Philip Jose Farmer
Won’t be down to breakfast. One of sci-fi’s greats. A good appreciation at Reason.com, by a scribbler who read PJF in his teens and doesn’t know how they’d play in adulthood. I read a lot of Farmer in my 20s and 30s. Played fine. Still think about a lot of his strange and haunting ideas, his love of humanity, its triumphs, follies and foibles, and the lessons he imparted as he toyed with them.
If you don’t know Farmer, Reynolds recommends you start with To Your Scattered Bodies Go. Sounds about right. First in the Riverworld series, one of the most magnificent literary gimmicks ever devised, allowed Farmer to game out history, society and his favorite characters and themes from both, amid high adventure and mystery. It’s What Would Sir Richard Francis Burton, Mark Twain & Julius Caesar Do, with Hermann Goering as an annoying holier-than-thou evangelist. And because it’s Farmer, of course, a Neanderthal.
The Fabulous Riverboat, The Dark Design, The Magic Labyrinth and The Gods of Riverworld continue the series.
Farmer fueled my own fascination with the mystery of the Neanderthals with his short story, “The Alley Man,” about the last Neanderthal, living on the fringes of our own society, a ragpicker doggedly seeking what the humans stole from his people.
Some more Farmer:
The Green Odyssey Don’t worry, no lecturing. “Green” is the scoundrel who is the main character, asail to adventure on a “wind roller” across a vast prairie.
Tarzan Alive: A Definitive Biography of Lord Greystoke
Venus on the Half-Shell and Others, a collection in which PJF acknowledges authorship of the notorious Kilgore Trout novel ”VOTHS” and others.
Dare. Dunno this one, but a new edition is due out, looks good.
Image of the Beast, PJF’s 1960s sci-fi porn epic.
Strange Relations, on human-alien love.
Pearls From Peoria for the diehard PJF fan, odd scraps and hard-to-find material from all aspects of his career.
Topics: literary
Posted by Jules Crittenden at 12:34 pm on Thursday, February 26, 2009
3 Responses to “Philip Jose Farmer”
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February 26th, 2009 at 3:09 pm
Ah, Farmer is gone. A pity, I’ve read many of his books, just not all. He was a prolific writer. Not quite up to the level of Isaac Asimov, but still a giant.
My favorite story by Farmer: Riders Of The Purple Wage. It struck a chord with me long ago, and not because of Farmer’s tendency toward soft porn (he made a good point by using sex, but it was still soft porn).
February 28th, 2009 at 8:43 pm
When I was a young teen I especially liked Venus on the Half-Shell, under Farmer’s alias “Kilgore Trout”.
I probably liked it for the reason Jeff_S cites
March 1st, 2009 at 12:33 am
The _Dare_ in question is Virginia, the first English child born in America (unless there were others born earlier in Newfoundland) who along with her parents, the other Roanoke colonists, the local indians, assorted Chinese villagers and Circassian women in a slave caravan, were kidnapped by aliens and taken to a planet in the Tau Ceti system. The story begins three hundred years after the settlement, I believe I read it about the same time I read Edgar Pangborn’s Davey. This was back before you could do SF and space opera that wasn’t a Star Wars imitation.