes were like; but these people keep themselves apart from the nomads who roam the landscape alone or in small groups. The nomads themselves are good survivors but not much skilled otherwise.

Anyway, Sola iss clearly hitched to Sol for his status as future emperor and not because she magically thinks he’s a nice guy; the two do not even seem to like each other much as people, never mind as partners. Sos is frustrated by this, in part because he’s very obviously horny over Sola but is unable to bed her because to bed another man’s wife would be dishonorable. “Could sex mean so much?” A funny question! Actually I have a few questions of my own, such as: If all it takes to change partners is a changing of bracelets then how come Sos doesn’t ask Sol if they could switch up every now and again? It’s not like there’s a signed contract for the marriage. Come to think of it, given the tribal nature of so much of humanity, how come there’s no plural marriage? We have something of a love triangle here (really a lust triangle, since no reasonable person can suppose any of the three parties are in love with each other) whose tension could be resolved by Sos and Sol agreeing to share Sola—with her consent, of course. Why does Sola agree to marry Sol now and not much later when he has proven himself as a leader more? I assume this is so that she doesn’t look like even more of an opportunist than she already does, which still does not help much.

A few more questions not strictly related to the interpersonal conflict of the novel but which I think are worth asking, such as: So women, when hitched, take the names of their husbands and simply add a letter to the end. What if there was same-sex marriage? What if two men got married? Would their names change? There seems to be a pattern that all the adult males have monosyllables for names. What if two women got married? This one is doubly vexing because as far as I can make out, women literally do not have names in the world of the novel if they’re not hitched to some guy. How does that work? How would anything in the legal realm get done here? How would there be a transference of property without names or even agreement in writing? Is there such a thing as property aside from what people are able to carry on their backs? The answer to that last one is probably “no.” No wonder civilization is in ruins, without the concept of property outside the micro scale (for the socialists in the crowd who are wondering, there does not seem to be an overarching government that would allocate land) and with the vast majority of the populace being illiterate.

The misogynistic implications—no, never mind, I wouldn’t even say implications—simply the misogyny deeply embedded in the novel is impossible for me to get around, even as someone who tends to be apologetic with misogynistic writing in old SFF. I know sexism is a problem that has to be called out as such, but I also understand that people from different places and times are often writing under different personal and economic circumstances than what someone reading in [CURRENT YEAR] would have personal context for. The rampant woman-hating in Anthony’s novel is not something I can excuse because not only does it badly skew our understanding of one of the main characters but it also contributes to some incredibly sloppy worldbuilding, such that the novel is built on a shaky foundation of misogyny. Sola is the most rounded character of the trio, even more than Sos (ya know, the protagonist), but she also acts as the malicious temptress who repeatedly and not so subtly tries coaxing Sos into doing something that he’ll most likely regret.

A pet peeve I have with modern reviewers is when they seem to think that a female character being physically active in a narrative must mean then that said female character is well-written. With all due respect to these people, because some of them really are astute critics, this is a lousy line of thinking when it comes to character writing. Sola lacks even a hint of interior life; her goals are all external in that they’re physical, which are a) to one day rule an empire as Sol’s wife/property, and b) to get her pussy licked. Sadly (for both Sola and the reader) these two goals are mutually exclusive, for a reason I have the misfortune of knowing. It’s time to get into spoilers, but I do wanna make one more criticism that may not be as much of a deal-breaker for some people: the action is somewhat boring. I don’t know what Anthony’s status as a writer of action scenes is, but whenever there’s a battle circle fight (and there are a few in the back end of Part 1), my eyes glaze over. Our Heroes™ also have run-ins with creatures of the wasteland such as killer shrews (yeah) and poisonous white moths that are little better to read about. Still better than some of the dialogue, which threatened to kill me.

Okay, enough fucking around, let’s get to spoilers.

There Be Spoilers Here

Particularly I wanna talk about a section in the middle when Sol is out of commission, having been bitten by one of the aforementioned white moths and with Sos having to carry him. It’s here, when the trio are in the badlands (later to serve as a training ground for men in Sol’s tribe), that the sexual tension between Sos and Sola reaches painful levels. A question that had been simmering in our minds (both mine and Sos’s) is why Sola and Sol agree to stay together despite being like oil and water; at first Sos thinks it’s that they’re dynamite in the sack, but it turns out there would not even be a fizzle in their bed. Undressing an unconscious Sol at one point, Sos and Sola discover to their horror that something is wrong with Sol’s junk. “Sol would never be a father. No wonder he sought success in his own lifetime. There would be no sons to follow him.” There’s the implication that Sol is a eunich, although I like to think his cock just looks really funny. In a show of mercy Anthony refrains from describing Sol’s deformity in detail; he also spares us of having to read the inevitable sex scene between Sos and Sola (the latter all but blackmailing the former into it), although that probably has more to do with editorial precaution than Anthony’s own.

For a time Sos is basically the one running the show, and after the trio’s encounter with the shrews (but why shrews) they start recruiting men deemed able enough to join the tribe. Like I said, trial by combat. Sos is intelligent and physically attractive enough to catch the eye of several women (who, being unmarried, are nameless), but turns them down because he is still weaponless; he also has his eyes set on Sola still, in spite of his better judgment. “Possession of a woman was the other half of manhood,” (ech) and clearly Sos’s lack of a weapon would be a metaphor for his lack of manhood (as in his dick). I do appreciate the irony of Sos being quite capable as both a fighter and lover despite being weaponless while Sol, the warrior who can do well with any weapon, is impotent; it’s a shame that this is buried under a shit-colored pile of male chauvinism and treating women as things to be owned. Why Sos has not started training with a new weapon I don’t know. We know that Sos will at some point apparently take on rope (huh) as his new weapon of choice, going by the novel’s title. I assume we’ll get more answers in the next installment, but something tells me thosse answered will be unsatisfying, not to mention there are simply too many holes in the worldbuilding for the ship to not sink.

A Step Farther Out

See you next time.