Lord Tyger Read online

  ALSO FROM TITAN BOOKS

  CLASSIC NOVELS FROM

  PHILIP JOSE FARMER

  WOLD NEWTON SERIES

  The Other Log of Phileas Fogg (available now)

  Time's Last Gift (available now)

  Tales of the Wold Newton Universe

  PREHISTORY

  Hadon of Ancient Opar

  SECRETS OF THE NINE: PARALLEL UNIVERSE

  A Feast Unknown

  Lord of the Trees

  The Mad Goblin

  GRANDMASTER SERIES

  The Wind Whales of Ishmael

  Flesh

  Venus on the Half-Shell

  PHILIP

  JOSE

  FARMER

  LORD TYGER

  TITAN BOOKS

  LORD TYGER

  Print edition ISBN: 9780857689665

  E-book edition ISBN: 9780857689696

  Published by Titan Books

  A division of Titan Publishing Group Ltd

  144 Southwark St, London SE1 0UP

  First edition: July 2012

  1 3 5 7 9 10 8 6 4 2

  This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents either are the product of the author's imagination or are used fictitiously, and any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, business establishments, events, or locales is entirely coincidental. The publisher does not have any control over and does not assume any responsibility for author or third-party websites or their content.

  Copyright (c) 1970, 2012 by the Philip J. Farmer Family Trust. All rights reserved.

  Introduction copyright (c) 2012 by Joe R. Lansdale.

  Foreword copyright (c) 2012 by Paul Spiteri.

  No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means without the prior written permission of the publisher, nor be otherwise circulated in any form of binding or cover other than that in which it is published and without a similar condition being imposed on the subsequent purchaser.

  A CIP catalogue record for this title is available from the British Library.

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  This story is dedicated to Edgar Rice Burroughs, without whom my childhood and youth would have been inestimably deprived and colorless, and to Vernell Coriell, a Lord Tyger in his own right.

  Contents

  Introduction

  Foreword

  Chapter 1

  Chapter 2

  Chapter 3

  Chapter 4

  Chapter 5

  Chapter 6

  Chapter 7

  Chapter 8

  Chapter 9

  Chapter 10

  Chapter 11

  Chapter 12

  Chapter 13

  Chapter 14

  Chapter 15

  Chapter 16

  Chapter 17

  Chapter 18

  Chapter 19

  Chapter 20

  Chapter 21

  Chapter 22

  Chapter 23

  FARMER'S TYGER, BURNING BRIGHT

  INTRODUCTION BY JOE R. LANSDALE

  Philip Jose Farmer is one of the greatest, and in some ways, most neglected writers of science fiction, or for that matter, any fiction. This is not to say he is totally unknown. He is respected, but his work was often outre and outside the parameters of conventional science fiction, or for that matter, mainstream fiction. And since in the field of science fiction he was so far ahead of the curve, his work didn't get the kind of attention it should have in his lifetime. Truth to tell, at the time Farmer was writing, science fiction was still behind the times when it came to the themes and prose of modern fiction. Those doors to connecting with the wider world of literature were just beginning to open, and in fact, Farmer was one of those, perhaps the most important one, holding the door.

  Farmer's influences were not only science fiction writers, primarily Edgar Rice Burroughs, but also writers like Jack London, William S. Burroughs, James Joyce and Kurt Vonnegut, and... Well, the list is endless, and while we're on the list, a number of those writers, not thought of as SF writers, did from time to time touch on the furniture of SF. But the bottom line here is Farmer was very well read, not only in his beloved pulp literature, but in classic literature, psychology and anthropology as well. All of these things became part of his work.

  Farmer was one of the kindest and gentlest of men. I met him several times and exchanged a few bits of mail with him, and had a very nice day at his house in Peoria once. He was the sort of guy who looked like he might be a small town schoolteacher, or editor of a weekly newspaper. He was quiet and easy to talk to. We once had a wonderful conversation about Jack London that revealed to me that not only was Farmer a great appreciator of fiction, he was someone who looked behind the words to see exactly what it was that propped them up. When he wrote, he pulled those props out from behind the words, and showed us that they were often bloody corpses, rabid sexual desires, and twisted views on the nature of the universe. Farmer may have been quiet in his life, but he was as savage as Tarzan in his work.

  Having to turn out so many stories and novels, due to the low payment of science fiction, made his writing uneven, and this may well have had to do with why his deserved reputation has been slower in coming, than say Ray Bradbury, or Kurt Vonnegut or Philip K. Dick.

  Sometimes his prose felt dashed off, his ideas not full formed, but at his best, which was much of the time, he wrote beautifully, and interestingly. There were more ideas in a few pages of a Farmer work than were usually presented in volumes by other writers. In fact, his pastiche of Vonnegut's writing, titled Venus on a Half Shell, may well have been better fiction than that written by the writer it was designed to emulate.

  Certain themes obsessed Farmer. Sexuality. Primal Man. Pulp heroes; Tarzan in particular. Freudian psychology. Jungian psychology. Experimental fiction. Alternate realities, and time travel. He wrote books that referred to all these subjects, and often times combined them. He was a gleeful wizard whose work threw off sparks and lit the tender of many an imagination.

  This book, Lord Tyger, is one of the best of his works. It combines the largest number of his obsessions, while never losing that main and most important ingredient of any work of fiction. The magical connection between writer and reader: What happens next.

  It is one of his most beautifully and cleverly written creations. It is engaging from beginning to end. It may well be my favorite of his works. It is about a man who wants to make his own Tarzan. It is about the unexpected results of that experiment. It is a book of supposed primal innocence that is not that innocent. It is a book of madness, brilliance, and wicked charm.

  It is a book that starts out with one of the finest opening paragraphs ever.

  "My mother is an ape. My father is God."

  I love it. I recommend it. It is a lucky experience for any discerning reader.

  I hope that discerning reader is you.

  Joe R. Lansdale is the author of over thirty novels and numerous short stories. Among the awards he has received are the Edgar, the British Fantasy Award, the Grinzane Cavour Prize for Literature, and nine Bram Stokers. He has been acknowledged as a Grandmaster of Horror Writing by the Horror Writers Association, and has received the Lifetime Achievement Award for Horror Fiction. He has also written graphic novels, numerous film scripts, as well as teleplays for Batman: The Animated Series, and others. His novella, Bubba Hotep was filmed by Don Coscarelli a
nd starred Bruce Campbell and Ossie Davis. Coscarelli also filmed Incident On and Off a Mountain Road for an episode of Showtime's Masters of Horror, and an independent, Christmas with the Dead, based on his short story, directed by Terrill Lee Lankford, is forthcoming in 2012.

  LORD TYGER

  FOREWORD BY PAUL SPITERI

  "My mother is an ape. My father is God."

  I'm going to take a bit of a guess here. A fairly well-educated one, I hope, but nonetheless a guess. I'm going to say that you've not read this novel before, or if you have, it was some time ago. Possibly you were prompted to pick this book up because of its enticing cover, or because you have been buying other titles in Titan's wonderful new series of Philip Jose Farmer books (all hail the completist book collector!). Whatever the reason, congratulations, you have a fantastic story to read or reread, one that Farmer himself rates amongst his best. Sure, readers may come to Farmer because of Riverworld, the World of Tiers, the Ancient Opar books or his biographies Tarzan Alive and Doc Savage: His Apocalyptic Life, but once they dig further, they find gems like Lord Tyger.

  Ras Tyger, whose forename means "Lord" in Amharic (the Semitic language spoken in Ethiopia), is a melting pot of emotion, ability, and thought. He has grown up in the jungle under the care of apelike foster parents and spends his youth exploring his domain, taunting and bedding members of the nearby Wantso village. He is a poet, an artisan, a wooer of women and at the same time he is a hunter, a killer, and a youth driven by the lust of an innocent. He knows he's different and revels in that difference. His white skin marks him as a ghost to the Wantso and Ras plays on this misapprehension to his advantage. As Ras enters adolescence his curiosity forges his course in life. His foster parents try their best to set him on a moral path but Ras is his own man and disobeys with little remorse. In fact he regards the punishment as just deserts, the joy of transgression outweighing the pain of the whipping. For guidance on bringing up their son, Ras's foster parents are given instructions from above, literally. The all-seeing Igziyabher, the "God" who watches over Ras, lives atop a tower set in the middle of a nearby lake. From there Igziyabher issues his commands to Ras's foster parents as he endeavours to guide Ras on the path he wishes his favoured subject to follow to adulthood. Ras naturally develops a healthy interest and curiosity and wants to meet "God." He travels to the lake but his attempts to scale the smooth walls of the tower continually result in failure. However, Ras is getting stronger and bolder by the day and when an unexpected visitor, a beautiful woman, crash-lands in his domain, this provides a further impetus, a catalyst, to find out about himself from the one who created him. And that's when the great adventure starts.

  There is a risk this story may sound like a reworking of the Tarzan and Mowgli epics, but this book is far from that. Farmer has read and learned from true-life and fictional feral child stories,1 and has applied a practicable element to his own version. In any case, some may regard this as not a true feral man story, seeing as Ras's development is being overseen to an extent, but this intervention is a nudge here and there rather than any overt involvement. It is also true that Ras has grown up among language users, thus differentiating him from any authentic cases of feral children. On that score, the best example I would offer of an authentic feral man (and how the development of language is dealt with) would be the story of "Victor," a child discovered living alone in the forests of Aveyron, France in 1798. Dr. Itard, a famous eye-ear-nose-and-throat specialist, took the feral child into his own home to study and develop the latent human characteristics of Victor. Itard had some success but Victor never learned more than a few words. The conclusion is that the child has to learn to speak at an early age and without society sinks into a beast-like state. This story was filmed as L'Enfant sauvage (The Wild Child) by French director Francois Truffaut in 1970 (coincidentally, the same year Lord Tyger was published).

  Farmer's strength is in understanding that a character like Ras Tyger could exist but that his life would not take the path described in romantic fiction. Farmer's creation is rooted in the real world and he carefully explores the effect of growing up without many of the cultural and physical boundaries we take for granted. The realism is palpable. Farmer's description of the landscape is exquisite and he has constructed a pocket world of great beauty but with inherent dangers. Farmer always excels at making his heroes inhabitants of the real world even as we marvel at their superhuman escapades.

  At this point I'd like to consider how others received and perceived the book. Its graphic content was condemned by some whereas others praised Farmer's exploration and deconstruction of the Burroughs Tarzan mythos. Algis Budrys called it "an entertaining, rich, inventive adventure novel in the best sense..."2

  Piers Anthony picked up on the inherent nature of the maturing child when he said "Lord Tyger might be a Tarzan juvenile--except that children are never permitted to be portrayed as they are, in their natural insensitivity and sexuality, lest this corrupt adult notions."3

  Locus Magazine wrote, "I think that even those who have no interest in Tarzan and who do not consider Burroughs' work to be worthwhile still have to admit that this novel transcends the mythos that inspired it."4

  And, Locus again, this time more recently: "To me, though, the most interesting [novel] is Lord Tyger (1970), which again sees Farmer playing reality-games. What looks like a mere retelling of the story, through the eyes of the preternaturally able (and highly sexual) jungle lord Ras Tyger, turns out to be more like a meta-fictional comment on what Tarzan means in our culture, and what people do with him as an icon. That makes it sound like a drab read, which it's not: it gives you both the primitive excitement of the source material and a far more sophisticated commentary on them."5

  But, for me, the most significant of them all is Paul Walker's reassessment of his own earlier review. "Philip Jose Farmer is one of the most original and unpredictable of SF writers. His novels and stories are uniquely his, and Lord Tyger is no exception. It is not unforgettable, but it is more than 'entertaining.' It has a peculiar flavor, a caustic tone, a vividness that could come from no one else. Yes, it is a sort of 'Tarzan novel,' but unlike any Tarzan you've met before. The eroticism is wild. The danger smells of danger. The jungle itself is alive with a poetry, both beautiful and sinister. The suspense is suspenseful. The book is never dull. In short, it is a fine read. I have done it an injustice and I apologize."6 We owe a great debt of thanks to Titan Books for giving us all the opportunity to reassess Lord Tyger for ourselves in this stunning new reprint.

  As the book develops its plot, Ras embarks on a physical and spiritual journey, much like the heroes of old. To quote Farmer himself: "In order to understand the structure and everything that's really going on there, you've got to be familiar with Joseph Campbell's The Hero with a Thousand Faces. If you read that, then read Lord Tyger, you can follow Campbell's motif right on through the novel. No critic ever noticed that."7 Campbell's book describes a number of steps in the classic journey, starting with the call to adventure, travelling the road of trials, attaining the ultimate goal, and returning as the hero to make use of what has been won. It is this aligning with the monomyth as described by Campbell that hooks Ras's story into our common consciousness and allows us to share in his experiences even as we know his exploits are far beyond anything we could hope to achieve.

  Farmer scholars will know of his admiration for the works of William Blake and how he used Blake's mythology within the World of Tiers series. I can only speculate, of course, but I have little doubt that Farmer would have been reading 'The Tyger' by Blake when thinking of his protagonist's character and name (and how I wish I could pick up the phone and discuss this with him!). The poem talks of the striking beauty of the tiger but also of its horrific capacity for violence. It tells us of God and how He created the magnificent tiger and in its magnificence the tiger is neither good nor bad but rather something wonderful and frightening. He is a beast of instinct. The smithy in the poem represents a traditional im
age of artistic creation and the 'forging' of the tiger suggests a very physical and deliberate kind of making; it emphasizes the physical presence of the tiger and precludes the notion that such a creation could have been in any way accidental. These notions draw clear parallels with our own 'Tyger.'

  In an interview with Paul Walker,8 Farmer acknowledges that the character of Boygur, the megalomaniac millionaire who plays such a key part in the novel, is a caricature of Farmer himself as the mad scientist who tries to raise his own Tarzan and continually has to compromise. Farmer also reveals where the inspiration for the name Boygur came from. The Boyg is a troll in Scandinavian folklore, historically characterized as a giant, slimy serpent that stands as a hindrance to travellers. In Henrik Ibsen's Peer Gynt the BOyg takes the form of a mysterious voice in the darkness that tells Peer what to do. Boygur is shocked and appalled when the jungle superman he has raised is far from innocent. Boygur sadly notes that for all his intended interventions "things went their own way." Ultimately no man can mould another into his own, or any other, image. To try and do so is to fail.

  It's certainly true, to a great extent, that the novel was inspired by the Tarzan stories but perhaps it's less about Tarzan per se and more about Farmer's lifelong love of his boyhood idol. Farmer may not have been in a position to truly recreate his own feral man but by casting himself as Boygur he achieves the next best thing. The historical and fictional stories of men raised in the wild have intertwined for many centuries, from Romulus and Remus--the preeminent feral children of ancient mythography--to documented true-life versions and the literary interpretations of Burroughs and Farmer.

  This book is dedicated to Edgar Rice Burroughs and it really is a tribute to him despite what some may see as parody. Lord Tyger pays homage to Farmer's favourite hero and whereas it demonstrates the fundamental impossibility of that character as conceived by Burroughs, it shows how literary ingenuity could lead to physical possibility. Farmer's genius is in devising a believable way in which a feral man could truly come to exist. In the real world, one of unpredictability, Boygur's experiment was always doomed to fail.