Philip José Farmer

Biography Youth and education

Farmer was born in North Terre Haute, Indiana. His parents gave him the middle name "Josie", from his paternal grandmother Josephine, but Farmer later changed it himself to “José” as he resented the woman's name and wanted to lend color to what he felt was an otherwise rather drab name. 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 underwent basic religious training in the Church of Christ, Scientist (Christian Science) as a child, which he later characterized as a "peculiar background" for a science fiction writer. He became an agnostic at the age of 14, and ultimately an atheist, though not, he said, indifferent to religion. At age 23, in 1941, he married Bette V. Andre, remaining a couple throughout his life; together, they had 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 later continued his education, however, earning a bachelor's degree in English from Bradley University in 1950 at the age of 32.

Early career Farmer had his first literary success when his novella The Lovers was published by Samuel Mines in Startling Stories, August 1952. Literary success did not translate into financial security, so he left Peoria in 1956 to launch a career as a technical writer. He spent the next 14 years working in that capacity for various defense contractors, from Syracuse, New York, to Los Angeles, while writing science fiction in his spare time. 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 His novel To Your Scattered Bodies Go (a reworking of the unpublished prize-winning first novel of 20 years before) won him a third Hugo in 1972, for Best Novel.

Later years Farmer had both critical champions and detractors. Leslie Fiedler proclaimed him "the greatest science fiction writer ever" 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." Isaac Asimov praised Farmer as an "excellent science fiction writer; in fact, a far more skillful writer than I am...." But Christopher Lehmann-Haupt, a reviewer opposed to "that sci-fi crap," dismissed him in The New York Times in 1972 as "a humdrum toiler in the fields of science fiction."

In 2001 Farmer won the World Fantasy Award for Life Achievement and the Science Fiction Writers of America made him its 19th SFWA Grand Master in the same year. 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. (of which Earth is one), created tens of thousands of years ago by a race of human beings not from Earth 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 several of these godlike humans and several "ordinary" humans from Earth who accidentally travel to these artificial universes. (One of those "ordinary" humans was Paul Janus Finnegan [PJF], who becomes the main character in the series.) The series 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. 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.

Literary themes

Sexuality Farmer's work often handles sexual themes; some early works were notable for their ground-breaking introduction of such material to popular science fiction literature. His first published science fiction story (with one minor exception), the novella The Lovers, earned him the Hugo Award for Best New SF Author or Artist in 1953, and is critically recognized as the story that broke the taboo on sex in science fiction. (Farmer's talk at the award ceremony was entitled “Science Fiction and the Kinsey Report”. ) It instantly put Farmer on the literary map.

The short story collection Strange Relations (1960) was a notable event in the genre. Moreover, Fire and the Night (1962) is a mainstream novel about an interracial romance; it features 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 to 1969 explore group sex, interplanetary travel, and interplay between fictional figures like Herald Childe and real people like Forry Ackerman. In the World of Tiers series he explores Oedipal themes. In 1982, Farmer acknowledged that most of literary critic Leslie Fiedler's "Freudian" analysis of his work is valid, but insisted that "there is also much that is Jungian and Reichian in my works".

Religion Farmer's fiction frequently includes religious themes; he once went so far as to muse that "religion is the earliest form of science fiction". Raised in the Christian Science church, he lost his religious faith in early youth. Nevertheless, he eventually found that he was not truly indifferent to religion, but was "powerfully attracted by the Roman Catholic faith". Immortality, the afterlife and soteriology were particular theological concerns for him. "The brain, knowing that a person can't live forever in this world, rationalizes a future, or other-dimensional, world in which immortality is possible.... For me, only those stories concerned with this one vital issue are serious stories. All others, no matter how moving or profound, are mere entertainments. They do not deal with that which is our gravest concern. Without a belief in eternal life for us, the terrestrial existence is something to be gotten through with as little pain and as much pleasure as possible. If this conclusion is the triumph of irrationality over logic, so be it."

In his groundbreaking novella The Lovers (1952) he invented a fictional religion based on J. W. Dunne's "Serialism". The novel 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. Jesus of Nazareth shows up as a character in both the Riverworld series (in the 1966 novelette "Riverworld" — but not in the novels, except for the brief mention of his death early in The Magic Labyrinth) and in the 1979 novel Jesus on Mars. Other examples of religious themes include the short stories "J.C. on the Dude Ranch", "The God Business", "The Making of Revelation, Part I", and the novels Inside, Outside (1964) — which may or may not be set in Hell — and Traitor to the Living (1973), among many others.

Pulp heroes Many of Farmer's works rework existing characters from fiction and history, Farmer's use of the pseudonym had caused confusion among many readers, who for some time assumed that Vonnegut was behind it; when the truth of Venus on the Half-Shell'''s authorship came out, Vonnegut was reported as being "not amused." In an issue of the semi-prozine The Alien Critic/Science Fiction Review, published by Richard E. Geis, Farmer claimed to have received an angry, obscenity-laden telephone call from Vonnegut about it. 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). 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, and perhaps related to the name Cordwainer Smith, a pseudonym used by Paul Linebarger.

Awards and honors

Awards 1982: Honorary doctorate awarded by Lincoln College 2000: Damon Knight Memorial Grand Master Award, lifetime achievement in fantasy and SF 2003: Forry Award for Lifetime Achievement, presented by the Los Angeles Science Fantasy Society

Runners-up, etc

General and cited sources Brizzi, Mary (Mary Turzillo). Reader's Guide to Philip José Farmer'', Starmont House, Mercer Island, WA., (Starmont Reader's Guides to Contemporary Science Fiction and Fantasy Authors series, No. 3, ed. Roger C. Schlobin) , 1981.

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