Philip José Farmer was a writer who to me always promised slightly more than he delivered, the ideas around which he built his stories more interesting in conception than realisation. He started writing science fiction at a time when it was very much still a straightlaced pulp genre and immediately injected a proper dirty, perverse sexuality in it when other writers were still proud of describing a tomcat as a “ballbearing mousetrap”. Thoroughout his career his writing was oscillating between his fascination for pulp and his fascination with sex and perversity, often combining the two, as in A Feast Unknown, starring Doc Savage and Tarzan as two sexual deviants only able to get it on after they’ve killed.
His biggest commercial succes was probably the Riverworld series, starring Sir Richard Burton as he goes in search of the sources of the river alongside which he wakes up after his death, millions of years into the future, along with everybody else who ever lived. A great concept, portrayed with much verve and passion, but which unfortunately petered out a bit in the sequels.
My own personal favourites instead was his World of Tiers series, the first novel of which, The Maker of Universes was one of the first novels I ever bought in English. It 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…
An almost perfect adventure story, and the sequels kept up the high standard set, each one exploring a new, more bizarre world. Perfect fodder for a fourteen year but not one that prepared him for his more …mature… novels.
Farmer was a great writer who helped science fiction grow up, yet who kept an apprecation for its more immature, more innocent side. If he was right, he’ll be waking up somewhere right about now, stark naked next to an endless river, looking for material to make a pen, ink and paper out of…