http://www.pjstar.com/entertainment/x1749108393/Philip-Jose-Farmer-dead-at-91
He may not have been the greatest SF author, but he certainly was one of the most influential. See you on Riverworld PJF.
Vaya con dios, Phil. You were a trend-setter and a thought provoker. Meet you by the River side.
I liked World of Tiers when I was a kid, but that may have been equally because of the covers on the paperback editions I had.
Adios, Senor Farmer. Thanks for some fun and thought-provoking stories.
Is it too soon to ask where he’s going to be planted?
Well I wasn’t really aware he was still (recently) with us.
But thanks for Riverworld (at least the first few), and thanks for introducing me to Richard F Burton.
The only book of his I read was The Stone God Awakens. Which easily makes my list of 10 worst novels I’ve encountered.
If anyone has a list of good stuff he wrote I wouldn’t mind checking some of it out.
Read To His Scattered Bodies Go, the first Riverworld novel. The series didn’t hold up, but the first one is a must-read.
World of Tiers – his other major series – is good overall.
And his Flesh may seem pretty tame today, but it was a groundbreaking work, introducing sexuality into SF.
Finally, if you’re a Vonnegut fan, you need to read Venus on the Half Shell.
BTW, Farmer’s middle name wasn’t exactly Spanish in origin. He was a Midwesterner and was named after his aunt Josie. He added the accent to make it look exotic.
It’s sad to see another major figure in the field go.
His Wold Newton concept was pretty good too – basically he did stories that were crazy mash-ups of popular pulp characters like Sherlock Holmes, Tarzan, Doc Savage, James Bond, Cthulhu mythos and scads of others.
Great imagination, great sense of humor. R.I.P
I’ll miss him.
I’m most familiar with the Riverworld and Dayworld series, and both share the same plus and minus: Basically, he could spin off a really interesting idea for a world, but he could not fill in a plausible, compelling back-story as to why or how that world would ever come to be. They weren’t quite Ringworld, where there was an interesting setting but no real plot, but they were a step in that direction.
Damn. Too bad. I saw him in person, once, way back in 1983.
I couldn’t get into a lot of his stuff, but I loved the Riverworld series – even the later ones.
No omne’s mentioned his sf/sex stories. Besides Flesh, try reading the stories in Strange Relations, or his novel The Lovers (which has a love affair between a human and an alien – and Farmer gets around the species incompatibility better than the staff at Star Trek did.)
Or, of course, A Feast Unknown and Image of the Beast. The former, as Farmer bragged, was the only x-rated book to spawn two G-rated sequels.
Or his prodigious “Tarzan”-themed output (**Tarzan Alive!, Mother Was a Lovely Beast, Lord Tyger, ** etc.)
The first book of his I read was The Stone God Awakes. Not great, but interesting enough, especially with a hero named “Ulysses Singing Bear”.
I loved the Riverworld series. RIP man.
His Wold Newton ideas will live on, on the Net, for a long, long time.
Harsh :D.
I read it young and loved it, probably in large part because of my age. I always regretted a lack of a sequel. Then again I doubt it would loom as strongly for me now.
I though the second was very good as well.
Yeah, though like the Riverworld books he seemed to lose steam over time.
PJF was pretty inconsistent and like many ( most ) wroters re-tread the same ground over and over. But he had a sometimes intriguingly inventive mind. As a writer he sorta brings to mind Jack Chalker, actually. As with Jack, I’m sad to seem him go. He brought me a lot of enjoyment as an adolescent.
RIP Philip Jose Farmer.
His name and partly his career were among the inspirations for the Jose Chung character on X Files. Also, he and Vonnegut actually had a falling out over his using the Kilgore Trout name for the VENUS ON THE HALF SHELL book, which was ironic since he was also an inspiration for Kilgore Trout.
I hadn’t been aware he was still with us, until I saw this thread.
Like others I found that his Riverworld series ended later than it should have, but it still remains an amazing world, and idea. And the first books still hold up. I’m also grateful for his view of both Richard Burton, and Samuel Clemens.
I can’t say he was one of my must read authors, but I’m sad to see him go. I hope we’ll meet on the Riverworld, after all.
I just learned that from his myspace page, and am really bummed about it.
And another master has left us. I hope he wakes up next to Alice on the banks of Riverworld.
I got to meet him briefly when he came to the U of I from Peoria for a book signing, so I assume I have an autograph somewhere. While the early Riverworld books were masterful, I especially admired his skill in extending characters from popular culture and tying them together. Besides the other books mentioned A Barnstormer in Oz examines that world from a more mature perspective.
Just before I left Illinois, I wrote a Plato lesson tying a character I used in my Star Trek review column and a bunch of other characters (like the storyteller in Tales From the White Hart with the Wold Newton network. It was a lot of fun.
Farmer had a lot to do with helping sf grow up.
I hadn’t realized he was fifty when he wrote “Riders of the Purple Wage”. I didn’t care for the story but I thought it was the work of a young hipster…
Damn. He autographed my copy of “Down in the Black Gang” so many years ago. I’ve still got it around here somewhere…
I also loved his “Venus on the Half-shell” story, written as Kilgore Trout
I loved the Wold Newton books and I also liked Dark Is the Sun…it was the first book of his I read, when I was a teenager.