Philip José Farmer

From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

  (Redirected from Philip Jose Farmer)
Jump to: navigation, search
Philip José Farmer
Born January 26, 1918(1918-01-26)
Terre Haute, Indiana,
United States
Died February 25, 2009 (aged 91)
Peoria, Illinois
Pen name see below
Occupation Novelist, Short story writer
Genres Fantasy, Science fiction
Official website

Philip José Farmer (January 26, 1918 – February 25, 2009) was an American author, principally known for his award-winning science fiction and fantasy novels and short stories.

Farmer is best known for his novel series, especially the World of Tiers (1965-93) and Riverworld (1971-83) novels. He is noted for the pioneering use of sexual and religious themes in his work, his fascination for and reworking of the lore of celebrated pulp heroes, and occasional tongue-in-cheek pseudonymous works written as if by fictional characters.

Contents

[edit] Biography

Farmer was born on January 26, 1918 in North Terre Haute, Indiana. According to colleague Frederik Pohl, his middle name was in honor of an aunt, Josie.[1] Farmer grew up in Peoria, Illinois where he attended Peoria High School. His father was a civil engineer and a supervisor for the local power company. A voracious reader as a boy, Farmer said he resolved to become a writer in the fourth grade. He became an agnostic at the age of 14. At age 23, in 1941, he married and eventually became the father of two children — a son and a daughter. After washing out of flight training in World War II, he went to work in a local steel mill. He continued his education, however, earning a bachelor’s degree in English from Bradley University in 1950.[2]

Farmer’s first literary success came in 1952 with a novella called “The Lovers,” about a sexual relationship between a human and an extraterrestrial. It won him the Hugo Award as "most promising new writer", the first of his three Hugo Awards. Thus encouraged, he quit his job to become a full-time writer, entered a publisher’s contest, and promptly won the $4,000 first prize for a novel that contained the germ of his later Riverworld series. Literary success did not translate into financial security, however, and in 1956 he left Peoria to launch a career as a technical writer. The next 14 years were spent working in that capacity for various defense contractors, from Syracuse, New York to Los Angeles, California, while writing science fiction in his spare time.[3]

A second Hugo came after publication of the 1967 novella Riders of the Purple Wage, an exuberant pastiche of James Joyce’s Ulysses as well as a satire on a future cradle-to-grave welfare state. Reinvigorated, Farmer became a full-time writer again in 1969[4]. Upon moving back to Peoria in 1970, he entered his most prolific period, publishing 25 books in 10 years. His novel To Your Scattered Bodies Go (a reworked version of the prize-winning first novel of 20 years before — which had never been published) won him his third Hugo in 1971. A 1975 novel, Venus on the Half-Shell, created a stir in the larger literary community and media. It purported to be written in the first person by one “Kilgore Trout”, a fictional character appearing as an underappreciated science fiction writer in several of Kurt Vonnegut’s novels. The escapade did not please that eminent author when some reviewers not only concluded that it had been written by Vonnegut himself, but that it was a worthy addition to his works. (Farmer actually had permission from Vonnegut for the playful hoax.)

Farmer had both critical champions and detractors. Leslie Fiedler proclaimed him "the greatest science fiction writer ever"[5] and lauded his approach to storytelling as a “gargantuan lust to swallow down the whole cosmos, past, present and to come, and to spew it out again”[6]. Isaac Asimov noted that Farmer was an "excellent science fiction writer; in fact, a far more skillful writer than I am...."[7] But Christopher Lehmann-Haupt described him in The New York Times in 1972 as “a humdrum toiler in the fields of science fiction”.[8]

Farmer died on February 25, 2009.[9][10] At the time of his death, he and his wife Bette had 2 children, 6 grandchildren and 4 great-grandchildren.[citation needed]

[edit] Novel sequences

[edit] Riverworld series

Main article: Riverworld

The Riverworld series follows the adventures of such diverse characters as Richard Burton, Hermann Göring, and Samuel Clemens through a bizarre afterlife in which every human ever to have lived is simultaneously resurrected along a single river valley that stretches over an entire planet. The series consists of To Your Scattered Bodies Go (1971), The Fabulous Riverboat (1971), The Dark Design (1977), The Magic Labyrinth (1980) and Gods of Riverworld (1983). Riverworld and Other Stories (1979) is not part of the series as such but a collection that includes the second-published Riverworld story, which is free-standing rather than integrated into one of the novels. (The first two books were originally published as two novellas, "The Day of the Great Shout" and "The Suicide Express," and a two-part serial, "The Felled Star," in the science fiction magazines Worlds of Tomorrow and If between 1965 and 1967. The separate novelette "Riverworld" ran in Worlds of Tomorrow in January 1966.) A final pair of linked novelettes appeared in the 1990s: "Crossing the Dark River" (in Tales of Riverworld, 1992) and "Up the Bright River" (in Quest to Riverworld, 1993).

The Riverworld series originated in a novel, Owe for the Flesh, written in one month in 1952 as a contest entry. It won the contest, but the book was left unpublished and orphaned when the prize money was misappropriated, and Farmer nearly gave up writing altogether.[11] The original manuscript of the novel was lost, but years later Farmer reworked the material into the Riverworld magazine stories mentioned above. Eventually, a copy of a revised version of the original novel surfaced in a box in a garage and was published as River of Eternity by Phantasia Press in 1983. Farmer's Introduction to this edition gives the details of how it all happened.[11]

[edit] World of Tiers series

Main article: World of Tiers

The World of Tiers series is regarded by many fans as equal to or better than the Riverworld series, though it is less well known[citation needed]. The series is set within a number of artificially constructed parallel universes, created tens of thousands of years ago by a race of human beings who had achieved an advanced level of technology which gave them almost godlike power and immortality. The principal universe in which these stories take place, and from which the series derives its name, consists of an enormous tiered planet, shaped like a stack of disks or squat cylinders, of diminishing radius, one atop the other. The series follows the adventures of a few humans from Earth who accidentally travel to these artificial universes, and consists of The Maker of Universes (1965), The Gates of Creation (1966), A Private Cosmos (1968), Behind the Walls of Terra (1970), The Lavalite World (1977) and More Than Fire (1993). Roger Zelazny has mentioned that The World of Tiers was something he had in his mind when he created his Amber series.[12] A related novel is Red Orc's Rage (1991), which does not involve the principal characters of the other books directly, but does provide background information to certain events and characters portrayed in the other novels. This is the most "psychological" of Farmer's novels.

[edit] Literary themes

[edit] Sexual

Farmer's work often handles sexual themes; some early works were notable for their ground-breaking introduction of such to science fiction literature.[13] His first (with one minor exception) published science fiction story, the novella "The Lovers", earned him the Hugo Award for "most promising new writer" in 1953, and is critically recognized as the story that broke the taboo on sex in science fiction.[14] It instantly put Farmer on the literary map.[15] The short story collection Strange Relations (1960) was a notable event in the history of sex in science fiction.[13] He was one of three persons to whom Robert A. Heinlein dedicated Stranger in a Strange Land (1961), a novel which explored sexual freedom as one of its primary themes.[16] Moreover, Fire and the Night (1962) is a mainstream novel about a love affair between a white man and a black woman; it features interesting sociological and psychosexual twists. In Night of Light (1966), he devised an alien race where aliens have only one mother but several fathers, perhaps because of an unusual or untenable physical position that cannot be reached or continued by two individuals acting alone. Both Image of the Beast and the sequel Blown from 1968-1969 explore group sex, interplanetary travel, and interplay between fictional figures like Childe Harold and real people like Forry Ackerman. In the World of Tiers series he explores oedipal themes.

[edit] Religious

His work also sometimes contains religious themes. Jesus shows up as a character in both the Riverworld series (in the novelette "Riverworld" but not in the novels, except for the mentioning of him dying early in The Magic Labyrinth) and Jesus on Mars. Night of Light (1957, expanded 1966) takes the rather unholy Father John Carmody on an odyssey on an alien world where spiritual forces are made manifest in the material world. In Flesh (1960) astronauts return to an Earth 800 years in their future dominated by a pagan Goddess-worshiping religion.

[edit] Pulp heroes

Many of Farmer's works rework existing characters from fiction and history, as in The Wind Whales of Ishmael (1971), an otherworldly sequel to Herman Melville's Moby-Dick; The Other Log of Phileas Fogg (1973), which fills in the missing time periods from Jules Verne's Around the World in Eighty Days; and A Barnstormer in Oz (1982), in which Dorothy's adult son, a pilot, flies there by accident.

He has often worked with the pulp heroes Tarzan and Doc Savage, or pastiches thereof: In his novel The Adventure of the Peerless Peer, Tarzan and Sherlock Holmes team up. Farmer's Lord Grandrith and Doc Caliban series portrays analogues of Tarzan and Doc Savage. It consists of A Feast Unknown (1969), Lord of the Trees (1970) and The Mad Goblin (1970). Farmer has also written two mock biographies of both characters, Tarzan Alive (1972) and Doc Savage: His Apocalyptic Life (1973), which adopt the premise that the two were based on real people fictionalized by their original chroniclers, and connect them genealogically with a large number of other well-known fictional characters. Further, Farmer wrote both an authorized Doc Savage novel, Escape from Loki (1991) and an authorized Tarzan novel, The Dark Heart of Time (1999). In his 1972 novel Time's Last Gift, Farmer further explored the Tarzan theme combined with time travel.

In his Khokarsa cycle — Hadon of Ancient Opar (1974) and Flight to Opar (1976) — Farmer portrayed the "lost city" of Opar, which plays an important part in the Tarzan saga, in the time of its glory as a colony city of the empire of Khokarsa.

[edit] Pseudonyms

Farmer wrote Venus on the Half-Shell (1975) under the name Kilgore Trout, a fictional author who appears in the works of Kurt Vonnegut. He had planned to write more of Trout's fictional books (notably Son of Jimmy Valentine), but a disagreement with Vonnegut put an end to those plans.[17] Thereafter Farmer wrote a number of pseudonymous "fictional author" stories, mostly for The Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction. These were stories whose "authors" are characters in other stories. The first such story was "by" Jonathan Swift Somers III (invented by Farmer himself in Venus on the Half-Shell but inspired by one of the dead voices of Spoon River Anthology), and later Farmer used the "Cordwainer Bird" byline, a pseudonym invented by Harlan Ellison for film and television projects from which he wished to disassociate himself.

[edit] Awards and nominations

[edit] Bibliography

[edit] Book series

[edit] Novels

[edit] Collections

[edit] Short stories and novellas

  • "O'Brien and Obrenov" (1946)
  • "The Lovers" (1952)
  • "Sail On! Sail On!" (1952)
  • "The Biological Revolt" (1953)
  • "Mother" (1953)
  • "Moth and Rust" (1953)
  • "Attitudes" (1953)
  • "Strange Compulsion" (1953)
  • "They Twinkled Like Jewels" (1954)
  • "Daughter" (1954)
  • "Queen of the Deep" (1954)
  • "The God Business" (1954)
  • "Rastignac the Devil" (1954)
  • "The Celestial Blueprint" (1954)
  • "The Wounded" (1954)
  • "Totem and Taboo" (1954)
  • "Father" (1955)
  • "The Night of Light" (1957)
  • "The Alley Man" (1959)
  • "Heel" (1960)
  • "My Sister's Brother" or "Open to Me, My Sister" (1960)
  • "A Few Miles" (1960)
  • "Prometheus" (1961)
  • "Tongues of the Moon" (1961)
  • "Uproar in Acheron" (1962)
  • "How Deep the Grooves" (1963)
  • "Some Fabulous Yonder" (1963)
  • "The Blasphemers" (1964)
  • "The King of the Beasts" (1964)
  • "Day of the Great Shout" (1965)
  • "Riverworld" (1966)
  • "The Suicide Express" (1966)
  • "The Blind Rowers" (1967)
  • "A Bowl Bigger than Earth" (1967)
  • "The Felled Star (part 1)" (1967)
  • "The Felled Star (part 2)" (1967)
  • "The Shadow of Space" (1967)
  • "Riders of the Purple Wage" (1967)
  • "Don't Wash the Carats" (1968)
  • "The Jungle Rot Kid on the Nod" (1968)
  • "Down in the Black Gang" (1969)
  • "The Oogenesis of Bird City" (1970)
  • "The Voice of the Sonar in my Vermiform Appendix" (1971)
  • "Brass and Gold" (1971)
  • "The Fabulous Riverboat (part 1)" (1971)
  • "The Fabulous Riverboat (part 2)" (1971)
  • "Only Who Can Make a Tree?" (1971)
  • "The Sliced-Crosswise Only-On-Tuesday World" (1971)
  • "Seventy Years of Decpop" (1972)
  • "Skinburn" (1972)
  • "The Sumerian Oath" (1972)
  • "Father's in the Basement" (1972)
  • "Toward the Beloved City" (1972)
  • "Mother Earth Wants You" (1972)
  • "Sketches Among the Ruins of My Mind" (1973)
  • "Monolog" (1973)
  • "After King Kong Fell" (1973)
  • "Opening the Door" (1973)
  • "The Two-Edged Gift" (1974)
  • "The Startouched" (1974)
  • "The Evolution of Paul Eyre" (1974)
  • "The Adventure of the Three Madmen" (1974)
  • "Passing On" (1975)
  • "A Scarletin Study, as Jonathan Swift Somers III" (1975)
  • "The Problem of the Sore Bridge - Among Others, as Harry Manders" (1975)
  • "Greatheart Silver" (1975)
  • "The Return of Greatheart Silver" (1975)
  • "Osiris on Crutches, as Leo Queequeg Tincrowder" (1976)
  • "The Volcano, as Paul Chapin" (1976)
  • "The Doge Whose Barque Was Worse Than His Bight, as Jonathan Swift Somers III" (1976)
  • "Fundamental Issue" (1976)
  • "The Henry Miller Dawn Patrol" (1977)
  • "Greatheart Silver in the First Command" (1977)
  • "Savage Shadow as Maxwell Grant" (1977)
  • "The Impotency of Bad Karma as Cordwainer Bird" (1977)
  • "It's the Queen of Darkness, Pal, as Rod Keen" (1978)
  • "Freshman" (1979)
  • "The Leaser of Two Evils" (1979)
  • "J.C. on the Dude Ranch" (1979)
  • "Spiders of the Purple Mage" (1980)
  • "The Making of Revelation, Part I" (1980)
  • "The Long Wet Dream of Rip Van Winkle" (1981)
  • "The Adventure of the Three Madmen" (1984)
  • "UFO vs IRS" (1985)
  • "St. Francis Kisses His Ass Goodbye" (1989)
  • "One Down, One to Go" (1990)
  • "Evil, Be My Good" (1990)
  • "Nobody's Perfect" (1991)
  • "Wolf, Iron and Moth" (1991)
  • "Crossing the Dark River" (1992)
  • "A Hole in Hell as Dane Helstrom" (1992)
  • "Up the Bright River" (1993)
  • "Coda" (1993)
  • "The Good of the Land" (2002)
  • "The Face that Launched a Thousand Eggs" (2005)
  • "The Unnaturals" (2005)
  • "Who Stole Stonhenge?" (2005)
  • "That Great Spanish Author, Ernesto" (2006)
  • "The Essence of the Poison" (2006)
  • "The Doll Game" (2006)
  • "Keep Your Mouth Shut" (2006)
  • "The Frames" (2007)
  • "A Spy in the U.S. of Gonococcia" (2007)
  • "A Peoria Night" (2007)
  • "The First Robot" (2008)
  • "Duo Miaule" (2008)

[edit] Ephemera

  • "Bradley Brave Sees New York With Observing Injun Eyes—And with Knocking Knees" (1940)
  • "Lovers and Otherwise" (1953)
  • "The Tin Woodman Slams the Door" (1954)
  • "White Whales Raintrees Flying Saucers" (1954)
  • "The Golden Age and the Brass" (1956)
  • "On a Mountain Upside Down" (1960)
  • "Blueprint for Free Beer" (1967)
  • "Reap" (1968)
  • "Oft Have I Travelled" (1969)
  • "Report" (1969) - republished as "The Josés from Rio" (2006)
  • "The Affair of the Logical Lunatics" (1971)
  • "The Arms of Tarzan" (1971)
  • "Tarzan's Coat of Arms" (1971)
  • "The Two Lord Ruftons" (1971)
  • "The Obscure Life and Hard Times of Kilgore Trout" (1971)
  • "A Reply to "The Red Herring"" (1971)
  • "Tarzan Lives" (1972) - republished as "An Exclusive Interview with Lord Greystoke" (1973)
  • "The Great Korak-Time Discrepancy" (1972)
  • "The Lord Mountford Mystery" (1972)
  • "Writing the Biography of Doc Savage" (1973) - republished as "Writing Doc's Biography" (1974)
  • "From Erb to Ygg" (1973)
  • "To the Wizard of Sci-Fi" (1974)
  • "Extracts from the Memoirs of "Lord Greystoke"" (1974)
  • "The Feral Human in Mythology and Fiction" (1974)
  • "Charles L. Tanner" (1974)
  • "A Language for Opar" (1974)
  • "Some Comments" (1975) - republished as "The Source of the River" (2006)
  • "How Dinosaurs Did It" (1976)
  • "Phonemics" (1976)
  • "Philip Jose Farmer Sez..." (1976) - republished as "A Fimbulwinter Introduction" (2006)
  • "Religion and Myths" (1977)
  • "Jonathan Swift Somers III: Cosmic Traveller in a Wheelchair" (1977)
  • "The Remarkable Adventure" with Beverly Friend (1978)
  • "Creating Artificial Worlds" (1979)
  • "Riverworld War" (1980)
  • "Maps and Spasms" (1981)
  • "The Monster on Hold" (1983)
  • "L. Frank Baum" (1985)
  • "Edgar Rice Burroughs" (1985)
  • "Memoir" (1986) - republished as "IF R.I.P" (2006)
  • "Remembering VERN" (1987)
  • "The Journey" (1988)
  • "Hayy ibn Yaqzam: An Arabic Mowgli" (1994)
  • "Robert Bloch: An Appreciation" (1994)
  • "Dede Weil: An Appreciation" (2000)
  • "I Still Live!" (2006)
  • "Why Do I Write?" (2006)
  • "The Trout Letters" (2006)
  • "The Light-Hog Incident" (2007)
  • "The Rebels Unthawed" (2007)
  • "A Modest Proposal" (2007)
  • "Sherlock Holmes & Sufism—& Related Subjects" (2008)
  • "Jongor in the Wold Newton Family" (2008)
  • "Three Metafictional Proposals" (2008)
  • "Uncle Sam's Mad Tea Party" (2008)
  • "Down to Earth's Centre" (2008)

[edit] See also

[edit] References

[edit] Citations

  1. ^ Pohl, Frederik (2009-02-28). "Josie!". The Way the Future Blogs. http://www.thewaythefutureblogs.com/2009/02/josie/. Retrieved 2009-03-01. 
  2. ^ Jonas, Gerald (2009), "Philip José Farmer, Daring Science Fiction Writer, Dies at 91" [Obit], The New York Times, 26 February 2009.
  3. ^ Jonas (2009), Op. cit.
  4. ^ Clute, John and Peter Nicholls (1993, 1995), The Encyclopedia of Science Fiction, New York: St. Martin's Griffin, pp 417-419.
  5. ^ Stoler, Peter (1980), “’Riverworld’ Revisited”, Time, July 28.
  6. ^ Fiedler, Leslie A. (1972), "Getting into the Task of Now Pornography", The Los Angeles Times, April 23. (Reprinted in slightly different form as “Thanks for the Feast: Notes on Philip Jose Farmer”, In: Farmer, Philip Jose (1973), The Book of Philip Jose Farmer, or the Wares of Simple Simon’s Custard Pie and Space Man, New York: Daw Books, Inc, pp 233-239.)
  7. ^ I, Asimov. Isaac Asimov. Bantam Books. p. 504. 1994.
  8. ^ Jonas (2009), Op. cit.
  9. ^ Official website
  10. ^ [1] Retrieved April 8, 2009
  11. ^ a b Farmer 1983: Author's Introduction
  12. ^ A Conversation With Roger Zelazny 8th April, 1978 at the Internet Archive
  13. ^ a b Clute 1993
  14. ^ Merrick 2003
  15. ^ Carey 2007
  16. ^ Heinlein 1991
  17. ^ Trout
  18. ^ a b "1972 Award Winners & Nominees". Worlds Without End. http://www.worldswithoutend.com/books_year_index.asp?year=1972. Retrieved 2009-10-05. 

[edit] Other sources

[edit] External links

Search Wikiquote Wikiquote has a collection of quotations related to: Philip José Farmer
Retrieved from "http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Philip_Jos%C3%A9_Farmer"