Politician

This review is for whole series -- engrossing characters and unfortunately probable world building. Absolutely the plot and the protagonist sucks you right in and goes nonstop through all 6 books.

I am a fan of Piers Anthony; but, reader beware -- this ain't no Xanth. Much more intense situations. "Caligula of the stars" on one of the excerpts is a very apt description for some disturbing portions in series; definitely for adults with actions and memories graphic/explicit as to sex, violence, rape and even child molesting.

In this third installment of the Space Tyrant biography, our hero, Hope Hubris, gets kidnapped and memory-wiped in an effort to cause him to lose the election for President of Jupiter. Of course, the plot fails and Hope wins the popular election for President. Of course, nothing's ever quite that easy for our hero...

Unfortunately, Piers starts to fall into his old ways again. There's a few pages of interesting banter and back-and-forth between Thorley and Hope. Then things start to devolve. Piers replicates the USA on Jupiter but instead of providing real state names the states are referred to by their mottos: Florida == Sunshine; California == Golden; New Hampshire == Granite. And then within Sunshine, Piers mangles the city names: Ami show more for Miami, Hassee for Tallahassee, Ybor for... something. I still haven't figured that out. And then there's Ganymede with it's Jupiterian base called Tanamo - for Guantanamo. It's that kind of shortcut taking that frustrates me about the later books in Piers' series. He starts off with a relatively good concept and then gets lazy with it and falls back to his old Xanth-like ways. He did that with the Incarnations of Immortality, the Adept Series, and the Space Tyrant series.

Of course, I'll finish off the series but my hopes are fading quickly.... show less

I liked this as a teen, but re-reading it some decades later I found myself unable to finish it. Liked the initial set up and the shout out to some basic cryptography, even like the (very) thinly veiled analogies to 80s geopolitics, but I felt the way the characters acted and talked was too unbelievable for me.

I knew from the start that the alleged SF setting was a thin veneer over our contemporary world, but this book is where it jumps the shark. Our hero goes on a tour of the United States of Jupiter, which is exactly like the USA in both political and geographical details. These correspondences were okay in the first two books, where they stayed in the background of an otherwise interesting story, but here they take center stage and far too much words are wasted on this assault on the reader's credulity.

This is the third book in the Bio of a Space Tyrant series (following Refugee and Mercenary). I picked this series up on a whim when it was cheap in a bookstore sale, and liked the first two books, although the first was quite grim and the second a little odd. This book isn't as strong as the other two, and it took longer to read than usual because of that... I guess the plot just seemed even harder to believe than the others in the series.

http://www.stillhq.com/book/Piers_Anthony/Bio_of_a_Space_Tyrant_Politician.html

#379 in our old book database. Not rated.

BIO OF A SPACE TYRANT