The Maker of Universes
Philip José Farmer
247 pages
published in 1965

The Maker of Universes is the first novel of the World of Tiers series and has long been a favourite of mine, having picked this up ages ago. This must've been one of the first sf novels I bought in English. The reasons I like this novel are not hard to see: this is pure wish fulfillment, as one look at the backcover blurb makes clear, a more modern version of Edgar Rice Burroughs' John Carter, Warlord of Mars stories.

The book starts with Robert Wolff, an almost retired professor of Greek, trapped in a somewhat loveless marriage, hearing a trumpet call out in the basement storage room of the newly built house he is thinking of buying. An impossibility obviously, as the closet is as bare as it could be, yet when he slides the door open again, he sees a portral to another world, where a bronzed youg man was holding a weirdly shaped trumpet in his hand and fighting of half a dozen of nightmarish, gorrila like creatures. Spying Wolff, the man tosses the horn to him and tells Wolff to look him, Kickaha up. Then the portal closes and Wolff is left with the horn...

Now admit it, if you have any sense of adventure, you would take Kickaha up on his offer, would you not? Because that is one of the purest forms of wish fulfillment, being a normal guy suddenly trust into adventure and becoming a true hero with unsuspected powers. Certainly Wolff needs little to convince himself of going for the horn and blowing it, re-opening the portal and stepping through it. I suspect, neither would you or I...

At first it seems to Wolff as if he has reached paradise. He has stepped into a world of a park like forest, surrounded by a calm sea, in which several species of fruit tree provide all the food you need and the water tastes like sweet fresh wine, the animals are friendly and untreatening and his body begins to rejuvenate. The inhabitants he meets are all equally beautiful, men and women both. This paradise is located on the bottom level of a world that consists of four tiers, with each tier being connected to and supported by a huge mountain on the next tier below, the whole floating in a void: a pocket universe. Wolff quite enjoys this paradise, but is concerned about Kickaha's disappearance.

And indeed the fairy tale does not last long. He never meets Kickaha, but does meet with Chryseis, for whom he immediately feels something, who had witnessed Kickaha's disappearance. His investigations before too long bring the monstrous gorilla-like creatures, the socalled Gworl, back and they kidnap Chryseis and steal the horn, leaving Wolff behind for dead. He immediately goes after them, but it means climbing the huge mountain at the other end of the ocean to the next level. And this is just the start of his adventures.

The way the World of Tiers is built up is like an adventure wonderland: the bottom level is a tropical idyllic paradise, the next level is North America before Columbus, but with all the animal species that on Earth died out in the last ice age as well as bioengineered centaur tribes. The level above it is filled with Medieval knights spending all their time in quests and tourneys, while the last level has the city of Atlantis. Wolff has to go through all the levels to get to the headquarters of the lord, fortunately with the help of Kickaha, whom he meets up with again halfway through his climb up to the second level.

The maker of Universes is adventure science fiction as they don't write anymore. Sure, plenty of adventure sf is still being published these days, but they lack the innocence of the World of Tiers series to me. There's no political agenda in these novels, unlike contemporary examples, where the agenda is often not so much hidden as crammed down the reader's throat. (I'm thinking here e.g. about some of S. M. Stirling's novels.) It's fun nonsense, somewhat dated perhaps, with the only important female character being little more than a damsel in distress there to be kidnapped and provide Wolff with the impetus to explore the World of Tiers.

I've always thought of Farmer as a rather good writer, but actually this is the first book of his I've read since I've started this booklog or longer, so I haven't read anything of his for at least a good six years and not missed his writing much. Nor, come to think of it, have I read as much of his as I thought I had; only scattered novels and short stories outside of the World of Tiers series. Which makes me wonder whether it's just me, or whether he just isn't as good or important a science fiction writer as I always thought he was?

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