Must Read Authors - Day 16 - Piers Anthony by Melanie

Welcome to 30 Days of Must Read Authors! Every day throughout June one of our VIPers (Jenn, Susan Or Melanie) with occasional comments from the others will present one of their favorite authors and the series or series'  they recommend! Hopefully you will find some new books and new authors to love!

Day 16 - Piers Anthony - from Melanie

Author name:​ Piers Anthony
Genre(s) they write:  Science Fiction / Fantasy​

How I found the author:  My dad read "Out of Phaze" that he randomly found as a new release at the library. He then shared the book with me. This is technically book 4 in the Apprentice Adept series but at the time it was being released as book one in a new series (and is set years later than the original ones).

Why people should read​:  I haven't ever read another series like this one. Even though it is one of the least popular of his series with only 7 books (Xanth for example has 42), it is the only series of his that I ever really connected with. I tried a few of the others - but there is something different about these. The basic premise of alternate or parallel worlds has been done many times - but none quite like this. 

Recommended Series : The Apprentice Adept Series. As I stated in the into I actually started this series at book 4.  Books 4 through 7 are in fact a series in their own rights with books 1 through 3 acting as another complete series in its own right, although they do definitely all work as one complete set with the first books following one generation and the next four following the second.  The series is split between two worlds, one based in science, and the other in magic. Each world mirrors the other in its own way for the most part. Sometimes a death would cause a slight chance, or in the science based side people could come in from off world, but in the end it all evens out. 

The first three books the worlds are very joined with a lot of communication between the two, the second series they worlds have been separated (for the greater good) but I think everyone knows how that goes. 

I have very old copies of these books, as my dad and I acquired them over the years because they were great to reread, but I was sad to see that on Amazon only the first part of the series (books 1-3 were available as eBooks).  The other parts are available in print, so I am assuming that the publisher, for whatever reason, didn't deem the series popular enough to bother with which I think is awful and it almost made me pull this article because you can't easily get them all, but I still wanted to share it... so I did!

Conclusion: As you can probably tell if you check out his work on Amazon, Piers Anthony loves titles with a bit of wordplay. I know a lot of people loved his Xanth series, but although I did try all the other series at some point or another, this is the only one I really loved.

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