The Book of Philip Jose Farmer

I really don't know. In one of many senses, or perhaps two or three, I am Kilgore Trout. But then the same could be said of at least fifty science-fiction writers.)

Thanks for the Feast

This is the only item in this collection which I did not write. I was, however, responsible for its being written. I did not ask that it be written. I did not even know that it was being written until I got a long-distance call from Digby Diehl, editor of the Los Angeles Times Book Review section. He informed me that Leslie A. Fiedler, the distinguished critic and author (An End to I

I was surprised, because I had no idea that Fiedler was the least interested in science-fiction, let alone in me. I had the same reaction that Kilgore Trout did when he ran into Billy Pilgrim, the antihero of Vo

The article was printed in the Times of April 23,1972. Ostensibly, it was a review of my Tarzan Alive but was, in actuality, a bird's-eye, or perhaps a worm'seye, view of my career. It was accompanied by an illustration of a goofy-looking Tarzan riding astraddle a rocket, obviously a phallic symbol. Its title was: "Getting into the Task of Now Pornography." I could take the illustration, but I did not care for the title. I found out later that it was an editor's, not Fiedler's. The editor had also emasculated the text and inserted some mismating of titles and their publishers.

The work at hand is Fiedler's original article with the original title. This was first printed in Moebius Trip; the quotations in double parentheses are the comments of the editor, Ed Co

Fiedler is a dyed-in-the-wool Freudian, but most of his analyses are valid -- from my viewpoint. There is also much that is Jungian and Reichian in my works, and these aspects are neglected in the article. Freudian, Jungian, Reichian, are terms I don't really like to use to apply to literary works. The term Farmerian should be good enough.

Some of my friends, on reading the Times article, commiserated with me. They did not read it aright. I was pretty happy with it. It's by no means a denigration, though not all laudatory, and it's a hell of a lot more insightful than anything most of the specialized science fiction critics have written about me.

I hope there's no deep significance in the fact that Fiedler wrote this on April Fool's Day.

Notes on Philip Jose Farmer

by Leslie A. Fiedler

Philip Jose Farmer seems now to have reached the point of public recognition, and I for one am feeling a little dismayed. I don't suppose that publication in Esquire alone is enough to make an unfashionable writer a chic one, but it is a real, perhaps irrevocable, step in that direction. I liked it much better when a taste for Farmer's fiction could still seem a private, slightly shameful pleasure, or a perverse affectation on the part of a scholar, an eccentric vice. In those days, he belonged chiefly to readers who did not even suspect that the novel is dead -- to an audience which took him off the racks in drugstores or supermarkets or airports to allay boredom -- and with no sense certainly that they were approaching "literature." Beyond them, there were, of course, a few others, some themselves more highly touted writers of Science Fiction, who knew that he was something very special; but they wanted to keep it a secret.

To be sure, Farmer had won a Hugo Award or two, one for his earliest work and another a decade and a half later. And a third, in 1972, for the novel, To Your Scattered Bodies Go. But he was never the object of cult adoration, like Robert Heinlein, for instance, after the appearance of A Stranger in a Strange Land; nor was he regarded, like Kurt Vo

Nonetheless, he has an imagination capable of being kindled by the irredeemable mystery of the universe and of the soul, and in turn able to kindle the imagination of others -- readers who for a couple of generations have been turning to Science Fiction to keep wonder and ecstasy alive in times apparently uncongenial to those deep psychic experiences. That wonder and ecstasy, wherever it is found in Science Fiction, is ultimately rooted in our sexuality; and the best writers of the genre during its period of flowering after World War II, appear to have realized instinctively that to succeed in their enterprise they had somehow to eroticize machines, gadgets, and the scientific enterprise itself -- or at least to exploit the preexistent erotic implications of the paraphernalia of a technological age.

Philip Farmer was, however, during the 50's, the only major writer of Science Fiction to deal explicitly with sex. He constituted, therefore, a singular exception, an eccentric case -- in a genre whose leading authors created protagonists themselves apparently desexed, though they and their adventures implicitly symbolized or projected sexuality; since they constitute, as it were, the communal dreams of a technological, urban civilization. And that civilization knows in its sleep, what it denies waking, that at this point, it must eroticize the Industrial Revolution or perish; just as it thinks it knows waking, what it denies in its sleep, that sex must be reimagined as machine technology or rejected out of hand. The latter is the task of modern pornography, even as the former is that of Science Fiction.

It was inevitable, therefore, from the start that Farmer would, at the climax of his career, produce two works at once fantasy and bald, explicit pornography -- "hardcore pornography," as the cant phrase has it: The Image of the Beast and A Feast Unknown. Both books were published by the same sub-respectable firm and distributed through cha

A Feast Unknown is a hilarious parody of the pop literature of super-heroic adventure; but its essential characteristic is a shamelessness beyond all possible apology. To speak of the imagination which informs it and its predecessor (in whose key scene an extraterrestrial girl with sharp iron dentures goes down on an unwary cop) as "healthy" is an inadvertent error or a deliberate lie. They are about as healthy as the works of the "divine" Marquis de Sade himself; which is to say, they may function therapeutically, but only by releasing in us, or exploding out of us, fantasies in themselves sick. And they have, in fact, helped pave the way for a new brand of Science Fiction, which deals frankly with human passion, "sick" and "healthy"; providing us with real phalluses and wombs, against which we can measure their symbolic projections in spaceships and underground cities on unknown planets. The paperback periodical, Quark, for instance, in which Farmer himself has been published, has also printed the work of younger writers, his debtors and descendants -- in the form of candidly-worked-out genital fantasies, often by recently liberated women, eager to excel him in the candor of their language and the brutality of their images. But Farmer was there first.