Piers Anthony

... real eldritch material in this book that I always kind of glossed over before because I immediately metabolized it as part of this high fantasy...

You know, like I grew up in a Tolkien derivative world, so I read Dragonlance and Piers Anthony, to name a very bad example.

Sword of Shannara, Terry Brooks, is that his name? I read all that-

Mm-hmm

I believe it's in, again, Dangerous Visions.

He talks about Piers Anthony and how he gave him some pointers as to how he thought the story should go, and Anthony was, like, happy to kind of take some of that on, but not so happy about other things.

Basically, with all respect, "Arlen, fuck off." And like, Ellison was kind of pleased by that.

For the most part, I feel like he took a hands-off approach, but I also feel like some of these stories are more consequential than others, and some of them maybe are the perfect length, and some of them are like, "Yeah, maybe I wish this was longer" or, "Maybe I don't wish it's longer, but, like, it's too short to really be of consequence anyway." And this one, I just feel like it belongs somewhere where it could be more, but it's-

That's a series.

I gotta put in some serious effort here and actually deliver something that'll kick people in the arse." I read, so far, a few of the Again, Dangerous Visions stories.

I've read the Joanna Russ story, which I thought was really interesting, and I read the Piers Anthony story, which was kinda simplistic but kinda cool, I guess.

I don't know.

And it had been absolutely amazing that they had needed all that.

And so I share in the book this story of Piers Anthony, this science fiction writer.

And it's a great story, so I'll give it away here.

But Piers Anthony has a story about how there are these – Different men and women, I guess they're only men in the book, but who have to embody death.

They take on the role of death.

And so it's their jobs to go collect the souls of people who've passed.

I love...

this exists in exactly the same way on this show and on the Piers Anthony show with Joel, where it's just like, I'm just, I'm the extremely online one.

So that's fine.

Like, like bring it at me.

That was the whole, the whole thing, and we read "The Odyssey." Uh, I, I, I really enjoy just about everything about this mytholo- mythological world.

I would say fifth, sixth grade is when my dad introduced me to, uh, Piers Anthony fantasy books.

Oh, sure.

And I think for me, it was fantasy before mythology.