Philip José Farmer

Philip José Farmer (January 26, 1918 – February 25, 2009) was an American author known for his science fiction and fantasy novels and short stories.

Farmer is best known for his sequences of novels, especially the World of Tiers (1965–93) and Riverworld (1971–83) series. He is noted for the pioneering use of sexual and religious themes in his work, his fascination for, and reworking of, the lore of celebrated pulp heroes, and occasional tongue-in-cheek pseudonymous works written as if by fictional characters. Farmer often mixes natural and classic fictional characters and worlds with real and fake authors, as epitomized by his Wold Newton family books, which tie classic fictional characters together as real people and blood relatives, resulting from an alien conspiracy. Such works as The Other Log of Phileas Fogg (1973) and Doc Savage: His Apocalyptic Life (1973) are early examples of literary mashup novels.

Literary critic Leslie Fiedler compared Farmer to Ray Bradbury, describing both as “provincial American eccentrics” who “strain at the classic limits of the [science fiction] form.” However, Fiedler found Farmer distinctive for his capacity “to be at once naive and sophisticated in his odd blending of theology, pornography, and adventure.”

Biography

Farmer was born in North Terre Haute, Indiana. His parents gave him the middle name “Josie” from his paternal grandmother Josephine. Still, Farmer later changed it to “José” as he resented the woman’s name and wanted to lend color to an otherwise drab name. Farmer grew up in Peoria, Illinois, where he attended Peoria High School. His father was a civil engineer and a supervisor for the local power company. A voracious reader as a boy, Farmer said he resolved to become a writer in the fourth grade. As a child, he underwent basic religious training in the Church of Christ, Scientist (Christian Science), which he later characterized as a “peculiar background” for a science fiction writer. He became an agnostic at the age of 14 and ultimately an atheist, though not, he said, indifferent to religion. At age 23, in 1941, he married Bette V. Andre and eventually fathered a son and a daughter. He worked in a local steel mill after washing out of World War II flight training. He later continued his education, earning a bachelor’s degree in English from Bradley University in 1950 at 32.

Early career

Farmer had his first literary success when his novella The Lovers was published by Samuel Mines in Startling Stories in August 1952, which features a sexual relationship between a human and an extraterrestrial. He won a Hugo Award for Best New SF Author or Artist in 1953, the first of three Hugo awards he won. Thus encouraged, he quit his job to become a full-time writer, entered a publisher’s contest, and promptly won first prize for a novel, Owe for the Flesh, that contained the germ of his later Riverworld series. However, the book was not published, and the farmer did not get the $4,000 prize to go to the winner. Literary success did not translate into financial security, so he left Peoria in 1956 to launch a career as a technical writer. He spent the next 14 years working in that capacity for various defense contractors, from Syracuse, New York, to Los Angeles, while writing science fiction in his spare time.

Farmer won a second Hugo award in 1968, the category Best Novella for Riders of the Purple Wage, a pastiche of James Joyce’s Finnegans Wake and a satire on a futuristic, cradle-to-grave welfare state. Reinvigorated, Farmer became a full-time writer again in 1969. Upon moving back to Peoria in 1970, he entered his most prolific period, publishing 25 books in 10 years. His novel To Your Scattered Bodies Go (a reworking of the unpublished prize-winning first novel of 20 years before) won him a third Hugo in 1972 for Best Novel.

A 1975 novel, Venus on the Half-Shell, created a stir in the larger literary community and media. It purported to be written in the first person by one “Kilgore Trout,” a fictional character appearing as an underappreciated science fiction writer in several of Kurt Vonnegut’s novels. The escapade did not please Vonnegut when some reviewers not only concluded that it had been written by Vonnegut himself but that it was a worthy addition to his works. Farmer did have permission from Vonnegut to write the book, although Vonnegut later said he regretted giving permission.

Later years

Farmer had both critical champions and detractors. Leslie Fiedler proclaimed him “the greatest science fiction writer ever” and lauded his approach to storytelling as a “gargantuan lust to swallow down the whole cosmos, past, present and to come, and to spew it out again.” Isaac Asimov praised Farmer as an “excellent science fiction writer; in fact, a far more skillful writer than I am….” However, Christopher Lehmann-Haupt dismissed him in The New York Times in 1972 as “a humdrum toiler in the fields of science fiction.”

In 2001, Farmer won the World Fantasy Award for Life Achievement, and the Science Fiction Writers of America made him its 19th SFWA Grand Master in the same year.

Farmer’s output slowed, but he continued to be active, publishing one novel and co-authoring three others (as well as producing about 20 short stories) in his last decade. He died on February 25, 2009. His wife Bette, two children, five grandchildren, and six great-grandchildren survived him.