Neq The Sword (Battle Circle #3)

Neq The Sword, by Piers Anthony

No month stated, 1975  Corgi Books

This final volume of the Battle Circle trilogy by Piers Anthony was only published in the UK, until it came out in the United States in 1978 as part of the collected Battle Circle paperback. It’s curious that it did not receive prior publication in the US, but having read the book I would wager a guess that it was because Neq The Sword is a bit of a mess. 

Sadly, the first quarter of the novel is great, and had me ready to declare this final volume the best entry in the trilogy. But then the book took a dark turn, after which it took a goofy turn, before coming to a close in a very muddled fashion. Given that “narcotic flowers” play a big part in the second half of the novel, my guess is that Piers Anthony was ingesting some sweet leaf of his own, and this translated into the book itself. But then I always prefer to imagine that my pulp authors are messed up on some drug or other – even cheap booze would suffice – because the only alternative is that he just turned in a bad book. 

As with Var The Stick, Neq The Sword can be read separate from first volume Sos The Rope…to a point. As with the previous book, while this one starts off for the most part self-contained, eventually we get a lot of “so this is how such and such a thing happened, and why it happened” sort of stuff, as titular Neq gradually ponders and ultimately deduces everything that happened in the previous two books, at much expense to the narrative. Oh and speaking of which – this one is the longest book in the trilogy, and a lot of it could have been cut. 

As mentioned, the first quarter of Neq The Sword is really good. Neq when we meet him has just turned 14, now a man in this post-Blast world, and he’s chosen the sword as his weapon for the battle circle. After some misadventures he ends up in the empire of Sol, from the first book. Anthony skips through the ensuing years, already documented from the perspectives of other characters in the previous books: Sol’s empire grows, and Neq becomes one of the top “sworders” in the empire, even running his own army. 

But a decade passes and everything falls apart – the empire disintigrates, thanks to the disappearance of both Sol and “The Weaponless,” aka Sos, and Neq ventures off across the blasted United States to start a new life as a nomadic warrior. He meets up with the same “crazy” who briefly assisted Sos, back in the first book, and ultimately goes off on a road trip with the crazy’s twenty-something secretary, a hotstuff blonde who made eyes at Sos back in that first book; we learn here that she was formerly “wild” herself, having grown up in the wilderness and rescued by the crazies at a young age. 

Her name is Ms. Smith, but within a few chapters she will be Neqa, as she takes on Neq’s arm bracelet – a recurring gimmick here, that the bracelet indicates that a woman belongs to a particular man, even if just for one night. But here’s the thing: Neq is a virgin, having been too anxious to take a woman (as was his right, per the battle circle rules) for all these years. And here’s the other thing: Ms. Smith, aka Neqa, is also a virgin, and we have this sort of post-Blast setup straight out of a 1940s screwball comedy where two virgins must travel together via truck across America. 

There are also elements of The Road Warrior here, what with Neq insisting he’s the only chance the crazies have of surviving outside of their high-tech world; long story short, the crazy empire has also been destroyed, which happened off-page in the previous book, and Neq has realized that the setup needs to be reinstated, otherwise the world will plunge into anarchy. So he insists on acting as security for Neqa as she drives a truck to get supplies from Helicon mountain, ie the mountain where Sos went to become a metahuman in the first book. 

This part is all pretty great, with Anthony doing a swell job of building up the rapport and eventual love between the two characters, with frequent action scenes as Neq makes short work of attacking brigands (the novel, however, is pretty anemic on the violence factor). But it ultimately becomes goofy, because despite growing close and spending nights together, these two still can’t get over their hangups and just do it already. 

It is almost laughable to read as they hold each other, and tell each other they want to, but then one of them will chicken out, or there will be a sudden brigand attack to distract them, or whatever. I mean, I can understand the skittishness on Neqa’s part, but come on – Neq is like in his mid twenties, at this point, and still a virgin…how much incentive would this guy really need? Indeed one starts to wonder if Neq just has a whole ‘nother type of hangup entirely, and just doesn’t realize it. 

For that matter, Neqa is even older than Neq, and there follows a humorous bit where Neq can’t get over how “old” she is, what with her being in her mid twenties. (To make it even better, Neq keeps referring to Neqa’s breasts in this part, saying how they look like a younger woman’s.) But at least here Anthony makes clear what was only understood in previous books: the non-crazy world is a world of youth, where boys become “men” at 14 and fathers soon after, and where a 35 year-old woman thinks of herself as a grandmother. 

That said, the prepubescent factor that sullied Var The Stick is not evident in Neq The Sword, but Anthony quite makes up for it by taking the novel in an unexpected and dark direction. In fact it gets so dark that I laughed; but long story short – Neqa does end up losing her virginity, but not to Neq. Instead, it’s to like the 50-some men in a tribe who take their turns with her as a bound Neq watches on helplessly. 

After this insane bit of nihilism, there follows an equally-good part where Neq goes out for revenge. Only problem: the brigands cut off both his hands. Problem solved: Neq finds a crazy doctor who gives Neq a sword for a hand, and also gives him pincers for his other hand. How Neq feeds himself or cleans himself is unstated, but it’s all good – he soon goes out to kill the members of the tribe, one by one, chopping them down with his sword hand. Patrick Woodroffe well illustrates this on the cover; as Neq enjoys cutting off the heads of his victims and staking them as warning to the others that their time will soon follow; note that Woodroffe also gives us the sword for a hand in his artwork. 

The only problem is, Piers Anthony has decided he wants to lecture us on how revenge never solves anything. Fine, but save the messaging for a novel that doesn’t feature a dude with a sword for a hand, okay? So we get all this crap where Neq, at much expense, realizes that nothing can bring back Neqa and etc, and etc. Oh and meanwhile the dude is still a virgin. Well anyway, in another (possibly cannabis-inspired) change of plot, Neq next decides that his reason for being will be to restore order to the post-Blast world by rebuilding Helicon, ie the high-tech underworld that was destroyed in Var The Stick. 

Oh and speaking of Var – SPOILER ALERT – Neq kills him, folks! Seriously. There’s another change of plot as Neq is tasked by the crazies with finding all these people and bringing them to the crazies to help rebuild Helicon, for reasons never adequately explained. So he has to get Tyl the stick fighter, and also Sos, and Sol, and Sola, and Sosa, and even Var – but the thing is, everyone is still under the impression that Var killed the little girl who was sent to fight him…but as readers of the previous book know, she instead ran off with Var, grew up into a teenaged beauty, then married Var and became Vara. 

Well, so much for Var, and now we have another change of pace as Neq is disgusted with himself and wants Vara to kill him – and Vara is quite ready to, given that she’s lost Var due to Neq’s “kill first, regret later” policy. But here comes Tyl, a minor character from the previous books now thrust for some reason into the limelight, who gives a lecture on how revenge doesn’t solve anything…and it goes on and on, with the three venturing across the badlands while Tyl argues with them over whether Vara has a right to kill Neq, and etc. 

Then we get to these hallucinogenic flowers that cause nightmares to be real, and it just goes on and on and on, and it gets even more laughable because soon a flower-maddened Vara is trying to screw Neq, but even here Neq pushes her away (as Arsenio would say, “Hmmm…”), and then finally they do it, and Piers Anthony leaves it off page entirely. I mean Neq loses his virginity in his late 20s and you’d think we’d at least get more than a sentence about it, but we do not. 

But folks, things get even more befuddling, as the crew makes it back to Helicon, and there’s a debate over whether Neq should lead them…oh, and have I mentioned yet that at this point it’s Neq The Glockenspiel? Folks I kid you not. As a way to show how he has sworn never to kill again, Neq has a glockenspiel molded to his sword-hand, and thus goes around singing to people as he taps out a melody on his glockenspiel hand. Like seriously, they had some good drugs back in the ‘70s, didn’t they? I almost wonder if Piers Anthony didn’t make a drunken bet with someone: “Dude, I’m gonna write a book where a guy has a glockenspiel for a hand! Hey, is that Sabbath? Turn it up, man!” 

Then it’s old home week as various characters return to Helicon, some of them characters not seen since the first book, but again it lacks any resonance because Anthony must deliver a lot of exposition to explain where they’ve been for all these years. Oh and SPOILER ALERT, but neither Sos nor Sol return, indicating that they did truly have a heroic sacrifice in the previous book. 

Neq does pretty damn well for himself; by novel’s end he knocks up both Vara and her mother, Sosa, the sultry and built lady from the first book who is now “old” in her mid-30s…folks there’s even a bit where Neq argues with Sosa that lots of men will want her despite her age, because in Helicon women are shared by the men due to the scarcity of women. Neq and Vara even break up, in the most off-handed matter, because Vara too will be expected to, uh, screw every other guy in the place, and Neq doesn’t want to interfere with tradition. 

It’s only just occurred to me that Neq The Sword is a commentary on the turned-on ‘60s generation: the drugs, the rampant arguments against violence, the shared communal women, and of course the narcotic flowers. And let’s not forget the glockenspiel, shall we? I guess looked at from that perspective, Neq The Sword is a triumph. I can’t say I enjoyed reading it, though; the first part was good, yes, but once Neq has achieved his vengeance it’s as if Anthony finished his tale sooner than expected, and so he got some chemical inspiration on what to fill up the rest of the book with. 

All told, Battle Circle really does not work as a trilogy. There is too little connecting the three books, and too much repetition in the parts that do connect with each other. Piers Anthony would have done just as well to leave it at Sos The Rope; as it is, the following two books only served to dilute the mythic impact of that first book. 

Here’s the cover of the Battle Circle book I read, which contains all three volumes; it was published in 1978 by Avon Books. I picked this up around 8 years ago and completely forgot about it until I came across it in my garage, of all places! The cover for this one is also by Patrick Woodroffe, and is taken from the original UK paperback edition of Sos The Rope:

Var The Stick (Battle Circle #2)

Var The Stick, by Piers Anthony

December, 1973  Bantam Books

I didn’t mean to read this second installment of the Battle Circle trilogy so soon; in fact I meant to post a review of a Sobs novel this week. But I started reading Var The Stick and ended up finishing it first. Piers Anthony continues on with his post-Blast storyline, world-building but at the same time moving away from the post-nuke Iliad vibe of the previous volume. 

It’s curious that the Battle Circle trilogy seemed to resonate more in the UK than here in the US; Var The Stick was first published there in hardcover in 1972, a year before this Bantam paberback original was published in the US. And final installment Neq The Sword (1975) was only published in the UK, not coming out in the US until it’s inclusion in the 1979 collection Battle Circle. 

It’s a year or so after the events of Sos The Rope and everything is essentially status quo; Sos, now known either as “The Master” or “The Weaponless” (and never referred to as “Sos” in the narrative) rules the empire he was supposed to dismantle in the previous book – the empire that was ruled by Sol, who went to suicide mountain with his daughter Soli at the climax of the previous book. Now Sos has everything he ever wanted, in particular Sola, the busty babe who married Sol in the previous book but really loved Sos (and also, uh, had a child with him), but a Piers Anthony protagonist can never be happy, and thus Sos finds his crown heavy. 

Piers Anthony has written Var The Stick so that it could be read as a standalone; reading it in the collection Battle Circle, immediately after Sos The Rope, one encounters a lot of repetition. This is because titular Var the Stick spends a lot of the narrative wondering over – and gradually learning – things we readers already learned in Sos The Rope. It does not add to the mythos nor inject any drama into the proceedings, and instead just comes off like a bunch of repetition of material that was handled better in the previous book. 

The shame of it is, Var The Stick has a wonderful opening. One of the tribes in Sos’s empire is under attack by a beast in the cornfields; The Master himself is called in to look into it. The cyborg master of karate soon deduces that the beast is really a mutant boy. There follows an unexpectedly touching (but in a masculine way, of course) scene in which man and mutant boy start off as hunter and prey before turning to each other for survival in the radioactive badlands. 

The effective opening only continues as we pick up four years later and the mutant boy – Var – heads back into that same tribe to test himself in the battle circle and thereby earn a name for himself. Despite winning, Var finds no willing women to take him, due to his mutant looks…until none other than Sola, “middle-aged” and “old” at 25, gives herself to Var that night in the tent they share; Sola, married to Sos but in love with his previous, pre-cyborg version and not the current model, reveals that the Master cannot have children, so once again the poor girl hasn’t gotten any in a while (a recurring theme for poor Sola, whose first husband, Sol, didn’t even have a dick). 

Anthony handles this sequence with more of a touching tone than a sleazy one, but we are told without getting too explicit of Sola’s ripe curves and whatnot; again we are firmly reminded that Sola has a kick-ass bod, but unfortunately she is barely in this novel. Same goes for Sos, and same goes even more so for Sol, who only shows up in passing. Even small-natured karate gal Sosa, whom Sos really loves, only appears in passing. As mentioned, Var The Stick is essentially a standalone tale. 

Instead of building on the storyline in the previous book, Anthony this time delivers a long chase sequence that encompasses the majority of the narrative. But still, it starts off seeming to pick up from the previous story; Sos, it develops, is planning to wage war on Helicon Mountain, aka the mountain he climbed to commit suicide but in reality is staffed with tech-loving “crazies” who live underground and who gave Sos his cyborg augmentations. Sos wants to wage war on them, certain that Sol and little Soli (who is actually Sos’s daughter, given Sol’s aforementioned lack of a dick) are being held captive there. He also wants to hook up with the little karate woman, Sosa. 

The only issue is, all this is relayed through the perspective of Var, a mutant kid of 15 or so who has no idea who any of these people are – and, what’s more, is so new to society that he has a hard time relating to anyone at all. This means there is a lot of obsfucation and vaguery, with Var only belatedly figuring out what is going on – figuring out stuff that would be dealt with posthaste if the tale had been told from Sos’s perspective, as the earlier book was. 

But Sos has become a remote figure now, and rarely do we enter his thoughts. It’s like the star of the trilogy has been reduced to a supporting character, and I can’t say we got a better character with Var. If I was prone to lame puns, I’d say we were given the short end of the stick. Well anyway, Var fights with sticks, and after a belabored battle sequence where Sos’s army attacks the mountain – a scene which is mostly told in summary, robbing it of any drama – it’s determined that Var will represent the empire and Hellicon will choose another hero to battle him, a hero-vs-hero match for control of the mountain. 

I’d write “spoiler alert,” but we’re still fairly early in the book; the champion turns out to be eight year-old Soli, aka the daughter of Sol (but really the daughter of Sos)…who, per tradition, fights in the nude. Not to sound like one of those perennially-aggrieved Goodreads reviewers, but this set off my “ick!” radar…only compounded by the fact that little Soli, who again is only eight years old, talks and acts like a regular adult. 

My son happens to be eight years old, and granted he’s a boy and also he wasn’t born after the nuclear Blast, and also he’s not a karate master, but still…I think from him I have a fairly good understanding of how well an eight year-old can communicate. Soli sounds nothing like this; she evidences logic and understanding well beyond her years, hell even at some points she’s beyond an adult of our own era (which, granted, isn’t really saying very much), to the point that it really drew me out of the book. I mean, I’m good with post-nuke pulp, and societies built around formalized battle in a circle, and even mutants…but too-intelligent and too-communicative eight year-olds is where I can no longer suspend my disbelief. 

It gets even harder to believe, as Soli is such a great fighter that her battle with Var, waged atop a cliff where hardly anyone can see them, goes on for hours, to the point that they call a temporary truce so they can each take a piss off the cliff! Then Soli – who, again, acts like the adult throughout – realizes that due to the fog no one can see them anyway, so they decide to sneak down the cliff and get some food. 

Anyway, let’s just cut to the chase…for “chase” is essentially all Var The Stick soon becomes. Piers Anthony jettisons the post-nuke love triangle meets Homer vibe of the previous book in favor of an endless sequence where Var and Soli head off together into post-blast America, with Sos chasing after them – and Sos is chasing them due to a harebrained subplot in which Var lies that he killed Soli on the clifftop, and thus has no idea why Sos would suddenly be so angry at him. Again, this novel is a very frustrating read for anyone who read the previous book, because the protagonist has no idea what happened in that previous book, while readers on the other hand do know, hence you spend the entire novel wishing Var the Stick had stayed in the cornfields and never gotten involved with the storyline in the first place. 

And this chase goes on for like a year or more, too! Things finally pick up when Var and Soli make it to the Pacific, where they run afoul of a Queen and her army of armored amazons, and here we have a strange bit where the mega-fat Queen wants to have sex with Var, given that all the men in her empire are eunnuchs. Fortunately, though, Anthony has refrained all this time from exploiting little Soli too much; my blog should be a testament to how much I love the lack of boundaries in ‘70s pulp fiction, but at the same time I believe that there are some boundaries that should not be crossed. 

Unfortunately, Anthony does cross those lines in the final quarter. Keeping up with the overall Greek myth vibe of the trilogy, Soli is at one point lashed up naked to a large rock by the ocean so as to be devoured by the god Minos. It’s all very Clash Of The Titans, and all this occurs on the island of New Crete after Var and Soli have been traveling together for some time; indeed, Soli is held captive in a temple for around two years while Var bides his time, working odd jobs and trying to figure out how to save her. 

There is, I’ve dicovered, always an oddball sort of vibe to a Piers Anthony novel, and such is certainly true in Var The Stick. I mean, it’s a post-apocalypse and the gal’s about to be sacrificed, but there’s literally a two-year interim where Var goes to work so as to make money for himself! Just not the sort of thing you’d expect to read in a post-nuke fantasy. Even odder, Minos is a bull-headed man who is capable of intelligent speech, as he’s been augmented by the crazies, same as Sos was, and he has a casual and friendly conversation with Var. 

Anyway, to keep Minos from ravishing Soli – we’re told the pseudo-god’s dick is so big it rips his victims apart – Var and Soli have sex on the rock, as Minos’s violent lust is only aroused by virgins. If my math is correct, Soli is only like twelve years old here. Anthony does not get explicit, leaving it as an “embrace” the two have, there on the rock, giving vent to their feelings for each other…but still. The “ick” factor returns in force when Minos comes back with a couple female corpses, girls “about the same age as Soli,” and it’s made clear that he’s raped them to death. 

And then we’re back to the oddball stuff; Var and Soli, pretending the moment on the rocks never happened, make it all the way to China, where Var suddenly decides Soli would be better off without him, and thus puts her in a “posh” school, paying her tuition by getting a job as a trash collector. I mean seriously, WTF? I’m not making any of this up. Two years pass, after which Soli is about to be given over to the emperor’s harem or somesuch, and Var has to act fast, as he’s finally realized he loves Soli…but how does she feel about him? 

At this point, the cool, “augmented warrior in a post-nuke wasteland” vibe of Sos The Rope is long, long gone. As even more of a slap to the face, we learn – in passing! – that Sos and Sol have been traveling together all these years, looking for Var and Soli. If you’re taking notes, this is the story we should’ve gotten in the sequel! But as mentioned, those two are supporting characters now – Sol, actually, is even less than that – and the reader can only wonder over the better novel this could have been. I mean we’re even told, again in passing, that Sol destroyed Helicon mountain in his wrath…like, couldn’t we have read about that instead of Var getting a job as a trash collector in China?? 

The finale sees Var and Soli (now named Vara, as she’s the wife of Var, even though she’s only like 14 or 15 now) heading back to America, to spread the word that “American society is the best.” Who would’ve expected a proto-MAGA sentiment at the end of a novel titled Var The Stick? 

I think this time I truly will take a bit of a break before finishing off the Battle Circle trilogy; next week I’ll have that Sobs review up. Actually one of these days I’d love to get back to a twice-weekly posting schedule…I’m working on it!

Sos The Rope (Battle Circle #1)

Sos The Rope, by Piers Anthony

October, 1968  Pyramid Books

Sos The Rope started life as a three-part serialized novel in The Magazine Of Fantasy And Science Fiction (July-September, 1968), before being published as this slim paperback. Then in 1978 it was collected with its sequels, Var The Stick (1972) and Neq The Sword (1975), as a fat mass market paperback titled Battle Circle. It was the collected edition that I read, but I’ll review the titles separately because I’m just that kind of guy. 

I recall picking up Battle Circle sometime in 2017, and recently discovered it in a box in my garage, of all places. Indeed, I discovered it on the very same day I (re)discovered my copies of The Virtue Of Vera Valiant (those were in a different box in a different room, though; I guess I’m just a hoarder at heart). 

While he is incredibly prolific, the only Piers Anthony novels I have read are the Jason Striker series and the Total Recall novelization. Thus I cannot say I am an expert in the style of Piers Anthony, but Sos The Rope reads very much like those other books: a somewhat formal tone to the narrative, with a somewhat lurid feeling (this is a good thing, of course), but nothing too exploitative or explicit (this is a bad thing, of course). 

The biggest comparison to Jason Striker is the dumb-ass protagonist. As we’ll recall, Jason Striker was this tough judo master who happened to be a ‘Nam vet, but he blundered like a fool from one situation to the next. The same holds true of this novel’s protagonist, the titular Sos The Rope, who basically gets his ass handed to him again and again in the battle circles of this post-nuke America. And like Striker he makes one poor choice after another, usually a victim of his own nature. 

Anyway, we know from the outset that Sos The Rope is set in a post-nuke world; or, post “Blast,” as the characters refer to it. In the first pages we have references to plastic, a refrigerator, and even television, yet at the same time it is clear this is a primitive society, with men wandering around on foot and challenging one another in the formalized, ritualized practice of battle-circle dueling. 

It’s worth noting however that this is not a bloodthirsty post-nuke society by any means; the battle circle fights are rarely to the death and are more so ritualized ways of settling differences or matters of honor. Brawny men choose their names, specialize in one of the weapons allowed in the battle circle (swords, staffs, knives, etc), and roam the post-nuke country like nomads. What sets off the course of Sos The Rope, and the ensuing trilogy, is a meeting between two men who have the same name: Sol. 

I’ll admit, the first several pages were a bumpy read. There’s nothing like trying to make sense of a post-nuke pulp from decades ago in which two muscular men, both named Sol, challenge one another in a battle circle on the windswept plains while a nameless young woman (with a “voluptuous body”) watches on. I had a helluva time keeping track of which Sol was which, but basically one of them has long black hair and a beard, and the other one has long blonde hair and no beard. 

The bearded one is Sol The Sword, because that’s his weapon; the beardless one is Sol of All Weapons, and he carries around a wheelbarrow or something with all his fighting gear. The two men meet at a hostel – a place, we’re informed, that was set up by “the crazies” and is used as lodging for the nomadic warriors – and they have a friendly disagreement over who “owns” the name Sol. They decide to settle their differences in the battle circle by the hostel, all while some busty chick who works at the hostel watches on, ready to give herself to the winner. 

Anthony, given his martial arts background, is pretty good with hand-to-hand fight description, as proven with Jason Striker. But still, it’s hard to know which Sol is which, let alone which one to root for. Not that it matters, as neither is killed and indeed they become lifelong friends: but, for what it’s worth, “our” Sol, ie the supposed hero of this novel who will become “Sos,” gets his ass kicked and loses – which, of course, sets the tone for the rest of the book. 

The fight was for the name of Sol, and now that this Sol has lost, he needs a new name. Eventually he will become “Sos.” As for the busty girl, she gives herself to Sol, the winner, and so she becomes Sola – in other words, women don’t even have a name until a man has taken them, a sign of how male-dominated this post-Blast society is. If you listen closely, you can hear the piteous wailings of the ever-indignant wokesters over on Goodreads: “How dare Piers Anthony stoop to such misogyny! His female characters have no agency!” And etc. 

An interesting thing is that Anthony works his world-building into the narrative, never shoehorning us with info; eventually we learn that there is no rape in this post-Blast world, where the men actually respect the women. Indeed, there is a later part where Sos sleeps in a hostel that is occupied by a girl who has expressly come there to find a man, and since Sos is not interested in her (not suprising, given his overall lameness), she sleeps by him without concern of being raped. 

The nomadic warrirors wear metal bracelets, and the women they choose – whether for life or just for the night – wear the bracelet when chosen. Gradually I realized this was Anthony’s post-nuke spin on a wedding ring. But this is how Sola becomes Sola, wearing the bracelet of Sol – and she, Sol, and Sos will prove to be the three main characters of Sos The Rope. 

The trio venture into the Badlands, ie the still-radiated wastelands around the countryside, and encounter all kinds of brutal flora and fauna. The latter is evidenced by a rat swarm that might raise the hackles of more sensitive readers (as if sensitive readers would be reading a book titled Sos The Rope!). The bigger threat however is the love triangle that develops: Sola belongs to Sol, but Sos and Sola have a thing for each other. 

Sadly, it develops that Sol does not have a, uh, thing; left comatose from the bite of a mutant moth, Sol is dragged to safety from the rats and loses his clothes in the process, and Sos discovers that Sol is castrated; something Sola was already aware of. So basically she’s “married” to a guy who cannot give her the goods, yet still – for reasons of honor and such – Sos won’t give Sola what she clearly wants. 

I forgot to mention: Sos as a child was reared by “the crazies,” ie the tech-savvy overlords who run things behind the scenes. They are the ones who stock the high-tech hostels and whatnot, and have all the learnings of the pre-Blast world, and Sos has not only learned to read but knows a fair bit of history…though he is uncertain how true those ancient books really are. 

Piers Anthony does a good job of keeping the story moving while doling out small bits of background about the post-Blast world. Meanwhile the main narrative has Sos becoming Sol’s best buddy and sidekick; Sol dreams of starting an empire, but he knows he isn’t smart enough. Sos, meanwhile, is smart in all those ways, so Sos agrees to serve Sol for one year and help him gather men into an army. 

Meanwhile Sos and Sola become an item while Sol is off gathering men, but Anthony leaves it off-page. About the most us sleazehounds get are random mentions of Sola’s “voluptuous” build and pretty face…not much. But Sos manages to knock her up, though this tidbit is left off-page; curiously, Anthony leaves many important events off-page…most notably, a part where Sos challenges Sol in the battle circle for Sola and her newly-born daughter. 

Yes, Anthony cuts immediately to some time later, and we learn that Sos has once again had his ass handed to him. So much for the “rope” he’s learned to fight with; all this is after the empire has been started, and Sos has gone back to the crazies to learn what to fight with now that he’s lost the right to use a sword. A rope wouldn’t be my first choice, and anyway Sos still can’t beat Sol, so whatever. 

Here’s where Sos The Rope gets real interesting. It’s some time later and Sos has decided to end his life by climbing this big mountain that people go to when they’re ready to commit suicide. He climbs up and up, then “dies,” then wakes up in this high-tech “underworld” that is run by the crazies. He will eventually hook up with a lithe young (and small-statured) lady with major karate skills (again, the hanky-panky occurs off-page), but most importantly Sos here is augmented into a sort of cyborg warrior so as to be sent back out into the world to kill Sol and topple his empire. 

My assumption is Piers Anthony was influenced here by Achilles in Homer’s Iliad, and this sequence – where Sos dies and then goes to an underworld where he has plastic armor embedded beneath his skin, and his muscles augmented, and etc – reminded me very much of the Neoplatonist readings of The Iliad. 

Simply put, the Neoplatonic reading of the Iliad goes like this: when Achilles’ best friend/lover Patroclus is killed in battle by Hector while wearing the armor of Achilles, the idea is that Achilles himself has died. After Patroclus dies, Achilles stops eating the food of mortals and instead eats ambrosia, the food of the gods. He goes to his mother, who happens to be a minor-grade goddess, and she in turn goes to Hephastus, aka Vulcan, and asks this major god to forge divine armor for Achilles. Dressed in this divine armor, Achilles is unstoppable when he goes back to the war at Troy, eventually killing Hector. The Neoplatnic reading here is that Achilles the mortal has died, reborn in his divine armor – ie his divine soul. 

That’s all very basic, and I’m sure I missed quite a bit, but that’s the essential idea, and more importantly for the goal of this review – that is what Piers Anthony has happen to Sos the Rope. It was at this point, around a hundred pages in, with Sos transformed into a sort of walking tank, with armor plating beneath his skin, that I realized Sos The Rope was a post-nuke Iliad. 

At this point I was very much into the novel; it was just that sort of late ‘60s/early ‘70s sci-fi I love, with a metaphysical and slightly psychedelic edge, but again it was slightly undone by the blunderings of Sos – or, “The Nameless One” as he is now known, a giant who towers over the average men. Piers Anthony again gives us a doofus protagonist who can’t make up his own mind; Sos has carried a torch for Sola all this time, and indeed he decided to climb suicide mountain over his loss of her. But, despite only thinking of the little karate lady as a casual lay in the underworld, Sos realizes, after leaving her forever, that he was truly in love with her, not Sola! Actually, now that I think of it, Piers Anthony might understand male characters better than any other sci-fi writer. 

Seriously though, this kind of gets to be a little much, and takes away from Sos’s post-death meta-human makeover (we’re told his hair has even gone white, like he’s some sort of super-deformed anime hero). But even in his superhuman state Sos blunders, outing himself on his first night back in the real world and inadvertently letting one of Sol’s men know who he is – the idea is, see, that Sos takes the job from the crazies to kill Sol, but really he plans to sneak into the empire and tell Sol to end his empire, so that Sol doesn’t have to die. 

This entails a lot of fights with Sol’s underlings so Sos can prove himself – again, the fighting is for the most part bloodless (save for one fight where Sos accidentally kills someone), but it’s cool how Sos has essentially become the post-Blast Hulk. Even here Piers Anthony does a curious skipping of important parts and suddenly has Sol and Sos confronting each other, though Sol apparently doesn’t realize this huge cyborg creature is actually his old buddy, Sos (or maybe he does; Anthony leaves this vague). 

The finale of Sos The Rope is quite curious, with the two characters arguing with Sol’s chieftans over whether or not Sol’s empire should be disbanded. SPOILER ALERT: The finale is rather downbeat, with Sol himself deciding to head on up suicide mountiain, his little girl demanding to go along with him – and Sos sadly watches his old buddy stalk off, kicking himself that Sol will no doubt make it up the mountain alive and end up banging the cute little karate girl that Sos has only now realized he’s in love with. In other words: wash, rinse, repeat – Sos now has the woman he wanted, Sola, but again he is jealous of Sol, who will no doubt soon be giving the little karate girl some good lovin. 

Well, all this no doubt is covered in the next volume, Var The Stick, which I’ll be reading soon. I have to say, I quite enjoyed Sos The Rope, especially the unexpected eleventh-hour jump into a sort of meta-human Iliad riff. I hope Piers Anthony continues with this vibe in the next books; one can only imagine the surreal, over-budgeted, psychedelic mess of a film Alejandro Jodorowsky might’ve made out of it.