When the Creepiest Science Fiction Author Wrote about Refugees — IN SPACE!!!!
CW — Rape, incest, pedophilia and Piers Anthony.
The controversy surrounding Jeanine Cummins’ American Dirt is a beautiful combination of schadenfreude, deconstruction of white savior tropes, and an opportunity to promote American Latinx authors. Jeanine Cummins is not just engaging in cultural appropriation. Her book revels in misery porn. As Alisa Valdes Rodriguez states: “The problem is actually anticultural misappropriation in service to a dominant (white, wealthy, non-Latino American) class narrative that insists there is only one story of people like that, and that this singular story is pathetic, and that we, being pathetic and all, cannot be trusted to tell it ourselves because we are obviously too busy running from coyotes and la migra.”
Cummins is not the first writer to pull the refugee’s white savior shtick. She’s not even the worst. That would be Piers Anthony. Known more for “funny” fantasy novels, Anthony decided to be serious and adult with Bio of a Space Tyrant: Refugee. Set 600 years in the future, the first book is all about Latinx refugees fleeing the moon of Jupiter. Piers Anthony thought that he was writing important literature. Many years later he would declare that the book was about “the very real plight of Vietnamese and Hatian boat refugees whose horror stories barely made the US press because most of the witnesses were dead — killed by pirates. I thought this matter deserved attention, though masked as fiction so it could make it into print.” In order to buy that excuse, you would have to ignore the fact that many refugees HAVE written about their experiences including Bryan Thao Worra, Saymoukda Vongsay and Hawa Allan.
In case you are unfamiliar, Piers Anthony was the one of the most popular science fiction and fantasy writer in the 1980s. Bookstores and libraries placed his novels front and center. His target audience consisted of young boys between the ages of 10–14. He filled his fantasy world with obvious puns and naked women. In many books, he wrote explicit sex scenes. In the afterwards, he spoke directly to his readers about everything including Dungeons & Dragons and suicidal teenagers. His writing was so juvenile that fans gravitated toward other books before they could recognize his misogyny. A Reddit user even compared Anthony to a child molester grooming his readers with Xanth before bringing in the porn.
For his core audience, Bio of a Space Tyrant was a power fantasy. The protagonist, Hope Hubris begins the book not much older than the average reader. From the title, the reader knows that Hope is going to become the most powerful man in the universe. The second attraction involved aggressively stupid politics. Every planet in the Solar System corresponded to a continent. Cold War politics still exist and Anthony’s formula for universal peace is a horny know-it-all obtaining absolute power.
Happily, the first book Refugee confines its clumsy politics to racist stereotypes about Latin America including subsistence farming, wealthy landowners, illiteracy and “We Latins place importance on that sort of thing.” That sort of thing is his older sister’s virginity. Jupiter is America and the moons are Latin America.
After techno-babble and ridiculous dialogue, the book opens with a rape scene.
The older sister, Faith, “had the business of being pretty down to a science” and assumes that the raiding pirates are bringing soap. She’s also very good at screaming. Piers Anthony claimed that he had female fans. The lead pirate is wearing yellow pantaloons, a bright red sash and a buccaneer hat. Remember Anthony stated that he was writing about Vietnamese and Haitian boat people being menaced by pirates.
During Faith’s rape, Hope’s reaction is creepy, especially for those not familiar with Piers Anthony: “I looked upon the foul lusts of Satan, and felt an echo of that lust within myself.” Hope is getting horny, but he feels bad about it. He feels even worse when he watches the other pirates join in.
Cut to weeks earlier. The Hubris family is being chased from a Jupiter moon because Hope and Spirit (the other sister) defend Faith’s honor. A wealthy landowner wants to rape her and they fight him off. The landowner makes the bank foreclose on their farm. His hovercraft gets a page of description. At least half the book is devoted to Anthony’s technobabble. It serves as a distraction from prose like “Faith, eighteen years old, resented this; she claimed her social life was inhibited by the presence of a skinny fifteen year old little sibling. The vernacular term was wont to employ was less kind, and I think not completely fair, and does not become her, so I shall not render it here.”
After tedious chapters where Anthony assures the reader that all of his characters are Latin American stereotypes and nothing has changed in six hundred years, they are finally on the space bubble. Hope Hubris gets a roommate named Helse who is actually a young girl pretending to be a boy. Hope helps her use the Space Urinal and he informs the reader that he has an erection.
Say what you want about Jeanine Cummins. She probably doesn’t include a scene with piss making a 15 year old boy horny.
Finally the story catches up to Faith’s rape and everything gets much worse. Some pirates just rape the women. Other pirates threaten to kill the children in order to rape the women. One pirate disembowels Hope’s father. In fact all the adults are dead around the halfway point.
Almost as if sensing that he is going overboard on the rape, Piers Anthony stops the narrative to argue on behalf of pedophilia. Hope’s girlfriend Helse tells Hope the story of how her family sold her to a wealthy pedophile when she was eight. You might find that horrifying and disgusting, but don’t worry. Anthony is going to help you get over it with the worst Platonic dialogue in literature. As Hope objects to the story, Helse explains that everything was fine. She enjoyed it. Some men just like children. She was even sad when puberty aged her out of the concubine gig.
This would not be the last time Piers Anthony wrote characters speaking on the benefits of pedophilia.
After this discussion, Anthony seems to lose interest. Hope has sex with Helse. More pirates. Faith sells herself to a pirate ship as the comfort woman. Hope has more sex with Helse. Helse dies. Pirates rip Helse open in order to find out what she’s carrying. Anthony strongly implies that Hope and his little sister have sex, but she was possessed by Helse so everything is fine. By the end Hope and his sisters are alive. Everyone else is dead.
Cultural appropriation and refugee stories tend to encourage the same debates. Should white people write about ethnic minorities? Can white people write about refugees? Can’t refugees tell their own stories? Why do white people love misery porn? Can stories about non-refugee Latin Americans sell? Does a Puerto Rican grandmother automatically provide +2 defense against charges of racism?
Regardless of our perspectives, we should all agree on one thing. Never let Piers Anthony write and publish books about serious social issues, because that’s how you get rape fantasies in space.