The jokes are fast and furious. The action is fantastical. In many ways, Xanth offers the same kind of entertainment as a good Arnold Schwarzenegger movie. But one of the real reasons it's compelling and the reason it has the power to hit bestseller lists over and over despite critical savagery or (more likely) critical neglect is that it offers the opportunity to return to a familiar world. Xanth develops, but in its essence, it is always the same.

True, non-fantasy series by P.G. Wodehouse and Ian Fleming offer the opportunity to return to beloved imaginary worlds, but the Xanth books' explicit agenda is the creation of an alternate universe. Anthony's novels (and probably series fantasy as an entire genre) offer a comfortingly repetitive escapism you can't get from a single story, or from a series ostensibly set in reality -- not even in anything so close to reality as to lack dragons, nymphs and unicorns.

Whereas in science fiction novels the fun is in the author's invention -- in novelty -- the Xanth books are populated with magical creatures we already know from Western myth and legend. Anthony takes these familiar beasties and gives them his own twist, and has thus generated his own body of lore. There are maps at the front of almost every novel, as well as a handbook for ardent fans: "Piers Anthony's Visual Guide to Xanth" lists all the animals, plants, magical elements of the world, from angelfish ("Very nice fish with gauzy wings which allow it to hover ... Devilfish like to pursue angelfish and do something censored to them") to the Zomonster ("the zombie Monster under Lacuna's bed"). The guide also summarizes Xanth history and provides sleek, comic-book style illustrations of all the major characters, with special attention devoted to bare-chested creatures like centaurs, merfolk, naga and fairies.

There are lots of naked bodies because all the Xanth books carry a frisson of naughtiness, which was no doubt an even larger part of their appeal to my teenage self than it is to my adult one. In many cases the sexual references are so ludicrous they make me laugh out loud. For example, in Xanth all children are kept ignorant of the facts of life by "The Adult Conspiracy" until they come of age. Once initiated, they know dirty words (usually rendered in *%!** symbols) and learn how to "summon the stork," an intimate activity that replicates ours in Mundania exactly -- except that the resulting progeny are, in fact, delivered by an actual stork.

Creatures in Xanth tend to mate with their own species -- goblins with goblins, centaurs with centaurs -- but there are also a lot of "love springs" around, some of which produce lasting affection and some of which produce only momentary lust. Thus, a dragon may mate with human to produce a half-breed dragon/girl, or a winged monster may mate with a centaur to produce a centaur with wings. In the magical tapestry that depicts all Xanth history in tiny moving images, such liaisons are misted out to prevent the breaching of the Conspiracy by inquiring children.

Maya Angelou reads from "The Heart of a Woman"