Classic PJ Farmer Read online

  The Classic Philip José Farmer

  1952-1964

  Edited and Introduction by

  Martin H. Greenberg

  Foreword by Isaac Asimov

  Foreword: Retrieving the Lost

  by Isaac Asimov

  The history of contemporary science fiction begins with the spring of 1926, when the first magazine ever to be devoted entirely to science fiction made its appearance. For a quarter-century thereafter science fiction continued to appear in magazines—and only in magazines.

  They were wonderful days for those of us who lived through them, but there was a flaw. Magazines are, by their very nature, ephemeral. They are on the newsstands a month or two and are gone. A very few readers may save their issues, but they are fragile and do not stand much handling.

  Beginning in 1950, science fiction in book form began to make its appearance, and some of the books retrieved the magazine short stories and serials in the form of collections, anthologies and novels. As time went on, however, it became clear that the vast majority of science-fiction books were in paperback form, and these, too, were ephemeral. Their stay on the newsstands is not entirely calendar-bound, and they can withstand a bit more handling than periodicals can—but paperbacks tend to be, like magazines, throwaway items.

  That leaves the hardback book, which finds its way into public libraries as well as private homes, and which is durable. Even there, we have deficiencies. The relatively few science-fiction books which appear in hardback usually appear in small printings and few, if any, reprintings. Out-of-print is the usual fate, and often a not very long delayed one, at that.

  Some science-fiction books have endured, remaining available in hardcover form for years, even decades, and appearing in repeated paperback reincarnations. We all know which these are because, by enduring, they have come to be read by millions, including you and me.

  It is, of course, easy to argue that the test of time and popularity has succeeded in separating the gold from the dross, and that we have with us all the science-fiction books that have deserved to endure.

  That, however, is too easy a dismissal. It is an interesting and convenient theory, but the world of human affairs is far too complex to fit into theories, especially convenient ones. It sometimes takes time to recognize quality, and the time required is sometimes longer than the visible existence of a particular book. That the quality of a book is not recognizable at once need not be a sign of deficiency, but rather a sign of subtlety. It is not being particularly paradoxical to point out that a book may be, in some cases, too good to be immediately popular. And then, thanks to the mechanics of literary ephemerality, realization of the fact may come too late.

  Or must it?

  Suppose there are dedicated and thoughtful writers and scholars like George Zebrowski and Martin H. Greenberg, who have been reading science fiction intensively, and with educated taste, for decades. And suppose there is a publisher such as Crown Publishers, Inc. which is interested in providing a second chance for quality science fiction which was undervalued the first time round.

  In that case we end up with Crowns Classics of Modern Science Fiction in which the lost is retrieved, the unjustly forgotten is remembered, and the undervalued is resurrected. And you are holding a sample in your hand.

  Naturally, the revival of these classics will benefit the publisher, the editors, and the writers, but that is almost by the way. The real beneficiaries will be the readers, among whom the older are likely to taste again delicacies they had all but forgotten, while the younger will encounter delights of whose existence they were unaware.

  Read—

  And enjoy.

  Introduction

  by Martin H. Greenberg

  un/con/ven/tion/al. Not adhering to convention

  con/ven/tion. General usage or custom

  Philip Jose Farmer certainly did not and does not adhere to the thematic and stylistic conventions of science fiction; in fact, he was personally responsible for changing several of the most important and long-lasting conventions in the field. Science fiction had ignored one of the most important of all human concerns—sexuality—partly because pulp science fictions audience was considered to be adolescent boys (a strange reason on the face of it), and partly because the men who controlled the field didn’t think the readership wanted strong doses of it mixed in with the adventure and the technology.

  Farmer proved them wrong with his first published work, “The Lovers,” which appeared in the August 1952 issue of Startling Stories. It’s gripping depiction of love and sex between a man and an alien insectlike creature had a tremendous impact on the field, broadening what was “acceptable” and opening up the market for others to explore. Largely because of this single story, he was voted a Hugo Award for 1953 as New Writer of 1952. It was the first of what to date constitutes a body of work totaling more than forty novels and collections, characterized by originality, inventiveness, and a use of symbolism that has yet to be equalled.

  Philip Jose Farmer was born in Terre Haute, Indiana, in 1918 but was raised in Peoria, Illinois, where he spent the bulk of his life. He enrolled at Bradley University in 1941 but had to drop out due to lack of funds. He later returned to school as an evening student, earning a degree in 1950; he also worked in a steel mill for many years. Farmer began to write in the mid-1940s, and “The Lovers” was published when he was thirty-four, an advanced age by the standards of the science-fiction community. However, he quickly made up for lost time by an astounding prolificity, although he did not write for considerable portions of time during the first decade of his career.

  His major literary themes and obsessions were clear from early on and have been noted by all who have written on him—a concern with sexuality and reproduction in all its variety; the good and evil that he seems to believe resides in all of us; an interest in religious beliefs and imagery, especially with matriarchal religions; parasitology, frequently coupled with sexuality; and a deep love of American popular culture and the books he read and adored as a child and as a young man, especially Burroughs, Baum, and Twain but also including the characters and magazines of the pulp era. Indeed, he has reworked these stories and characters in his own writing to the extent that he has produced a whole body of work about parallel universes, parallel places, and parallel people, books where Samuel Clemens, Tarzan, Odysseus, and Doc Savage all interact, and most are even related to one another.

  His writing is characterized by rapid pacing, some weakness of plot, a wonderful use of puns, protagonists who are deeply flawed—a quality especially true in his “heroic” figures—and a deep cynicism that pervades even his humorous work.

  But most of all, Farmer (like the late Philip K. Dick) writes of the real, the unreal, and the maybe real, combining and integrating them into the same story in ways that have revolutionized one corner of modern science fiction. Few writers have been as daring so early as Farmer, few so willing to shock, in his case usually to good effect. One of his most important critics, Mary T. Brizzi, has commented that “He is certainly among the brightest stars in the science fiction sky,” and that “His early works were beautifully crafted, exploring unconventional themes in a sensitive way.” His work has also been called “nauseating,” “filthy,” and “obscene.”

  John W. Campbell, Jr., said that one of his stories (which he didn’t buy) made him “want to throw up.” He notes that other, more admiring critics have noted the powerful influence of Freud and Jung in his work, but he rejects these references saying that “The term Farmerian should be good enough.” Indeed it is.

  This volume collects what I consider to be representative selections of his best work from the years 1952 to 1964, years that saw the publication of several impor
tant longer works and collections, including The Green Odyssey (1957), Flesh (1960, revised 1968; a novel which gives new meaning to the term father-figure), A Woman A Day (1960, also revised 1968), The Lovers (expanded and published in 1961 and revised again in 1979), Cache from Outer Space (1962), Inside Outside (1964, a major work), and Tongues of the Moon (1964).

  Outstanding examples of his best work since 1964 will be included in a future volume in this series. For now, we offer you such stunning stories as “Sail On! Sail On!,” based on a recurring dream Farmer had in which he says “I saw the tiny galleon of the Portuguese Prince Henry the Navigator (A.D. 1394-1460). It was sailing along in a heavy sea and on a dark night. A small building was on the poopdeck; in it sat a very fat monk. He had earphones on and was tapping out a coded message, in Latin, on a spark-gap transmitter…”

  “Mother” contains many of the themes and obsessions mentioned earlier, including some of the underground passages that are partially responsible for his reputation as a Freudian, and the family relationships that were so important in all his early work. The story later became the centerpiece of his collection Strange Relations (1960).

  “My Sister’s Brother” (originally published as “Open to Me, My Sister”) is especially important to Farmer, and he considers it one of his two favorites—the other is “Riders of the Purple Wage,” included in the following volume in this series. Like “The Lovers,” this story had a difficult time finding a publisher, being rejected by the major magazines because of its sexual content. Robert P. Mills took it for The Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction after having rejected it when first submitted to him—times had changed, and Farmer had changed them, a rare example of a writer developing a market for his own work. Farmer says that this powerful story is “a hardcore science-fiction tale. But it is also about an Earthman’s hangups, extraterrestrial ecosystems, sexobiological structures, and religion.”

  The remarkable “The Alley Man” is one of the best pre-historic-man-in-modern-times stories ever written. It finished a close second to Daniel Keyes’ “Flowers for Algernon” in the voting for the Hugo Award in 1960. One of the many amazing features of Farmer’s career is the incredible number of series he has sustained—his ideas are simply too big for even very large novels.

  “The King of Beasts” is a gem of a short-short, while “The God Business” is one of those stories that is much better read than discussed.

  If you have not encountered Farmer or these stories before you are in for a treat. In the words of Leslie Fiedler, “Thanks for the feast.”

  Sail On! Sail On!

  1952

  FRIAR SPARKS SAT wedged between the wall and the realizer. He was motionless except for his forefinger and his eyes. From time to time his finger tapped rapidly on the key upon the desk, and now and then his irises, gray-blue as his native Irish sky, swiveled to look through the open door of the toldilla in which he crouched, the little shanty on the poop deck. Visibility was low.

  Outside was dusk and a lantern by the railing. Two sailors leaned on it. Beyond them bobbed the bright lights and dark shapes of the Nina and the Pinta. And beyond them was the smooth horizon-brow of the Atlantic, edged in black and blood by the red dome of the rising moon.

  The single carbon filament bulb above the monk’s tonsure showed a face lost in fat—and in concentration.

  The luminiferous ether crackled and hissed tonight, but the phones clamped over his ears carried, along with them, the steady dots and dashes sent by the operator at the Las Palmas station on the Grand Canary.

  “Zzisss! So you are out of sherry already… Pop!… Too bad… Crackle… you hardened old winebutt… Zzz… May God have mercy on your sins…

  “Lots of gossip, news, et cetera… Hisses.… Bend your ear instead of your neck, impious one… The turks are said to be gathering… crackle … an army to march on Austria. It is rumored that the flying sausages, said by so many to have been seen over the capitals of the Christian world, are of Turkish origin. The rumor goes they have been invented by a renegade Rogerian who was converted to the Muslim religion… I say… zziss … to that. No one of us would do that. It is a falsity spread by our enemies in the Church to discredit us. But many people believe that…

  “How close does the Admiral calculate he is to Cipangu now?

  “Flash! Savonarola today denounced the Pope, the wealthy of Florence, Greek art and literature, and the experiments of the disciples of Saint Roger Bacon… Zzz… The man is sincere but misguided and dangerous… I predict he’ll end up at the stake he’s always prescribing for us…

  “Pop… This will kill you… Two Irish mercenaries by the name of Pat and Mike were walking down the street of Granada when a beautiful Saracen lady leaned out of a balcony and emptied a pot of… hiss!… and Pat looked up and… Crackle… Good, hah? Brother Juan told that last night…

  “PV… PV… Are you coming in?… PV… PV… Yes, I know it’s dangerous to bandy such jests about, but nobody is monitoring us tonight… Zzz. … I think they’re not, anyway…”

  And so the ether bent and warped with their messages. And presently Friar Sparks tapped out the PV that ended their talk—the “Pax vobiscum.” Then he pulled the plug out that connected his earphones to the set and, lifting them from his ears, clamped them down forward over his temples in the regulation manner.

  After sidling bent-kneed from the toldilla, punishing his belly against the desk’s hard edge as he did so, he walked over to the railing. De Salcedo and de Torres were leaning there and talking in low tones. The big bulb above gleamed on the page’s red-gold hair and on the interpreter’s full black beard. It also bounced pinkishly off the priest’s smooth-shaven jowls and the light scarlet robe of the Rogerian order. His cowl, thrown back, served as a bag for scratch paper, pens, an ink bottle, tiny wrenches and screwdrivers, a book of cryptography, a slide rule, and a manual of angelic principles.

  “Well, old rind,” said young de Salcedo familiarly, “what do you hear from Las Palmas?”

  “Nothing now. Too much interference from that.” He pointed to the moon riding the horizon ahead of them. “What an orb!” bellowed the priest. “It’s as big and red as my revered nose!”

  The two sailors laughed, and de Salcedo said, “But it will get smaller and paler as the night grows, Father. And your proboscis will, on the contrary, become larger and more sparkling in inverse proportion according to the square of the ascent—”

  He stopped and grinned, for the monk had suddenly dipped his nose, like a porpoise diving into the sea, raised it again, like the same animal jumping from a wave, and then once more plunged it into the heavy currents of their breath. Nose to nose, he faced them, his twinkling little eyes seeming to emit sparks like the realizer in his toldilla.

  Again, porpoiselike, he sniffed and snuffed several times, quite loudly. Then satisfied with what he had gleaned from their breaths, he winked at them. He did not, however, mention his findings at once, preferring to sidle toward the subject.

  He said, “This Father Sparks on the Grand Canary is so entertaining. He stimulates me with all sorts of philosophical notions, both valid and fantastic. For instance, tonight, just before we were cut off by that”—he gestured at the huge bloodshot eye in the sky—“he was discussing what he called worlds of parallel time tracks, an idea originated by Dysphagius of Gotham. It’s his idea there may be other worlds in coincident but not contacting universes, that God, being infinite and of unlimited creative talent and ability, the Master Alchemist, in other words, has possibly— perhaps necessarily—created a plurality of continua in which every probable event has happened.”

  “Huh?” grunted de Salcedo.

  “Exactly. Thus, Columbus was turned down by Queen Isabella, so this attempt to reach the Indies across the Atlantic was never made. So we could not now be standing here plunging ever deeper into Oceanus in our three cockle-shells, there would be no booster buoys strung out between us and the Canaries, and Father Sparks at Las Palmas and I on th
e Santa Maria would not be carrying on our fascinating conversations across the ether.

  “Or, say, Roger Bacon was persecuted by the Church, instead of being encouraged and giving rise to the order whose inventions have done so much to insure the monopoly of the Church on alchemy and its divinely inspired guidance of that formerly pagan and hellish practice.”

  De Torres opened his mouth, but the priest silenced him with a magnificient and imperious gesture and continued.

  “Or, even more ridiculous, but thought-provoking, he speculated just this evening on universes with different physical laws. One, in particular, I thought very droll. As you probably don’t know, Angelo Angelei has proved, by dropping objects from the Leaning Tower of Pisa, that different weights fall at different speeds. My delightful colleague on the Grand Canary is writing a satire which takes place in a universe where Aristotle is made out to be a liar, where all things drop with equal velocities, no matter what their size. Silly stuff, but it helps to pass the time. We keep the ether busy with our little angels.”

  De Salcedo said, “Uh, I don’t want to seem too curious about the secrets of your holy and cryptic order, Friar Sparks. But these little angels your machine realizes intrigue me. Is it a sin to presume to ask about them?”

  The monk’s bull roar slid to a dove cooing. “Whether it’s a sin or not depends. Let me illustrate, young fellows. If you were concealing a bottle of, say, very scarce sherry on you, and you did not offer to share it with a very thirsty old gentleman, that would be a sin. A sin of omission. But if you were to give that desert-dry, that pilgrim-weary, that devout, humble, and decrepit old soul a long, soothing, refreshing, and stimulating draught of lifegiving fluid, daughter of the vine, I would find it in my heart to pray for you for that deed of loving-kindness, of encompassing charity. And it would please me so much I might tell you a little of our realizer. Not enough to hurt you, just enough so you might gain more respect for the intelligence and glory of my order.”