(4) PHILIP JOSE FARMER –
RIVERWORLD (1971 – 1983)
Philip Jose Farmer brought the kink to my science fiction.
Actually, Philip Jose Farmer brought the kink to science fiction in general. In the words of Joe Lansdale, Farmer gave science fiction sex – and not just conventional sex, but kinky alien sex, most notably in his Hugo Award-winning 1952 short story “The Lovers”, subsequently expanded into a novel. And also religion – “in his odd blending of theology, p0rnography and adventure” as per literary critic Leslie Fiedler. If that’s not a compelling advertisement, I don’t know what is!
Leslie Fielder also applauded Farmer’s approach to storytelling as a “gargantuan lust to swallow down the whole cosmos, past, present and to come, and to spew it out again”.
And yes, he did actually bring the kink to my own personal science fiction. My sexual imagination was permanently, well, blown by The Image of the Beast, and its sequel, Blown, in my adolescence. I wouldn’t recommend them for the faint-hearted – they were explicitly written, in every sense of the word explicit, for a publisher of science fiction literary erotica.
Farmer also gave science fiction his Riverworld series, the definitive posthumous or afterlife fantasy – well, apart from the original posthumous fantasy by John Kendricks Bangs by which it was inspired.
Every human (and sapient hominid species) that has ever lived and died in history or prehistory finds themselves resurrected en masse in the mysterious Riverworld, in a style somewhat similar to the Matrix and equally engineered.
Like Stephen King’s The Dark Tower, its concept was too large for its narrative finish and it falls apart somewhat in the concluding volume, but the journey through Riverworld is unforgettable – and part of me still awaits to be resurrected there.
FANTASY & HORROR
The fourth of my four posthumous or afterlife fantasies that I’ve smuggled into my Top 10 SF list – because they’re written by writers I know primarily through their SF.
RATING: 4 STARS****
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