Me and Philip José Farmer (RIP)

No I never met him, and he hadn’t a clue who I was, but I had a relationship with PJF, and now that he’s passed — at the can’t-complain-age of 91 — I want to write a few words about him and me. Here they are:

When I discovered SF literature, and found that it wasn’t all just Arthurian fantasy and naval adventures in space, but could actually be literature — serious, provokative, important — I  crossed the Harlan Ellison event horizon and fell irrevocably towards his anthology, Dangerous Visions, as surely as I would into a black hole.  Everyone in the field, it seemed, alluded to it continually, and as far as serious SF reading was concerned, Ellison might as well have called it Start Here¹.  Trouble was, there were no current British editions, so the best I could do was hope for American imports, or second hand copies.

At a comics convention in Glasgow, I struck gold.  It was an old paperback edition, sold in three parts.  The good news was the vender only wanted 50p for each of them, the bad news being he only had the first two to sell.  (To this day, I’ve only read two thirds of Dangerous Visions, which may go a long way to explain the major gaps in my reading and personality.)  It was a firebrand of a book, a rabble-raising, subversive, trouble-making work.  And at the heart of it was Philip José Farmer.

In his introduction to Farmer’s story, Riders of the Purple Wage, Ellison plainly stated that it was his favourite in the collection, and I had read nothing even remotely like it. It was mesmeric, ingulfing and, yes, dangerous.  I couldn’t believe I’d never even heard of Philip José Farmer.  I had to have more.

So instead of keeping an eye open for Dangerous Visions in the second hand shops, it was PJF I was looking for.  Over a year passed before I saw his name on the cover of a book.   It was in the long-gone John Smith’s Bookshop on St. Vincent Street, Glasgow, and it was on a large paperback anthology called The Road to Science Fiction Vol. 3: From Heinlein to Here, ed. James Gunn².  The Farmer story was not as revolutionary as Wage, but it was charming and clever and did nothing to dull my interest.

Then I did a really smart thing.  I went to my local library.  They had a full-length novel by this man,  Red Orc’s Rage.  In it, a young guy in a mental asylum is offered a radical treatment where he projects himself into the fictional World of Tiers.  There’s nothing remotely SF about this set up — it was a therapy that had actually been tried, and it was all done through psychological means, no silly technology or anything.  The SF element was in those chapters where the protagonist is embroiled in the fantasy world.  The fact that in the real world, the real real world, the World of Tiers is a series of Philip José Farmer novels just adds self-referential fun to a fascinating novel.  The moment I found it in the library, though, was a defining one for me.  I picked it off the shelf and read its first line³ wondering if this would be a maelstrom like the Dangerous Visions story, or just a fun, well-written romp.  It read: “Jim Grimson never planned to eat his father’s balls.”  I was in love.

From then on, I had far more luck.  An Edinburgh second hand bookshop had all but one of the books in the Riverworld series.  By the time I got to the missing volume, Borders in Glasgow had American imports of them all, so I bought an actual new copy to complete the series.   Since then, I’ve bought every novel, short story collection and anthology with him in it that I’ve come across, and he’s been marvelous company.

Back when I had first discovered Dangerous Visions, I had been in high school.  I was in university when reading the Gunn anthology, singing cabaret in a Rothesay hotel when ploughing through the World of Tiers and by the time I was half way through the Riverworld saga, I was at drama school.  Specifically, I was in a play, Come Back to the Five and Dime, Jimmy Dean, Jimmy Dean by Ed Graczyk, and between my scenes I’d sit in the dressing room (which I had to myself, being the only male in the cast) and read my newly minted copy of The Dark Design.  I was very content in those moments.

Though I never met him, never knew him, I’ll miss Philip José Farmer; the same way I miss Stanley Kubrick.  People die and people are born, but Philip José Farmer will never be replaced.

Thank you, Phil.

Notes

¹ One in particular that sticks out: I was reading a great deal of Philip K. Dick’s short fiction and his “The Story to End All Stores for Harlan Ellison’s Anthology Dangerous Visions” was a particular favourite, despite not being the Dick story that was actually in Dangerous Visions.

² This is a very good history of SF book, and I ended up buying the next two volumes, From Here to Forever, and The British Way.  Recommended.

³ Not so much anymore, but I used to be obsessed with first lines (which is probably why I’ve always had a hard time getting past them).  Slaughterhouse Five is another favourite.