Ch-ch-changes …

 

Over the course of a long career, artists will sometimes go through serious changes. 

Not all — John Wayne was still mostly playing the same character at the end of his days as you saw in Stagecoach. 

Others went from dramatic leading men to comedy roles —  Leslie Nielson was a star in Forbidden Planet, and Airplane! Bill Murray did, and is still doing, dramatic roles way past his SNL days.

Happens with painters, singers, and writers.

Look at Picasso’s portrait of his mother, done when he was sixteen, then at his Blue Period.

Had occasion to think about Piers Anthony recently, and here is another writer whose oeuvre shifted along the way.

I suspect most people who know him do so for a series of fluffy, pun-based fantasy novels in his Xanth universe. 

There are what? forty-some of these books, many of them bestsellers, that feature magic and dragons and stuff, and often, a long, rambling, afterward that ranges from his sister taking an extra turn on the tricycle as a child, to a plumber who overcharged him for a repair.

People who came to know of him through Xanth might consider him a frivolous-fantasy guy with so-so chops.  

They would be wrong.

Early on, he was one of the best science fiction writers in the biz, and his story, “In the Barn,” done for Ellison’s Again Dangerous Visions, was, at the time, such a gut-punch horror of a tale that there were people who had to put it down, unable to finish reading it.

He shifted to fluffy-fantasy for a couple reasons: It was easier to write, and he made a hell of a lot more money.

Can’t blame him for either, but it wasn’t because he lacked talent or skill.