Philip Jose Farmer (source).
Robert Anton Wilson and science fiction writer Philip José Farmer were fans of each other's work. See this blog post for an apparent reference to Farmer's Wold Newton in Masks of the Illuminati; for Wilson on Farmer's Riverworld novels, and Farmer on Wilson's work, go here.
A couple of RAW fans, Mark K. Brown and myself, are Farmer fans. So I asked him what his favorite Farmer works are.
Mark answered, "My absolute favorite is the 1st Riverworld book. I love that series, World of Tiers, the Khokarsa books, the fictional biographies."
I like the first two Riverworld books, the World of Tiers series and "Riders of the Purple Wage," his Hugo Award winning novella inspired by Joyce's Finnegans Wake. To find "Riders of the Purple Wage" see this listing of appearances.
For more on Farmer, see this elaborate official website. See also the Science Fiction Encyclopedia entry. I linked above to the Wikipedia bio.
As with other classic authors, such as Poul Anderson, Farmer's books often go on sale cheap as Amazon Kindle editions, although I didn't notice any current compelling sales when I looked yesterday.
8 comments:
I also highly recommend the Riverworld series. I know the first one appears on Gold’s reading list. I don’t recall if others appear there.
The first book in the Riverworld series is “To Your Scattered Bodies Go”. The main character is the historical explorer Sir Richard Francis Burton also famous for his extensive translation of “A Thousand and One Nights” Burton also translated an important Sufi text and was a strong influence on Aleister Crowley.
The previous comment on Riverworld was from me if it shows up as anonymous.
Great recommendations. I love the Wold-Newton works by Phil Farmer.
The Riverworld series is actually my all-time favorite science Fiction series.
As one of the founders of the New Wold Newton Meteoritic Society, I get you.
I see this page has Mark Brown contributions: https://www.pjfarmer.com/chronicles/index.htm
Ah! My short lived Wold Newton site.
I wanted to say a little something about my interest in Philip Jose Farmer and Wold Newton. When I was fourteen, I suffered a minor knee injury that required stitches. When I returned to the doctor’s office to have them removed, I picked up a magazine in the waiting room. It was the April, ‘72 issue of Esquire, containing Farmer’s Interview with Lord Greystoke. I had been a HUGE Edgar Rice Burroughs fan since I was 4 or 5, when my dad introduced me to the Tarzan books, and I was still young enough to be uncertain as to whether the Interview was meant to be fictional or not. When Tarzan Alive, Farmer’s bio of Tarzan, was published later that year, I grabbed it immediately. If you’ve read it, you know that the blending of reality and fiction was heightened, with a bibliography including books on all relevant topics, from history to heraldry to cryptozoology. I had already read Bernard Heuvelmans’ On the Track of Unknown Animals, which meant that perhaps the most outlandish claims about Tarzan’s world, the potential survival of prehistoric beasts and the existence of non-Homo Sapiens hominids in Africa, seemed at least plausible. I spent much of the next two or so years, reading the books in the bibliography and pouring over Burke’s Peerage, trying to determine whether or not Tarzan was a real person. I was very confused as to what was real and what was not. This was my first encounter with something like Chapel Perilous.
Even after I sorted this all out, I stayed fascinated by the Wold Newton concept: the idea that the heroes, villains and just plain people like Leopold Bloom, that we encountered in fiction might be real, but more importantly, to my mind, might inhabit the same world, might interact with one another. In those pre-internet days, of course, I never found anyone who shared my interest in things like this. In the 90s, though, I hooked up with WIn Scott Eckert and others who were interested in PJF and Wold Newton, and we corresponded with the avidity of those starved for contact with like minds. I began to write my own articles about fictional people and places and even had my own short-lived website about the subject. Three of my articles made their way into Win’s anthology Myths for the Modern Age (published by MonkeyBrain), alongside Wold Newton material by others, including Farmer, which was pretty damn gratifying.
Oddly enough, it was my interest in all this that led me to RAW. When Illuminatus! was published, while I was still in high school, one of my pulp and Lovecraft loving friends handed me a copy, with the comment that this was probably more in my line than his. Back to Chapel Perilous and down another rabbit hole. This time, it was one I’m still not entirely out of.
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