The Lovers:

In this Hugo-winning novella, Farmer provides more complex characters than in much of his later work. The hero is a rebel, but not too much of one; he’s caught up by the beliefs he was raised with, and has difficulty getting past them. In this, he doesn’t always take the easy literary path; he doesn’t invariably triumph against all odds, and not all of his choices are good. The villain of the piece has another side that we only glimpse, but know is there.

While the depth of characterization is a surprising precursor to the more simplistic templates Farmer later relied on, the seeds of that more facile approach are here as well. I never really found myself believing in the society he created, nor in the alien biology he posits. For one thing, there’s no clear focus to the book; it feels very much like he’s making it up as he goes along. Sometimes that works. Here it doesn’t.

For all the story’s flaws, there are the bones of interesting ideas, and I can see why it attracted attention. At the same time, the story feels unnecessarily stretched out, and the weak spots are hard to ignore. This should probably have stayed at short story length. Still, I wish he’d taken the complexity and interesting choices that are here, and written more like that, rather than what seems to have been a determined tack toward pulp.

Dark is the Sun:

I’ve read a lot of Philip Jose Farmer in recent months. I’ve liked very little of it. In fact, I’d started to think that my enjoyment of the Riverworld series was an anomaly, and that, to put it bluntly, Farmer was simply not a very good writer.

Dark is the Sun doesn’t entirely confound that view; it’s not a work of any particular genius. But it is head and shoulders above the World of Tiers series, to pick one example. It’s so different that it reads as if it had been written by an entirely different author. Had I picked it up blind, I’d have assumed it to be a lost Piers Anthony novel from the 1970s, or a collaboration with him during that period. It has the same mounting introduction of novelty after novelty, and the same relentless, if somewhat facile, logical application of concepts. The sexism is limited and of its time rather than well past it. In short, it’s like reading a book by a whole different author.

That doesn’t mean this is a good book, but it’s not a bad one. It’s got an interesting world, decent (if into entirely credible) characters, and a challenging quest. There’s not a lot of surprise, but there’s plenty to keep you going. Of the half dozen Farmer books I’ve read recently, this is the only one that had me looking forward (slightly) to the next reading session, rather than looking for any excuse to put it off.

I can’t say this is the Riverworld Farmer I remember and liked, but it’s a lot like the Tarot and Cluster Anthony that I remember and liked. If you’re a fan of those series, you might like this as well.


Riders of the Purple Wage:

I can only imagine what Farmer was intending when he wrote this. It appeared in Harlan Ellison’s Dangerous Visions, and I envision Ellison asking Farmer for a story, Farmer agreeing, and then trying to be ‘dangerous’ by emulating Hunter S. Thompson and Jack Kerouac. Or being on a lot of drugs. Or both.

I can’t imagine what the Nebula (nominated) and Hugo (won) voters were thinking. I found this essentially unreadable. If you really try, you can get a general sense that it’s about an artist trying to win a government grant. But there’s no reason to try. I did, and I’d like to save you the effort. Don’t read this.

It was a mistake to request all of these PHF books at once because reading them all together recalls how old they are and how tastes have changed. These books were revolutionary and fun at the time but they have been so widely imitated that they have lost their specialness. This is too bad because really, PHF sampled a little bit at a time can be quite a treat.

I received a review copy of this and five other volumes of the works of Philip José Farmer through NetGalley.com.

This collection of three works, one novel and two novellas satisfied my itch to delve into some key works of this science fiction writer who achieved the Grand Master designation in 2001. I had previously enjoyed the imagination of first of his Riverworld fantasy series, which has all humans who ever died awake on the banks of a vast river and learn how to tap their varied skills to survive and explore the mystery behind their strange new circumstance. It was kind of fun to experience the likes of Mark Twain, Herman Goering, and other historical figures take paths of collaboration or competition with each other. Another read of Farmer brought Vonnegut’s Killgore Trout alive again in his “Venus on the Half-Shell” (1975), which was a corny and forgettable space opera parody. My other read was of “The Image of the Beast” (1968), which broke ground for innovation by blending pornography, horror, and detective genres. When I read it sometime in the 70s, the murder scenario of evil female beasts taking their male victims by lulling them with sex then sending a snake-like monster out from her hoohaw to wreak slaughter was enough of uncomfortable horror to last me a long time. Thus, I have encountered enough diversity in his writing to wonder what worthy works of Farmer I may have missed.

“The Lovers”, from 1952 (only 3 years after Orwell’s “1984”), was his first book, a novella that won him a Hugo Award as a “Most Promising New Talent.” With a bit of the flavor of P.K. Dick, it features an unlikeable man, Hal, who is a cog in the machinery of a totalitarian theocracy with a repressive Victorian outlook on sexuality. As a linguist on an imperialist mission to the planet Ozgan, his job is to help the team learn the language of its sentient species, the Wogglebugs, which have evolved from insects. The hidden agenda is to find any excuse necessary to wipe them out to facilitate human colonization of the planet. Unknown to his personal monitor for correct behavior, Pornsen, who is a bit of a fusion between the Inquisition and political officers placed within the Soviet bureaucracy, Hal encounters an apparently normal human woman in his forays among the ruins of a colony lost to history, who seeks his help. His friendship with her begins to humanize him, and as his love turns to obsessive lust, he becomes radicalized against his brainwashing. His growing affinity for the Wogglebugs advances through their help in keeping his transgressions secret, and soon he becomes an outright rebel against emerging plan of the human invades to wipe them out. The fly in the ointment for our emerging identification with Hal comes when it turns out his lover is not fully human and there is a collision between moral development and an edge of horror that rewards his betrayal of his species. The biology and technology concepts in this tale are not very plausible or compelling, and the Wogglebugs are insufficiently alien in their society, but the psychology of its antihero and his metamorphosis made this a worthy and innovative read for me, about 3.5 stars of pleasure.

“Dark is the Sun” (1979) is a fantasy adventure novel set on a dying Earth billions of years in the future when humans live in small hunter-gatherer tribes and many orders of animals and even plants have evolved toward sentience. Devy is a young man who sets out on a traditional quest to find a mate among other tribes, accompanied by his trusty and highly intelligent dog and panther. A setback occurs when his “soul egg” is stolen, an object worn around the neck which somehow registers compatibility for marriage and reproduction and required to be accepted into a tribe. He finds and is suitably attracted to a feisty woman who has also had her soul egg stolen, so his quest and her become merged. They are accompanied by a plant being, Shoosh, who resembles a slowly-moving, leafy centaur and holds much ancient knowledge about the former achievements of human civilization. I loved his odd mentality and subtle humor, but not his long lectures on ecology, which was not very plausible or compelling. The story unfolds through continuous series of dangerous interludes and narrow escapes through brave action with strange life forms and remnants of ancient technology. A favorite character is an old tank-like robot with lasers that they wake up and persuade to aid them in their battles. Eventually, they find the thief among a subhuman species of humans, who points them to the machinations of Shemibob, a chimerical, monstrous witch of the crystal cities of the vast wasteland zones of the continent. In a nice plot twist, their efforts to surmount her evil forces and tricks leads to enlisting her to the ultimate quest, that of reviving lost technology to master wormholes as a means for transporting sentient life forms to another star system. This one had some of the feelings of Heinlein’s “Glory Road” (1963), a comparable quest by diverse, ragtag collection of beings, and Aldis’ “Hothouse” (1962), another dying-Earth scenario of post-human survival amidst a riot of weird and dangerous species. The interspecies teamwork also shares some elements with the adventurous explorations in Niven’s “Ringworld” (1970), although the characters are not nearly as loveable. Farmer’s Wiki entry tells me that the true source he is channeling is the pulp Martian adventures of Edgar Rice Burroughs, which share a similar approach of continuous action and minimal reflection. I’d say I got another 3.5 stars of pleasure from this read.

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The final part of this package, “New Riders of the Purple Wage”, a Hugo and Nebula award winning novella from 1967, is a good representative of Farmer’s satirical and absurdist bent. In 31st century Earth, technology has automated the machinery of civilization and production of artificial food (without resorting to recycled human protein a lá Soylent Green). People without ambition get a cradle-to-grave income referred to as the “Purple Wage”. A golden opportunity for humans to devote their lives to creativity and culture. But people just don’t know how to achieve happiness in this utopia without strife, jealousy, and decadent decay. Our main character, Chib Winnegan, is an artist whose innovation in three-dimensional paintings requires him to win a grant, or he will have to move from the pinnacle of culture in the arcologies of the LA megapolis to the hinterlands of Egypt. I enjoyed some of the arch humor about the power of pompous critics that Chib faces. I didn’t enjoy the prolonged conflict and brawl he has with his girlfriend over her plan to terminate her pregnancy. Another big piece of the plot concerns his wealthy grandfather’s revolt against the government’s attempt to nationalize all capitalism enterprises and worker unions. A crescendo is reached with a lot of over-the-top revenge staged for his funeral, replete a lot of references to the one featured in “Finnegan’s Wake” (the chapter is entitled “Winnegan’s Fake”). This extension of the satire into the political and economic realm felt flat without the true-believer element like Heinlein’s libertarianism or P.K. Dick’s deep paranoia. In other words, there wasn’t enough of the face of dystopia to justify any pleasure from bucking the system. Much here is cleverness for cleverness’ sake. Two stars on the pleasure meter, bring to total for the set to 3 stars.

All in all, I wouldn’t push most readers to go out of their way to pursue this read, but if, like me, you are a true scifi/fantasy fan and you are interested in the history of ideas in speculative fiction, this should be worthwhile. This e-book was provided by the publisher for review through the Netgalley program.

The Lovers, Dark is the Sun, Riders of the Purple Wage by Philip Jose Farmer-Two of the author's novels and one of his most famous novellas in one offering.
The Lovers. I've read a lot of Farmer's stories and quite a few novels but never had a chance to read the Lovers. Starting off it's a little shaky and straight out of the 50's mind-set of population explosion, repressed religious societies, and vivid conservative trappings. Not much happens until the protagonist, Hal Yarrow, gets off Earth and settles in on an alien world to observe the dwellers there. He doesn't realize it, but he's just looking for love, and he finds it where he least expects to. Up until this point in science fiction, sex has pretty much been a taboo subject except for the scantily clad women on the magazine covers. But Farmer is more ambitious than most and introduces emotional depth to his story along with some hanky-panky. It sounds okay but reads rather slow and drags in places. Only a must read for a true fan or archivist.
Dark is the Sun. The Sun has died and the burning moon no longer serves as a fill-in. A young man goes on a quest to find his soul egg? and a mate along with a strange collection of forest dwellers. A quest story with all the Farmer quirks and asides. This is a long journey but filled with dangerous wonders and unexpected pleasures.
Riders of the Purple Wage. This novella first appeared in Harlan Ellison's famously ground-breaking anthology Dangerous Visions and went on to win a Hugo award. There is a story here if you pay close attention. Reading like John Dos Passos on mushrooms or James Joyce on acid, the text is filled with unreal images and hilarious happenings. Not for everyone but a true classic in its own way.