Prostho Plus - less creepy than many of Piers Anthony works

On a whim, I decided to reread Piers Anthony’s Prostho Plus, the tale of a modern day dentist who gets abducted by aliens to work on teeth on other worlds.

I hadn’t touched the book in more than twenty years. I got to say, Piers Anthony is an author who you love in middle school but get disillusioned with by high school. But I had good memories of Prostho Plus so I was willing to give it another try.

Rereading Prostho Plus, I have to say that I think it’s one of his best books. Not that it’s that good but it is far less skeevy than so many of his later works. A lot of his books make me want to throw them across the room.

Don’t get me wrong. Judy Galland’s relationship with Dillingham is distinctly a male fantasy but it’s still healthier than so many of the relationships in Anthony’s other books.

And the actual book itself is a romp. It’s not one of Anthony’s more complex books, more of a throwback to the classic science fictional formula where the plot is about solving a problem. However, more than forty years after its first publication, the idea of an interstellar dentist is still a novel one and Anthony clearly had fun writing it.

I really didn’t know how Prostho Plus would hold up, reading it as an adult. I was happy that it only had a dash or two of pervy elements. At the end of the day, it’s really just fluff but it was fluff that didn’t disturb me.