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Fannish 50 2024 #1: Philip Jose Farmer
Okay, I'm trying this again!
I think part of why the Fannish 50 project didn't go anywhere for me in 2023 is because I never really figured out what I wanted to post about (and also probably starting a new project while I was recovering from a lot of health issues and their corresponding mental health issues wasn't a great idea).
So my theme for these posts, which I'll try to do about once a week, is revisiting older canons - books, TV, movies, whatever. I would have started with something I have more personal attachment to, and this isn't necessarily a big formative influence for me, but I was talking to![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png)
yhlee this morning about Philip Jose Farmer so - let's start there!
One thing that came up in the discussion with Yoon is how thoroughly Farmer has dropped out of popular awareness compared to some of his contemporaries like Heinlein, Asimov, Zelazny, etc. I would say that at the time, he was just about as well known and widely read - at least when I encountered him as a tween I thought of him as one of the "bigs" of that era, but I feel like he's fallen not precisely out of favor but simply out of sight.
Which is too bad, because his books were fun wall-to-wall tropefests, heavily influenced by the pulps that he clearly grew up on. They're certainly dated, there's no getting around that. But at least some of them hold up pretty well! And some of them considerably better than expected .... one that I reread in the last few years was a book I vaguely remembered from childhood and thought it couldn't possibly have aged well, Two Hawks of Earth (1966), in which an Iroquois bomber pilot in WWII falls through a rift in spacetime into an alternate Earth in which Europe was colonized by Native Americans instead of vice versa, and the Iroquois are the big democratic colony-building empire of the era. And it was honestly considerably better than I was expecting! Two Hawks is a typical PJF protagonist, a genius multilingual polymath, and the extremely meta plot involves rescuing an Indigenous Princess (she's British) and returning her to her homeland, which only the protagonist knows is a major world power in his own time instead of an Ethnic island backwater.
But moving on to World of Tiers! The series begins with The Maker of Universes (1965), followed by five more books at the time of Farmer's death. Of the various Farmer I read as a tween/teen, these were my favorites, and I reread them relatively recently since they're now available in cheap ebook omnibuses and enjoyed them. The first three are my favorites, and my interest took a nosedive in the fourth book and I stalled out around the end of book 5, which I think was as far as I ever got as a teenager, too. The first ones are definitely better.
The meta-premise: a highly advanced pre-human civilization of humanlike men and women (and unusually for SF of the era, we do see the women as well) developed Sufficiently Advanced magitech that allowed them to create made-to-order pocket universes, their own personal worlds. Styling themselves Lords - a gender-neutral term in this case - they devolved into a decadent immortality in which they spent most of their time competing to create ever wilder pocket universes and trying to kill or usurp each other.
The first book begins with Robert Wolff, a human retiree coming off a long, boring career and saddled with a haranguing wife he doesn't love (who appears in about two pages, solely to henpeck him and demonstrate Wolff's sucky Earth life, #justiceforbrenda), discovers a portal to another world in the basement of the retirement home he is examining for purchase. He ends up on the bottom layer of a world that is constructed like a series of flat wedding cake layers connected by a central tower, each thousands of miles across and populated by people and creatures drawn from thousands of years of Earth history or created in labs. (Farmer absolutely *loves* worldbuilding and conlanging and so forth; these are not anthropological sci-fi by any means, but you can really see him getting into the fun of throwing together thousands of years of history and running his protagonist through it.) Wolff finds his aged body growing younger as he drinks the water and eats the food of the place, and - having emerged on an Ancient Greek level - falls in love with a nymph named Chryseis, who tells him of the decadent Lord, Jadawin, who rules this world and terrorizes its people. Wolff decides to climb the tower and free the world from their tyrannical ruler.
Light spoilers for the trajectory of the series follow; anything major will be hidden under a spoiler arrow.
The big spoiler regarding Wolff's quest will probably be evident from nearly the beginning to anyone genre-savvy -
The second book is my favorite because the setup is absolute dynamite and its execution fully follows through. Wolff ends up trapped with a group of Lords in a labyrinth consisting of one-way gates leading them between highly creative pocket worlds, forced to go onward because most of the worlds are unliveable (and also because they are being forced in various ways; Wolff's wife is held hostage). This book is just so fun, with the one-way gates that might lead them to any sort of brand-new batshit world, including one that's made of glass with animals that use suction cups or skates to get around, another where the animals can bounce around in time as a protective mechanism, and so forth. Meanwhile the trapped group quarrels and backstabs and tries to form alliances with each other.
Book 3 switches to a new protagonist, Kickaha, the World of Tiers trickster befriended by Wolff in the first book (actually a human soldier who discovered one of the Lords' world-gates in the ruins of a French farmhouse during WW2). He teams up with Anana, a Lord, to look for his friend Wolff, who is still missing in the aftermath of book 2.
I strongly suspect that if this series had any fandom whatsoever, the fandom would be primarily Wolff/Kickaha - they spend much of the first book adventuring together, and the plot of book 3 onward is literally Kickaha trying to find him - with a secondary but enthusiastic het shipperdom of Kickaha/Anana, canon het pairing with a truly enjoyable enemies-to-lovers dynamic. (And probably an extremely minor Wolff/Chryseis contingent complaining about how their pairing only appears as tagged secondary pairings to other ships, plus the dirtybadwrong Lord incest shippers of the various, usually closely related familial pairings.)
Rereading as an adult, I was genuinely surprised how much of a force to reckon with Anana is. She obviously takes a backseat to Kickaha because, well, 1960s book dynamics, but she's stronger and faster than he is, she's thousands of years old, and she knows how to use a bunch of tech he doesn't. She starts out thinking of him as an animal, as the Lords perceive mortal beings, but they end up making a good action couple team.
Kickaha: but you can't kill everyone here
Anana: why tho
Kickaha: it is their culture
Anana: what if I literally go through you
me: I can't see a reason why not
As well as trying to find Wolff and Chryseis, their other primary plotline deals with an enemy straight out of Doctor Who: the Bellers, ancient enemies of the Lords who are able to derail the Lords' technological immortality by imprisoning their brains in floating black "bells" and stealing their bodies. When I was a kid, I remember being astonishingly creeped out by the mental image of the drifting black bells that can settle over a person's head and steal their mind. Now I'm merely aware that the creepy floating black bells pursing people in slow motion are perhaps the most Doctor Who image that I've ever seen in written fiction.
The series takes a quality nosedive in book 4 and I've never made it past the fifth one to find out what happens in book 6 (maybe one of these days). But the reread was legit fun for the first three books, and highly qualified fun for the two that came after!
Please talk about your Farmer faves in the comments, if you have any! Spoilers can be noted in comment subjects or at the top of a comment, and I'll do likewise.
I think part of why the Fannish 50 project didn't go anywhere for me in 2023 is because I never really figured out what I wanted to post about (and also probably starting a new project while I was recovering from a lot of health issues and their corresponding mental health issues wasn't a great idea).
So my theme for these posts, which I'll try to do about once a week, is revisiting older canons - books, TV, movies, whatever. I would have started with something I have more personal attachment to, and this isn't necessarily a big formative influence for me, but I was talking to
yhlee this morning about Philip Jose Farmer so - let's start there!One thing that came up in the discussion with Yoon is how thoroughly Farmer has dropped out of popular awareness compared to some of his contemporaries like Heinlein, Asimov, Zelazny, etc. I would say that at the time, he was just about as well known and widely read - at least when I encountered him as a tween I thought of him as one of the "bigs" of that era, but I feel like he's fallen not precisely out of favor but simply out of sight.
Which is too bad, because his books were fun wall-to-wall tropefests, heavily influenced by the pulps that he clearly grew up on. They're certainly dated, there's no getting around that. But at least some of them hold up pretty well! And some of them considerably better than expected .... one that I reread in the last few years was a book I vaguely remembered from childhood and thought it couldn't possibly have aged well, Two Hawks of Earth (1966), in which an Iroquois bomber pilot in WWII falls through a rift in spacetime into an alternate Earth in which Europe was colonized by Native Americans instead of vice versa, and the Iroquois are the big democratic colony-building empire of the era. And it was honestly considerably better than I was expecting! Two Hawks is a typical PJF protagonist, a genius multilingual polymath, and the extremely meta plot involves rescuing an Indigenous Princess (she's British) and returning her to her homeland, which only the protagonist knows is a major world power in his own time instead of an Ethnic island backwater.
But moving on to World of Tiers! The series begins with The Maker of Universes (1965), followed by five more books at the time of Farmer's death. Of the various Farmer I read as a tween/teen, these were my favorites, and I reread them relatively recently since they're now available in cheap ebook omnibuses and enjoyed them. The first three are my favorites, and my interest took a nosedive in the fourth book and I stalled out around the end of book 5, which I think was as far as I ever got as a teenager, too. The first ones are definitely better.
The meta-premise: a highly advanced pre-human civilization of humanlike men and women (and unusually for SF of the era, we do see the women as well) developed Sufficiently Advanced magitech that allowed them to create made-to-order pocket universes, their own personal worlds. Styling themselves Lords - a gender-neutral term in this case - they devolved into a decadent immortality in which they spent most of their time competing to create ever wilder pocket universes and trying to kill or usurp each other.
The first book begins with Robert Wolff, a human retiree coming off a long, boring career and saddled with a haranguing wife he doesn't love (who appears in about two pages, solely to henpeck him and demonstrate Wolff's sucky Earth life, #justiceforbrenda), discovers a portal to another world in the basement of the retirement home he is examining for purchase. He ends up on the bottom layer of a world that is constructed like a series of flat wedding cake layers connected by a central tower, each thousands of miles across and populated by people and creatures drawn from thousands of years of Earth history or created in labs. (Farmer absolutely *loves* worldbuilding and conlanging and so forth; these are not anthropological sci-fi by any means, but you can really see him getting into the fun of throwing together thousands of years of history and running his protagonist through it.) Wolff finds his aged body growing younger as he drinks the water and eats the food of the place, and - having emerged on an Ancient Greek level - falls in love with a nymph named Chryseis, who tells him of the decadent Lord, Jadawin, who rules this world and terrorizes its people. Wolff decides to climb the tower and free the world from their tyrannical ruler.
Light spoilers for the trajectory of the series follow; anything major will be hidden under a spoiler arrow.
The big spoiler regarding Wolff's quest will probably be evident from nearly the beginning to anyone genre-savvy -
Large series-setting-up spoilers for the end of the first book
which is that Wolff *is* Jadawin, overthrown by another Lord and exiled to Earth, with amnesia, to grow old and die when separated from the magitech compounds that keep the Lords young and healthy. (This book predates Amber by several years and was evidently part of Zelazny's inspiration for Corwin.) Wolff regains his memories but not fully his Godhood; living on Earth has irrevocably changed him into someone who can no longer perceive himself as superior to the mortal beings of other worlds.The second book is my favorite because the setup is absolute dynamite and its execution fully follows through. Wolff ends up trapped with a group of Lords in a labyrinth consisting of one-way gates leading them between highly creative pocket worlds, forced to go onward because most of the worlds are unliveable (and also because they are being forced in various ways; Wolff's wife is held hostage). This book is just so fun, with the one-way gates that might lead them to any sort of brand-new batshit world, including one that's made of glass with animals that use suction cups or skates to get around, another where the animals can bounce around in time as a protective mechanism, and so forth. Meanwhile the trapped group quarrels and backstabs and tries to form alliances with each other.
Book 3 switches to a new protagonist, Kickaha, the World of Tiers trickster befriended by Wolff in the first book (actually a human soldier who discovered one of the Lords' world-gates in the ruins of a French farmhouse during WW2). He teams up with Anana, a Lord, to look for his friend Wolff, who is still missing in the aftermath of book 2.
I strongly suspect that if this series had any fandom whatsoever, the fandom would be primarily Wolff/Kickaha - they spend much of the first book adventuring together, and the plot of book 3 onward is literally Kickaha trying to find him - with a secondary but enthusiastic het shipperdom of Kickaha/Anana, canon het pairing with a truly enjoyable enemies-to-lovers dynamic. (And probably an extremely minor Wolff/Chryseis contingent complaining about how their pairing only appears as tagged secondary pairings to other ships, plus the dirtybadwrong Lord incest shippers of the various, usually closely related familial pairings.)
Rereading as an adult, I was genuinely surprised how much of a force to reckon with Anana is. She obviously takes a backseat to Kickaha because, well, 1960s book dynamics, but she's stronger and faster than he is, she's thousands of years old, and she knows how to use a bunch of tech he doesn't. She starts out thinking of him as an animal, as the Lords perceive mortal beings, but they end up making a good action couple team.
Future annoying book spoilers for Anana; rape TW
One reason why I noped out after book 5 was because it pissed me off exceedingly by giving her a rape plotline. On the other hand, the guy who raped her sure did get killed a lot, and the narrative was reasonably on Anana's side in killing quite a few people with extreme prejudice. But she spent a lot of the book being oppressed and used as breeding stock (not *actually* breeding as the Lords use birth control implants, and IIRC may not be cross-fertile with humans anyway, but the antagonists don't know that) by the extremely sexist society in which they spent much of the book stuck with, and I was Annoyed. She takes something of a step backward in her character development from viewing all mortals as disposable animals, but like. I can't really blame her. Kickaha, nominally her Morality Pet most of the time, doesn't really help.Kickaha: but you can't kill everyone here
Anana: why tho
Kickaha: it is their culture
Anana: what if I literally go through you
me: I can't see a reason why not
As well as trying to find Wolff and Chryseis, their other primary plotline deals with an enemy straight out of Doctor Who: the Bellers, ancient enemies of the Lords who are able to derail the Lords' technological immortality by imprisoning their brains in floating black "bells" and stealing their bodies. When I was a kid, I remember being astonishingly creeped out by the mental image of the drifting black bells that can settle over a person's head and steal their mind. Now I'm merely aware that the creepy floating black bells pursing people in slow motion are perhaps the most Doctor Who image that I've ever seen in written fiction.
The series takes a quality nosedive in book 4 and I've never made it past the fifth one to find out what happens in book 6 (maybe one of these days). But the reread was legit fun for the first three books, and highly qualified fun for the two that came after!
Please talk about your Farmer faves in the comments, if you have any! Spoilers can be noted in comment subjects or at the top of a comment, and I'll do likewise.
Farmer fave: Dayworld (spoilers)
Dayworld has a super cool sci-fi thriller premise, which is that thanks to overpopulation, Earth has this system where everyone is only "activated/alive" ONE DAY of every week, and then sort of goes into a hibernation fridge thingy the other six days, like hot-bunking on steroids. However! for Reasons I can't remember, the hero is a man who is (gasp!) active/awake EVERY DAY, and also for Reasons (something something surveillance state something something?), each day he has a completely different personality. One of them was an Irish Catholic priest (Father Timothy??), I don't remember the rest. And the big conspiracy, of course, is that the overpopulation problem was solved decades? ago but because Reasons (power-hungry elites, probably), everyone is still forced to hot-bunk their lives like this, and the hero is either an agent on some side or gets caught up in this because the "multiple personality" thing (this was the term extant at the time I encountered the books, as opposed to dissociative identity thingy) makes him useful. I do not remember if the "multiple personality" was a sci-fi gimmick or due to "trauma" or what.
Hilariously, this was not actually the first I learned of multiple personalities; that was in 4th grade math class, because Mr. Gunn liked to talk about Interesting Things and one of them was Three Faces of Eve and something something Sybil, and I did in fact go read some of those books in the nonfiction section (When Rabbit Howls, The Minds of Billy Milligan), but that's a separate topic.
Re: Farmer fave: Dayworld (spoilers)
Re: Farmer fave: Dayworld (spoilers)
I did read some short stories as a kid, including a haunting one about "Who Killed Cock Robin?" being actually some kind of coded kid lore about an alien world that kids...disappeared to? Or maybe they got eaten? Or murder aliens? I literally remember nothing else and in 5th grade I wasn't taking notes on authors or anything. :facepalm: There seems to be some "ecological mystery" book on that theme, and it's not that, it was about LITERAL ALIENS, kind of like an alien nursery rhyme take on Lewis Padgett's "Mimsy Were the Borogoves" [Wikipedia].
Re: Farmer fave: Dayworld (spoilers)
My SF reading as a kid was almost wholly based upon "books which are in our house", but my dad was a big SF reader so I had a lot of things to read, and that's definitely where I first encountered Cherryh, Amber, Farmer, and a bunch of other things. I also did get a chance to read a lot of classic SF short stories, including The Cold Equations which I know is unpopular now for stupid reasons but made me absolutely SOB as a teen.
Re: Farmer fave: Dayworld (spoilers)
I was completely, 1000000% spoiled for "The Cold Equations" to hell and gone by reading multiple sci-fi literary criticism essays about it in high school before I EVER laid my hands on a copy. I was so scared to read it because, I mean, however one feels about the story, it has a GIANT reputation; I don't think anyone remembers a goddamn other thing Godwin ever wrote. (I read one once and, welp, it was sort of unmemorable and based on a terrible pun.) And even knowing the ENTIRE story from beginning to end before I even READ it, I SOBBED UNCONTROLLABLY when I read it. And then the next two times.
I also love that story and think most of the people who hate it have...really stupid reasons for "it's a bad story" (vs. "I don't like that story"). Most of the nitpicky critiques are about "but safety engineering this" or "if they'd done fuel safety margin that" and I'm all. Y'all. This is not a story about safety engineering and fuel safety margins, even though that's the frame. This is, thematically, about math and physics. Godwin may not have gotten the exact engineering correct, but the thematic statement is correct.
I often think (this is a rant I've had for a while) that modern sf/f has calcified around the fetishization of mimesis, to the point that many readers (writers) lose sight of the idea of...a metaphor? an allegory? (Sometimes I am that reader/writer.)
Because sometimes criticizing "The Cold Equations" on modern safety engineering grounds is like criticizing Paul Bunyan's Pilgrim's Progress because you think he fucked up the soil composition in the Slough of Despond. Or criticizing the Elric books by Michael Moorcock because they don't account for (as Moorcock notably remarked) the GDP of Melniboné, as opposed to Hey actually, the point (at least initially) was a deconstruction of the Conan-style sword-and-sorcery hero.
The degree of mimesis considered desirable/necessary in a work is not an objective fucking standard, it's a function of current literary/cultural fashion and marketing constraints.
(okay, rant over)
Re: Farmer fave: Dayworld (spoilers)
Re: Farmer fave: Dayworld (spoilers)
I felt like this about a lot of China Miéville's criticism of Tolkien.
Re: Farmer fave: Dayworld (spoilers)
Re: Farmer fave: Dayworld (spoilers)
"Death in Bangkok" (1993), which I also read in The Year's Best Fantasy and Horror. I managed to read all four of the Hyperion Cantos because they were going through my friendlist in college, although I am skeptical I would be able to hack a re-read. The best thing I can say about The Terror (2007) is that it provided the skeleton for the superb 2018 AMC series and otherwise Jesus Christ.
sidetracked by MATH
Re: sidetracked by MATH
Re: Farmer fave: Dayworld (spoilers)
Re: Farmer fave: Dayworld (spoilers)
"Riders of the Purple Wage," plus another book influenced by World of Tiers?
I wonder if I might make more sense of it now. I am sitting on a copy of Dangerous Visions that someone generously gave me; I literally haven't reread the antho since high school, so, ~25 years. For example, I could not make heads or tails of the "frelk" story - aha, "Aye, and Gomorrah" by Samuel R. Delaney, which I thought was stupid and pointless because...reading the summary NOW, I had NO IDEA there was sex (or prostitution) going on, or that the characters were neuter.
(...I wonder now if all the stories that to me were like "Okay, what's the big deal and what's so subversive/'dangerous' about them?" were STORIES WITH WEIRD SEX IN THEM. But I digress.)
The other thing this puts me in mind is Robert Silverberg! So, as far as I know Silverberg is still alive, he was certainly very prominent in his day, bunches of Hugos and so on. My introduction to Silverberg was Lord Valentine's Castle, and while I admit the general setup is a tropey thing that one could see done by a lot of sf/f writers, the premise of Lord Valentine's Castle (bodyswapped ruler whose position has been usurped goes on a picaresque quest in a colorful world with colorful friends!) does vaguely look like it could theoretically have been influenced by World of Tiers although of course it could have been something else. For example, the much older Henry Kuttner (& probably also C. L. Moore) pulp novel Dark World (1946) has some of those ideas in embryonic form, where the hero Edward Bond, an injured WWII pilot, turns out to have been the exiled magician Ganelon from the eponymous world, which is magical and parallel to our Earth. (This book was also an inspiration for Zelazny's Amber. Also now I want the crossover between Biggles and Dark World...)
But Silverberg is another author who was HUGE in his day, certainly is known by people who read sf/f from that era, and just does not seem to be remembered as a household name by Readers of Later Sf/f the way they might recognize Asimov or Heinlein even if they've never read Asimov or Heinlein. Wikipedia tells me he retired from writing (or made the statement) in 2015, but I honestly loved his older body of work, including the relatively obscure Face of the Waters, which is a sci-fi/alien planet retelling of "The Rime of the Ancient Mariner."
Re: "Riders of the Purple Wage," plus another book influenced by World of Tiers?
Re: "Riders of the Purple Wage," plus another book influenced by World of Tiers?
Re: "Riders of the Purple Wage," plus another book influenced by World of Tiers?
Re: "Riders of the Purple Wage," plus another book influenced by World of Tiers?
I'd say Larry Niven is another, while we're at it! I have a memory of Ringworld especially being HUGE in its day, or The Mote in God's Eye by Niven & Pournelle. I expect if you polled twenty-year-old-and-under people on Tumblr about Niven or Pournelle, most of them would not be able to list any books by either author, vs. my running into accounts of Niven's construction of Ringworld having a Technical Flaw rather famously pointed out by Hal Clement, I think more than once!
Re: "Riders of the Purple Wage," plus another book influenced by World of Tiers?
I adored The Integral Trees (1984) and The Smoke Ring (1987): zero-g forests, oceans of sky, rediscovery of ancient tech which does not overhaul the world so much as enlighten the tech in question. The first novel has an utterly dumbass incident of don't-want-to-die-a-virgin which even in middle school I thought would not exactly be my priority in the middle of a disaster, but I read and re-read both books voraciously for years. I've never seen a similar setting even in later sf.
Re: "Riders of the Purple Wage," plus another book influenced by World of Tiers?
Oh those!! I remember them, and I also adored them! What an incredible, fascinating world that was, and you're right, I can't think of anything else even remotely like it in the years since then. I suppose it was Niven's stab at doing "ether" (in the 19th century sense) with a sci-fi gloss. Sometimes I've thought about rereading them; I last read them in high school.
Re: "Riders of the Purple Wage," plus another book influenced by World of Tiers?
I suspect I would find the language and the characters flatter than I remember, but I don't see how the world can have been damaged and the world was what I loved most. I read those books in trees in summer and on the way to air shows with my family. It was perfect.
Re: "Riders of the Purple Wage," plus another book influenced by World of Tiers?
My dad had a ton of Pournelle and Niven books. I remember enjoying the Mote books as a teen, mainly for the slow burn first contact (still something I love, but there’s not much of it around these days). I’m pretty sure that even at the time I thought all the human characters were paper-thin and dumb as rocks, though.
Re: "Riders of the Purple Wage," plus another book influenced by World of Tiers?
I never got into that series! I read an inconsistent amount of Niven: loved some novels, bounced completely off others, read a lot of his short fiction. Have you read Ruthanna Emrys' A Half-Built Garden (2022), for first contact?
Re: "Riders of the Purple Wage," plus another book influenced by World of Tiers?
Admittedly apparently Philip K. Dick had very interesting psychiatric stuff going on, but I was only vaguely aware of this until rather later; I don't think I was even aware of the "Dick calls the FBI on various people because alien? voices?" until I was reading up on Stanislaw Lem after reading the spectacular but mindfucky The Futurological Congress. Lem, a Polish writer, apparently noped THE FUCK out of SFWA; Dick tried to sic the FBI on Lem as well, so the interesting thing here is apparently Lem thought Dick was one of the few American sf writers who was actually good at writing!
Re: "Riders of the Purple Wage," plus another book influenced by World of Tiers?
Re: "Riders of the Purple Wage," plus another book influenced by World of Tiers?
Re: "Riders of the Purple Wage," plus another book influenced by World of Tiers?
But Silverberg is another author who was HUGE in his day, certainly is known by people who read sf/f from that era, and just does not seem to be remembered as a household name by Readers of Later Sf/f the way they might recognize Asimov or Heinlein even if they've never read Asimov or Heinlein.
Jumping in here randomly to say that I read a book by Silverberg called Across a Billion Years when I was a teenager and I remember loving it. It was told in the first person by a young guy who's an archaeologist on an expedition to investigate a long-extinct very advanced alien race and the book is told in the form of letters to his sister, and eventually the archaeologists find one last very very ancient member of this race, who essentially existed for so long that they just sort of... withered away. No idea if it'd hold up today but I remember really loving the whole, IDK, spirit of intellectual adventure the book captured.
I have never read any Farmer! I should remedy that.
Re: "Riders of the Purple Wage," plus another book influenced by World of Tiers?
Re: "Riders of the Purple Wage," plus another book influenced by World of Tiers?
Re: "Riders of the Purple Wage," plus another book influenced by World of Tiers?
I enjoyed Silverberg a ton in HS after discovering him and continued poking around his backlist in college, but also, he had published a metric ton of books and stories, so I just couldn't make a huge dent. XD
Re: "Riders of the Purple Wage," plus another book influenced by World of Tiers?
Though I may be misremembering, I think there was a story about a vault of treasure on an asteroid protected by a robot that asked trivia questions about literally any subject? And everyone knew the treasure was there but no one could get past the robot. But some guy (not the protagonist, but his… heist companion? Partner in crime) basically built a pocket Google and confidently answered all the questions - only to get killed anyway. The protag watched all this go down from their spaceship, then went out to try himself because he’d promised his partner he would. Except now Google was fried so he just made up random gibberish, and it turned out that’s what the robot - who’d always said it needed people to demonstrate “truth and understanding” or somesuch - actually wanted.
Of course there’s a twist at the end where the protag gleefully loads up his pockets with (absolutely exquisitely described) treasures and the robot idly asks him “Why are you taking these things? Why do you want them?” and the protag absentmindedly says something along the lines of “Because they’re beautiful and rare and valuable” … which of course is a straightforward factual answer and thus the robot kills him on the spot. XD
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For the trail leads to a bizarre, long-forgotten land boasting a multitude of strange and terrifying mysteries: the City Built by God, the Hideous Hunter, the One to Avoid, and most shocking of all, the Crystal Tree of Time--whose seductive powers could ultimately spell Tarzan's doom . . . '
Also a novel set in Pemberley (as in Pride and Prejudice 's Pemberley) described as darkly erotic
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That was my formative Farmer, too—I'm not sure I got into any of his other series, although I read a bunch of his short fiction as it was always turning up in anthologies lying around the house. I have vivid memories of the first three, can't remember a thing about the fourth, and recognize the cover of the fifth which suggests I had access to it, but none of the plot you relate actually rings a bell. I'm not sure I even knew there was a sixth until this post. I haven't read any of the books since high school at the latest, but I did read them more than once at that time.
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Also I think I just figured out *why* I've never read the sixth one .... looking it up, apparently it's not really part of the main continuity at all, but rather a maybe-a-dream, maybe-not experimental novel in which a previously unseen character roleplays being part of the world of the books, or maybe does actually portal directly into the world, but the novel never makes it clear which is happening. I could imagine myself bouncing off this book hard if I ever tried reading it as a teen.
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Which is a shame for anything titled honest-to-God The Lavalite World.
a maybe-a-dream, maybe-not experimental novel in which a previously unseen character roleplays being part of the world of the books, or maybe does actually portal directly into the world, but the novel never makes it clear which is happening.
Huh! That does feel like a very Philip José Farmer thing to do in terms of metafiction, but I don't know how I would have felt about it.
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I know!! It's such a waste of a good premise. The actual world is weird and cool, and PJF clearly had a grand time working out the details of how people could survive, live, and feed themselves on a world where the ground moves all the time, but unfortunately the plot is about 300 pages of the characters traveling with the lavalite-dwelling nomads in search of a way off the world, nearly every part of the world is exactly the same due to the constant undulating that breaks up every geological feature, and the people they're with are also ragingly sexist. The entire thing drags endlessly.
(Although now that I'm thinking about it, this *might* be the book in which Our Heroes build a hot-air balloon from scratch, which was conceptually fun, at least. It definitely happened at some point in this series. Honestly, one of the highlights of Farmer for me is the characters reinventing industrial-era technology with Stone Age tools, which happens in a lot of his books, IIRC.)
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"Lina. She can't act, she can't sing, she can't dance. A triple threat."
Honestly, one of the highlights of Farmer for me is the characters reinventing industrial-era technology with Stone Age tools, which happens in a lot of his books, IIRC.
My strongest impression is the blenderized myth and sci-fi, which I feel was a popular combination around that time.
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