Philip José Farmer

From Freepedia

Philip José Farmer (born January 26, 1918) is an American author, principally known for his science fiction and fantasy novels and short stories.

Many of Farmer's works involve reworking existing characters from fiction and history, such as The Other Log of Phileas Fogg (1973), which fills in the missing time periods from Jules Verne's Around the World in Eighty Days, or A Barnstormer in Oz (1982), in which Dorothy's adult son, a pilot, flies there by accident. His favorite subjects for this type of work are the pulp heroes Tarzan and Doc Savage: in his novel The Adventure of the Peerless Peer, both Tarzan and Sherlock Holmes team up. Farmer also created the Lord Grandrith and Doc Caliban series, wherein we see disguised but less-than-innocent versions of Tarzan and Doc Savage. These consist of A Feast Unknown (1969), Lord of the Trees (1970)and The Mad Goblin (1970). Farmer has also written two witty mock biographies of either character - Tarzan Alive (1972) and Doc Savage: His Apocalyptic Life (1973) - wherein he conducts an exigetic mock-biography that winds either character in with a mind-boggling array of other fictional characters.

This has led to a burgeoning of a particular type of this form of fiction which is frequently referred to by reference to Farmer's original premise, the Wold Newton family.

His Riverworld series follows the adventures of such diverse characters as Richard Burton, Hermann Göring, and Samuel Clemens through a bizarre afterlife in which every human ever to have lived is simultaneously resurrected along a single river valley that stretches over an entire planet. The books consists of To Your Scattered Bodies Go (1971), The Fabulous Riverboat (1971), The Dark Design (1977), The Magic Labyrinth (1980) and Gods of Riverworld (1983). Riverworld and Other Stories (1979) is taken to be part of the series but is actually a short story collection, containing the original story where Farmer started the series.

Farmer wrote Venus on the Half-Shell (1975) under the name Kilgore Trout, a fictitious author who appears in the works of Kurt Vonnegut.

Farmer's works often contain sexual themes: his collection of short stories Strange Relations was a notable event in the history of sex in science fiction.

The World of Tiers series consists of The Maker of Universes (1965), The Gates of Creation (1966), A Private Cosmos (1968), Behind the Walls of Terra (1970), The Lavalite World (1977) and More Than Fire (1993). His parallel universe series World of Tiers inspired Roger Zelazny's Amber series.

His work sometimes contains religious themes and has included Jesus as a character in both the Riverworld series and Jesus on Mars. (To be specific, Jesus shows up in the Riverworld setting during a short story in Riverworld and Other Stories and is not a character in the primary books of the Riverworld series.)

External links

• The Official Philip José Farmer Home Page
• Philip José Farmer - International Bibliography
• An Expansion of Philip José Farmer's World Newton Universe