Every book in this series feels fresh and exciting. Chaos Mode, like the others, is clearly a combination of whatever Anthony was interested in at the time (in this case, it’s writing Burgess Shale fanfic) and his continuing devotion to his readership. That said, the novel does a great job of building on what came previously and is the first in the series to see Colene really come into her own as a leader. It’s refreshing to see a story where the male characters, while having strengths of their own, are not all brilliant thinkers or rippling with physical prowess. Instead, Colene is increasingly called upon to step into the role of tactician and strategist, her ability to think quickly, logically, and at a planetary level becoming her own form of magic that the other fantastical voyagers lack. In Chaos Mode Colene also continues to struggle with depression and suicidality, with confusion and pain as she faces difficult choices, and with the extreme fear of feeling like she is not worth enough to the people in her life.

To his credit, having written a complicated heroine whose emotional and interpersonal situation is nuanced and touching, Anthony doesn’t ever create artificial comfort or easy answers for her. He does not diminish her problems, but neither does he frame them as hopeless or irresoluble. By having characters be steadfast and supportive friends to Colene, by recognizing that even limited resolution of troubled relationships can be meaningful, and by never letting men off the hook for their many crimes against women, Anthony models what empathy should look like. It is not meaningless words or enforced silence about violence against women. 

Because of this and his unerring attention to Colene’s many strengths, desires, sorrows, and joys, Anthony has written an adventure novel that is truly celebratory of the women and girls who all inspired Colene. As he makes explicit in his author’s note at the end of Chaos Mode, the institutional reaction to his Mode novels has been largely negative because the frank (though far from gratuitous) acknowledgment of rape, domestic violence, and sexism in the series is considered vulgar and inappropriate for fantasy. Societal scorn is directed at the mention of these subjects, not at the fact that gendered violence is written into reality for women and girls everywhere and the male perpetrators are not only unhindered but actively defended. Piers Anthony recognized that the women and girls who wrote to him were not just objects of sorrow, not just victims, not just smiling faces, not just brilliant thinkers. They were, they are, complex creatures who exist so far beyond the expectations of men that they might as well be planeswalkers. They are irreducible, and Anthony wrote a whole fantasy series just to demonstrate how incredible that is.