A Spell for Chameleon
Xanth was the enchanted land where magic ruled - where every citizen had a special spell only he could cast. It was a land of centaurs, dragons and basiliks.But poor Bink alone had no magic. And unless he got some - and fast - he would be exiled. The Good Magician Humfrey was convined that Bink did indeed have magic, magic as powerful as any possessed by the King or Good Magician Humfrey himself. But no one could fathom the nature of Bink's very special magic. Bink was in despair. This was worse than having no magic at all...and he would still be exiled.
Stats for nerds
3recommend
4mentions
4people
2008–2024years
75% recommend25% neutral
Mentions per year
What Hacker News says
- A Spell for Chameleon, by Piers Anthony. It's the first fantasy novel I ever read. I picked it up from the school book fair on a whim. Led to a lifelong love of fantasy and science fiction. That influenced my college choice (I picked a liberal arts school where I could learn physics and writing; planned to be an SF author). That had a big impact on my life.
The series gets sillier and sillier as it goes on. I haven't re-read it lately, but I still have the copy.
- What three [Xanth] books should I be buying?
Perhaps not the one I mentioned, since I just spoiled it for you. :) I have found that adults don't tend to like Piers Anthony's writing (it's filled with puns and adolescent soft-porn humor), but if you want to better know where your friends - who might have read Xanth books at ages at which they could better appreciate the writing style - are coming from, I would pick the first three of the series:
* A Spell for Chameleon * The Source of Magic * Castle Roogna - The Fall, by Camus. Sometime after a friend of mine killed himself, I went to the library and picked this up basically by accident. I read it in the space of an afternoon. It was the beginning of my thoughts about the meaning of death.
A Spell for Chameleon, by Piers Anthony. It was the first of my mom and dad's sf books that I chose to read for myself. It started a lifelong love affair. I outgrew the Xanth, but not the sf.
Anna Karenina, by Tolstoy. An unassailable Mount Everest in the peaks of high literature. It's a spiritual journey I've taken repeatedly over the years.
The Mind of the Maker, by Dorothy L Sayers. A meditation on the intersection between art, creativity, free will, and the Trinity. My copy is getting worn out.
The Analogical Imagination: Christian Theology and the Culture of Pluralism, by David Tracy. This book was the cap to my spiritual journey in college. It is about finding authentic experience in classics, whether they are from your own tradition or not. It is a synthesis of modern Christian (also Catholic) thought, but also about how Christianity should be mediated through lived beliefs and culture, and how people should be open to real experiences from a culture not their own.
- Again, I think it's a mistake to hold up GRRM as representative of someone who would be "shafted" if HBO were able to make GoT without his participation. That ignores the other side of the coin: all the works that could be made into other media but aren't because: the author doesn't want someone else to sully their work; the author wants too much money; no one can find the copyright holder.
It's interesting that none of the works you cite as being vulnerable are more than 12 years old. If we could agree on 12 years with a 12 year renewal, I'd happily compromise on that compared to what we have now.
Looking at Cassandra Khaw: the book you mention, Hammers On Bone, is just seven years old. So under my scheme (I allowed for the idea of renewals) maybe she'd be on her second renewal? Certainly nothing like the current system, where that book will conservatively be under copyright well into the 2100s.
But to your point: U.S. publishers sell almost a billion books per year. I'm not sure how much authors get, since the numbers seem to be different for professionally published books vs. self-published, but let's take it as $1 per copy. HoB is currently ranked 560,000th on Amazon. If we take any kind of reasonable distribution of book sales, that would have her selling <= 1,000 books per year. That means she's clearing up to $1,000 per year on that book -- certainly enough to call it "significant revenue," but also not enough to keep body and soul together on its own.
And again, I'll point out that current copyright goes far beyond the death of the author. Should we be similarly sympathetic to the children (or even grandchildren) of the author?
And as an aside: Cassandra Khaw is actually similar to Piers Anthony: the very first book in the Xanth series is currently ranked 48,000th at Amazon, but the 20th book is ranked over 1 millionth. Interestingly, the most recent book is ranked 280,000th, so better than the middle of the series, but not as good as the first book. This speaks more directly to your point than any of the examples you gave, since A Spell for Chameleon came out almost fifty years ago. And the Battle Circle omnibus edition (it was a trilogy originally) is ranked 180,000th, so better than the most recent Xanth novel.
But all of this ignores the point I originally made, which is that copyright is only secondarily for the benefit of authors. If you really want to argue for longer copyright, you have to support the idea that fewer authors would write, or write less, if copyright were shorter. That's the only justification that speaks to the intent in the constitution.
