Book Reviews


This page contains a list of where all the known reviews of Philip José Farmer's books have been printed. Our resourses are limited so there are probably many hundreds of reviews out there that we do not know of. Since most of the book reviews we have are many years (if not decades) old, we have decided to reprint them here. If anyone finds a review they wrote, or printed in their magazine or fanzine, and they would like it removed, please email us and we will do it immediately. This page should be expanding rapidly so check back often.
THE GREEN ODYSSEY

Fantasy & Science Fiction, October 1957
(Ballantine, $2.75; paper 35¢) Saga of escape by land-sailing windjammers across the vast plains of a colorful feudal planet. Wonderfully lusty and roistering adventure story, with a shrewd hero, a magnificent heroine, and acutely inserted s.f. details - one of the year's most entertaining tales. (Anthony Boucher)
Infinity, November 1957
(Ballantine 35¢) Here's a disappointment, from one of science fiction's most brilliant and least predictable writers.
    Farmer's celebrated magazine stories; "The Lovers," "Mother," "The Night of Light," are richly dark with psychological meaning. The Green Odsyssey is a pastel pastiche, superficial and half-hearted, of Tarzan, Conan, Hubbard's Caves of Sleep and heaven knows what all else. What color it has is borrowed without improvement. Like some of de Camp's lesser works the story is set on an alien planet for no very evident reason; with minor changes, it could as easily have taken place in medieval India right here on Earth.
    The element which is specifically science-fictional is shoveled in: Green is that king cliches, the castaway space-traveler. Hearing that some other spacemen have been captured and are being held as demons in a distant kingdom, he leaves queen-mistress and slave-wife (but the later tags along with her six children) and ships out on a merchant "roller"—a sailing vessel on wheeels. This is an ingenious notion, given the absolute flatness of the alien plain, but its interest lasts just as long as the first description of it, after which the "rollers" begin acting exactly like ordinary vessels. In which case, of course, the plain might just as well have been an ocean to begin with. "A difference that makes no difference is no difference."
    Farmer's characters are sharply defined, but have nothing to do. Green himself is a reluctant lover and hero, the type of the comic adventurer; but he is propelled by the author through a series of notably unfunny adventures. His wife, Amra, is a majestic white-goddess figure; the plot gives her a couple of minor rescues to perform offstage, when the hero might better have gotten himself out of trouble; otherwise she has no function except to deliver stadard dusky-belle line over and over—you know, "White man sail away in big boat, forget poor Cheeta." The merchant, Miran, a wonderful blend of optimism and greed, has a supernumerary's role; and so on. The story winds up in a blaze of Tom Corbettism: the floating islands which roam the plain turn out to be abondoned lawn-mowers (honest), left over from a time when the plain was one gigantic spaceport. By taking over one of these, Green mows down his enemies, rescues one of the castawy spacemen, &c, &c. The whole thing is miserably dull and must have been drudgery to write; the author's private jokes (e.g., calling the merchant clan Effenycan and their god Mennirox) don't help. (Damon Knight)
Venture, November 1957
Satellite, December 1957
Astounding, January 1958
(Ballantine Books, N.Y. No. 210. 1957. 152 pp. 35¢) I must be about the only fan now alive who not either enthralled or appalled by the publication of Philip José Farmer's "The Lovers" back in 1952. The reason's simple: I've never read it. The story appeared just in time to go into a carton when I headed to Pittsburgh, and it's still there. The book that Shasta promised never appeared, and neither did the prize-winning Shasta-Pocket Books novel that followed. "The Green Odyssey" is, therefor, the author's first book in print—and I still don't know what all the shouting is about.
    These are the adventures of Alan Green, spacewrecked on a far planet that is overrun with feudal human societies. He is the latest mate of a Amazonian slave, Amra, official leman of the Duchess Zuni of Tropat, and on the whole doing quite well in a precarious position when he hears that a rocket come down in a far country, a few thousand miles away across the grass sea of Xurdimur. The two "demons" on the ship will be executed if they don't prove their innocence by dying first. So Mr. Green—the title is a pun—schemes valiantly to get himself to Estorya in time to rescue the Earthmen and hitch a ride home.
    The plot, the settings, the trappings are strictly by Edgar Rice Burroughs out of Robert E. Howard (Amra? Zingaro?), but the whole thing is curiously flat and unexciting. It's as full of detail as an officially approved Russian painting, and adds up to as little. (Incidentally, though no sailor, I have my own doubts about how effective one steering axle would be on a roller-ship, where there are thirteen other pairs of wheels plowing along straight ahead.) Miran, the freebooting merchant, should be a real character, but he isn't. Neither is Amra, with her brood of assorted brats sired by assorted nobility and others. Neither is Green. In fact, the only really likable character is a black cat-goddess with a taste for beer, picked up after shipwreck on one of the wandering islands of the Xurdimer.
    "Rollicking science-fiction adventure," the blurb calls it: "uproarious" . . . "hell-bent" . . . "swashbuckling" . . . "sheer fun." These is was not, although it could have been. What was with "The Lovers" that blew up such a storm? (P. Schuyler Miller)
Galaxy, January 1958
(Ballantine Books, $2.75) At first glance, this would seem to be a routine space opera, complete with heroic tenor, particularly since a symbiote makes the hero virtually invulnerable. But maybe you have also noticed lately the revulsion of many authors of the John Carter-Kimball Kinnison brand of hero.
    The Farmer boy is big, handsome, blond and strong, a castaway on a planet of short, dark people. He is also lazy, cautious to the point of timidity and not very bright. A good thing he was supplied with his GI symbiote that increases strength, repairs wounds and replaces lost parts and also that he managed to pick up an Amazon of a native wife, a slave like him, who combines beauty and intelligence with five kids, one of them his.
    He has managed to get himself installed as a gigolo to the local duke's voluptuous but bath-needing wife, and overhearing that two strangers have come from the sky in a strange ship and are being held in a distant city, he arranges passage there with a merchant ship captain.
    Though a slave, he gives the captain a financial plan that offers sufficient gain to overcome reluctance to help a fugitive. He thinks he's lamming on his wife, but she's a heap smarter than he is.
    The story has a flavor of the de Camp's famous series, the nautical atmosphere being supplied by an interesting concept in dry-land shipping -wind rollers, sailing vessels of the plains.
    Farmer throws in pirates for plot and floating islands for mystery and almost makes a mish-mash of the ending, but doesn't.
FLESH

Analog, January 1961
(Beacon Books 277 1960 190 pp. 35¢) (see STRANGE RELATIONS for the beginning of this review) The symbolism is there, too, in "Flesh," but in line with the publisher's policies, just about everything in the book has an overt sexual motive or meaning. A starship which has left Earth about 2100 A.D. returns after eight centuries to find the planet a parched cinder, with a few oases of human civilization on a more or less pastoral level. This culture of the thirtieth is based on a fertility cult that incorporates just about everything in "The Golden Bough," with embellishments from the author's fertile. Peter Stagg, giant red-headed captain of the returned ship, promptly has antlers grafted on his skull, is adopted into the Elk fraternity, and as the year's "Sunhero" is launched on a six month's career of servicing every eligible "mascot" or virgin in the DeeCee kingdom. His triumphal northward march will bring him to Albany at the summer soltice, where the hideous Mother of Pigs will castrate and slaughter him, sending the Sun back into darkness from which a new Sunhero will rescue it at the winter solstice.
    For the surface reader in search of such entertainment, this is simply the story of one prolonged orgy—a dream fantasy made real—with colorful and plausible detail, and with a small amount of melodrame thrown in, as Stagg falls in love with a captured mascot from the pseudo-Catholic Casey kingdom of Boston, is taken prisoner by the Pants-Elf homosexuals of Pennsylvania—a foul libel!—and is pursued by the hunting pigs of Mother Alba. Meanwhile, in subplots, Stagg's fellow spacemen try to fit themselbes into the sex-centered society. Those who dig psychological symbolism can carry things to still another level, and delight in what the other says symbolically that the can't get by with in simple Anglo-Saxon. Finally, since Farmer is a serious writer, he is undoubtedly saying something about the psychological nature of man and human society, but quite without the finesse and suave subtlety of "Father" and "My Sister's Brother." After all, that's not what Beacon pays for.
New Worlds #184, November 1968
Kirkus Reviews, February 15 1968
(Doubleday 68-11784) Eight hundred years later, ten starship men return to an earth that erupts with pagan rituals, fraternities and fertility rites. Peter Stagg is adopted as this year's "Sunhero," initiated into the local "Elks" and a pair of antlers is grafted on his head which give him "the biggest case of satyriasis known to history." As he bounds along the thorny and horny path, at one point he takes on all of what's left of Boston's delicate daughters. But then he falls in love with Mary Casey, captive from Caseyland and can't get past her chastity belt. These are just some of the numbing visions devoted to satisfying man's more delinquent daydreams. Flushed Flesh….
Publishers Weekly, February 19 1968
(Doubleday 68-11784) Doubleday's catalog calls this "one of the all-time science fiction novels long out of print, now completely re-written by the author." We have no personal knowledge of the original version, but this one seems a steamy tale blending allegory and fertility rites with life in a futuristic world. Stagg, the Sun Hero, the Horned King, with the aid of antlers that give him erotic strength beyond dreams, is driven by an inexhaustible compulsion to scatter his seed and repopulate the desolate world. The thing he objeas to, however, is the ritual death forecast for him when he meets the Moon Goddess. This all seems pretty old-fashioned in terms of much of the science fiction being written today.
Library Journal, April 15 1968
(Doubleday 68-11784) Peter Stagg (note the last name), with his nine crewmen, returns to earth after an absence of more than 800 years during which time he has been exploring space. He and his men have been frozen for much of this period. Earth, in the meantime, has experienced the Desolation and reverted to the stone age. The state religion is a fertility cult; the capitol in Washington (now Wazhtin) has two domes in honor of the Great White Mother, and the Washington monument also has sexual implications. Stagg is made the sun-hero of the population, made up mostly of women, and, as any good stag would, has a wild time with all of these willing women before his death. If you like your science fiction on the gamey side this may be for you. (Paul E. Edlund)
Fantasy & Science Fiction, December 1968
(Doubleday, $3.95) Philip José Farmer’s FLESH is "a revised and expanded version of a novel by the same name first published by Galaxy Publishing Corp." The original copyright is 1960. It is my uninformed, outsider’s opinion that the revision and expansion have been minimal and that the book might have been very good if more time had been spent on it. It is a satire (part of the time), an adventure story (part of the time), a celebration of primal appetites (ditto) and a primitive society created out of whole cloth along the lines of Frazer’s GOLDEN BOUGH (likewise). Farmer seems never to have settled on a consistent attitude toward his material; none of the versions of the book listed above manage to mesh with any of the others. Most promising but worst achieved is the celebration of primal appetites (eating and sex) – arch when it should be coarse and coyly evasive when it should he specific. The book keeps heading into erotic scenes and shying off at the last minute. And some very unpretty things lie under the "comic" surface: mass castration, death by rape, and the ripping apart of children, to name a few. The book gives the impression of a naturally austere, cultivated and somewhat morbid sensibility trying to portray Rabelaisian simplicity and heartiness with all the forced go of an unhappy conventioneer. There are vivid flashes of imagination that no one but Philip Farmer could even come near, but even so, it isn’t a good book. It does his reputation particular disservice because it could have been one. Readers especially interested in Farmer can simply consider it early Farmer and read it as such. Others will probably wish it were less uneven and confused. (Joanna Russ)
Analog, November 1969
(Signet No. T3861; 75¢) Philip José Farmer, on the other hand, is back with a pair of semi-SF books which he and the publisher intend to be pornography and are consequently pricing at appropriate prices: $1.95 each. From where I sit, they are pure juvenile exhibitionism. In his "Flesh", first a paperback, then a hardback, now back again as a Signet paperback, Farmer was projecting some of the fertility rites of ancient times into our future, mixing in ome molecular biology, and writing a bawdy but good yarn. {see IMAGE OF THE BEAST for the next part of this review}.
Vector, Spring 1970
Locus #130, December 29 1972
(Signet Q5097, 191pp., 95¢) This is a revised and expanded version of the original which came out in 1960 (or maybe the original was cut and this restores some of the deletions). Basically, we have a starship crew returning to Earth with the traditional centuries long time lag to find the eastern shore of America to be a society believing in the Mother Godess with some technological ramifications. Farmer must have had lots of fun writing this because I had quite a bit reading it. (Tony Lewis)
Review by Christian "naddy" Weisgerber
A WOMAN A DAY

Science Fiction Review #42, January 1971
(Timestop! Lancer 74616 75¢) The Sam Moskowitz blurb on the cover of this new edition of a novel originally published by GALAXY in 1957 descibes it as a "fast-moving cloak-and-dagger novel of the future", and for once Sam cannot be accused of exaggerating. It is decidedly fast-moving. The story is set in a future where the Earth is divided between the totalitarian Haijac Union and several independant states and federations attempting to avoid absorption into that empire. Its principal character, Dr. Leif Barker, is a top level secret agent working within the Haijac Union to subvert and destroy it, and from the first to the last page Timestop is a fast-paced story of his efforts to remain one step ahead of the Haijac autorities.
    The Haijac Union is a theocratic dictatorship, dominated by the hierchary of the Sturch, the institutional body of a "scientific religion" founded some generations earlier by one Isaac Sigmen, who is supposedly traveling through time and is scheduled to manifest himself on the occasion of Timestop and reward his faithful followers. (One of the avenues by means of which Barker's espionge network is undermining Haijac society involves the propagation of rumors that Timestop is imminent.)
    The religion is provided with an Anti-Christ in the person of one Jude Changer, who is aso able to travel through time and is engaged in sowing evil and undoing the work of the holy Sigmen. The initials J.C. which appear frequently as graffiti, often at the scene of some serious mischief, are suspected to refer to Jude Changer. They might also, however, be the initials of Jacques Cuze, allegedly the leader of a (literal) French underground headquartered in the ancient sewers and subways of Paris. Or J.C. might refer to Jikiza Chandu, the founder and profit of the Bantu church. All of these elements, in any event, form opposition to the Haijac Union.
    Leif Barker's difficulties begin when the mauled body of Halla Dannto is rushed to the hospital where Dr. Barker and his "wife", Ava, work. The extraordinarily beautiful Halla is the wife of a high Sturch official and, more important, an agent of the same intelligence bureau as Barker. His orders are that, if Halla Dannto is dead, he is to conceal the fact until her identical twin sister can be substituted for her. This he does, in an environment where everybody is suspicious of everybody else, and with the added difficulties of a passionate husband and a cold, cunning, ultra-suspicious secret police official haunting the hospital corriders. He also manages to complicate things further by falling in love with the counterfeit Halla, disobeying the instructions of his own superiors and getting involved with a group of Bantus living a shawowing existence in the abandoned Paris subway tunnels. Utimately, Barker manages to escape with Halla to Bantuland, and there, presumably, they live more or less happily ever after.
    Beyond this failry conventional plot, Farmer offers a couple of (for him) characteristic touches: a sexual theme, and a few analytical pot-shots at religious intolerance. Halla and her sister have a surgically-implanted organ in their abdomens which generates a stimulating electric shock during intercourse. In an oppressive society of sexually frustrated men—made that way to render them easier to control—a woman capable of thus turning on a man is an invaluable agent. The antithesis of that society is the Bantu community-family, which functions like a Hippie commune with the additional bond of telepathy. There is one scene in which they are practicing a ritual of love, which, I am quite certain, but for the time and place in which it was written, would have culminated in something very like the giant daisy chain of Blown.
    Farmer does a good job of depicting a rather unpleasant future society, and the writing is technically sound without being either beautiful or brilliant. Characterization is generally sharp, but the author goes a little overboard in portraying Barker as a somewhat pompous figure.
    Timestop is worth reading if you hadn't read it in its earlier incarnation as A Woman A Day. Or, for the matter, even if you had. (Ted Pauls)
Constellation #5, 1978
(Timestop!) Quite simply, Farmer's 1984, a doctor works as a spy in a society ruled by opression and "big brother". The scene is France during the future. A clever novel with many interesting facets. Unfortunately not one of his best, as it gets a bit boring, especially as the plot appears to thicken. If you like Philip Jose Farmer try it, if not give it a miss.
Paperback Parlour, December 1978
Locus #236, August 1980
Books Received: (Berkley, $2.25 220pp, pb) Reprint novel (Beacon 1960), also known as TIMESTOP and as DAY OF TIMESTOP.
STRANGE RELATIONS

Amazing, September 1960
Worlds of If, September 1960
Philip José Farmer's Strange Relations (Ballantine) is a collection of five short pieces arranged in the form of a family album: the stories are Mother, Daughter, Father, Son and My Sister's Brother. (The last two have had their titles forcibly wrenched into conformity with the pattern.)
    Farmer is an important writer, who repays study. He is, it is true, an acquired taste, but that is only another way of saying that he is his own writer instead of being a copy of someone else. In his work are several highly individual qualities - one, an explicit curiosity about reproduction and elimination; two, an astute knack for inventing alien biology; three, an obsessive concern for the subconscious wounds which express themselves in the human sum called "personality."
    Nearly all of Farmer's aliens are meticulously and brightly drawn. Nearly all of his humans have pockets of rot in their brains which seep through, polluting their actions. No matter what great struggles his characters may engage in in the physical world, their real battle is always with the wild black storms that scourge their minds. (Frederik Pohl)
Analog, January 1961
(Ballantine Books 391-K 1960 190 pp. 35¢) "Strange Relations" is a collection of five novelettes and short stories published between 1953 and 1959. It demonstrates the author's talents far better than than the newer novel, "Flesh," and at the same time is a show-piece of sexual symbolism and variation. "Mother" and "Daughter," from Thrilling Wonder, open the book. They are companion stories about the intellegent molluscs or land-oysters of Baudelaire, females all, whose reproductive cycle is unlike anything on earth except the symbolic phantasmagoria of dreams. In the first and better of the two stories, mama's boy Eddie Fetts, wrecked on Baudelaire with his classically dominant mother, literally retreats into the womb of the monster he names Polyphema and spends the rest of his life there, fathering her litters in the strange manner developed by her species. "Daughter" is told by one of these offspring, her father's favorite, who took one of his nursery tales to heart and thoroughly quashed one of the most dangerous predators of the planet. This yarn might be taken as the author's tongue-in-cheek demonstration that a good writer can turn anything into an acceptable SF story—even "The Three Little Pigs."
    "Father," the third in the collection, was in Fantasy & Science Fiction in 1955. It is by far the most impressive in the book, and the best of the author's stories that I have read seen-since his classic "The Lovers" appeared just as I was moving to Pittsburg, and I never read it. It is also one of the rare science fiction magazines with a religious theme—a world of all-female creatures, except for one male humanoid giant who is in a way creator of them all. Two priests, in the crew of a ship forced down on Abatos, are taught the art of raising the dead. One, Bishop Andre, is to take Father's place while he carries the gift of resurrection to the rest of the galaxy. But the more worldly Father Carmody begins to probe a little deeper, and to uncover disquieting things.
    "Son," from a 1954 Argosy, where it was called "Queen of the Deep," is a time-marking short story about a man swallowed by a Russian submarine that is run by an electronic brain. He, of course, finds a way to outwit the machine and escape. "My Sister's Brother" from Satellite 1959—it was "The Strange Birth" there—comes close to the quality of "Father." A man on Mars finds and underground, or at least encased society of strange creatures, with a bizarre sexual cycle vaguely suggesting that of the socail insect, and with these Martians a strange, seemingly sexless womanoid creature of entirely different type. The storyline is rather inconsequential; what counts here is the ingenuity with which the biology of these aliens has been worked out. Again, for the Freudian, sexual symbolism is poured in with a lavish hand to flavor the outlandish stew. (see Flesh for the rest of this review)
Vector, June 1961
Books and Bookmen, December 1966
Locus #167, November 20 1974
Books Received: (Avon/Equinox 10578, 189pp., $1.95) Collection of five of Farmer's trail blazing novelettes from the Fifties including the excellent "Mother." Ballantine first published the book in 1960 and here it is as the first volume in the "SF Rediscovery" series. It's certainly an important book in the development of SF, but I wish there was a critical introduction saying why. The stories stand up very well after 20 years even if the shock value is no longer there. Recommended.
Futures, April 1975
Delap's F&SF Review #2, May 1975
SFRA Newsletter #40, May 1975
Galaxy, September 1975
SF&F Journal #86, February 1976
THE LOVERS

Amazing, October 1961
Fantasy & Science Fiction, October 1961
Analog, January 1962
Vector, Summer 1962
Renaissance #4, Fall 1972
Moebius Trip, January 1973
(Ballantine #02762 - 160pp. - $1.25) In a copy of RIVERSIDE QUARTERLY which lies buried somewhere in the mound of boxes which presently houses my library, there appears an article on Philip José Farmer's THE LOVERS. By the end of the first paragraph, the reader has been instructed not to read further before reading the story. Readers of the article must have been few, since the book was then unavailable. Happily, Ballantine has seen fit at last to correct this situation and those lacking a copy are advised to get one as soon as possible.
    Anyone who has read the Moskowitz histories knows of the sensation caused by the novelette's publication in STARTLING STORIES during 1952. Don't think that it is graphic sexual descriptions that caused the uproar, as I had been led to think; this isn't even soft-core porn. It is instead a reader's treat in which characterization and idea receive equal attention.
    This is the realm of one Hal Yarrow, linguist and joat, and also of his meeting and forbidden love for Jeannette Rastinac of the planet Ozagen. It is the domain of the Sturch (gee, Phil, where do you get your neat slang?) and Hal's gapt, Pornsen. Enter it.
    If you are fortunate enough not to know the plot, there is a well constructed mystery awaiting you and an ending which takes the old story of love in a repressive society (1984) and rejuvenates it as only SF can. I judge that the actual novelette begins with chapter 6, for those interested. The earlier chapters are, structurally, the weekest part of the book and can be skipped if they bore you.
    I trust that this was the part Phil meant when he said that he wanted to revise the book, but Ballantine wouldn't let him; publication costs wouldn't justify it. Still another reason SF doesn't "measure up" to the level of the mainstream.
    Farmer writes two kinds of books: in is strickly an adventure story, perhaps even a single draft, written to maintain financial stability while he works on the other, a more serious undertaking. This latter reeks of polish and creation-pains and it is hear that THE LOVERS stands. The world of Ozagen lives, is coherent and credible. The central thesis of the story is biologically sound, a similar situation occuring among certain lizard and salamander populations. (Did you know that?)
    My favorite line in the whole book has to be, "'You're damn shib I am'"
    (Is there anyone still reading this? Why aren't you reading THE LOVERS?)
    Item: Blurb from the back cover...
"Ballantine Books Twentieth Anniversary Classic Science Fiction Celebration...In 1961, [Farmer] wrote and published the full-length novel based on "The Lovers." And in 1972, Ballantine Books is proud to bring this classic work back into print."
    Ballantine Books: aside from the outrageous $1.25 cover price, if you are so proud and this so much a classic, why is that eleven years elapsed between printings? Both are inexcusable. THE LOVERS should have been in print full-time, just as are the Clarke books. Under such circumstances, I might accept the price. If it wouldn't sell, I could accept the denied permission for revision. In combination, they are incompatible and reprehensible.
Kirkus Reviews, April 1 1979
(Del Rey 28032-6, hardcover reprint) Before the publication of this story in shorter form in 1952, only the genteelest of biological premises ever showed their faces in science-fiction magazines, but The Lovers (first in book form in 1961) may now seem like pretty tame stuff. Hal Yarrow, product of a sexually repressive theocracy, leaps at the chance to accompany a mission to the newly discovered alien civilization of Ozagen. Here he meets the beautiful Jeanette , apparently the offspring of an earlier Terran explorer and a native humanoid. Their clandestine affair, carried out against the background of a secret Terran plot to wipe out the indigenous population of Ozagen, culminates in disaster brought about by Hal's ignorance of Jeanette's true biological ancestry. Farmer's busy circumstantiations of the puritanical Terran culture and the Ozagen reproductive cycle, even though apparently revised for this new edition, do not wear very well, but it's good nonetheless to have this ground-breaking book in print.
Publishers Weekly, February 1 1979
(Del Rey 28032-6 hardcover reprint) "Since the early '50s, no SF novel has more often been described as taboo-breaking than this one," remarked PW. Farmer speculates about alien sexuality and the possibility of love between human and alien. We concluded that the work has "interesting settings, depth of characterization and a concept that still has the power to amaze. This landmark book belongs in every SF collection."
Publishers Weekly, March 19 1979
(Del Rey 28032-6 hardcover reprint) Since the early '50s, no SF novel has more often been described as taboo-breaking than this one, now in hardcover for the first time. Sex was almost nonexistent in SF until Farmer began to break down the barriers with his speculations about alien sexuality and the possibility of love between human and alien. Despite at least one structural problem inherent in the plot, the novel holds up well. It has interesting settings (both the planet Ozagen and the religious tyranny on Earth the hero comes from), a depth of characterization that was rare when the book was new and is still not as common as it should be in SF and a concept that still has the power to amaze. This landmark book belongs in every science fiction collection.
Booklist, September 1 1979
(Del Rey 28032-6 hardcover reprint) This is the first publication in hardcover of a major novel in the sf genre and it has been revised by the author for this edition. Its theme is the sexual attraction of human Hal Yarrow for a beautiful native of the planet Ozagen; and its 1961 magazine publication marked a permanent departure from the Calvinistic mores of the sf mode called modern science fiction in the 1940s and 50s. Acceptably written and equipped with an ingenious plot and explosive sf premise, this is a book of which many have heard. It thus comes equipped with a built-in audience. It is also, of course, mandatory reading for all those interested in the evolution and nature of sf as a literature. (Algis Budrys)

When Hal Yarrow, a member of the Big Brother society of the future, dares to think "unrealistically" and falls in love with a human-looking insect, his love proves to be both his salvation and undoing. A fine science fiction tale recommended for older teenagers.

Future Life #15, December 1979
($8.95 in hardcover from Del Rey/Ballantine) One place where the world got ahead of SF is in matters sexual. In the ’40s and ’50s, our heroes were clean of mind, saving damsels in distress – and the universe – for no more than a kiss on the cheek. Philip José Farmer struck one of the first blows for freedom with The Lovers. When this story of human-alien love first appeared in 1952, it generated so much controversy that Farmer felt compelled to expand it to book length.
    Now with several sorts of sexual revolution behind us, The Lovers can be read as a tale of love, death and first encounter – instead of just an iconoclastic exercise for shock effect.
    Farmer’s 31st century America is rigidly controlled by the Sturch – a combination of church and state with the most repressive characteristics of both. Here, everyone has a highly specialized job, a spouse and a personal guardian angel something like a live-in policeman/priest. Our hero, Hal Yarrow, doesn’t like any of this and jumps at the first opportunity to escape it all – a trip to the distant planet of Ozagen.
    A linguist, Yarrow is supposed to study the native Wogglebugs’ language under the care and keeping of his guardian angel, Mr. Pornsen. But Yarrow encounters Jeanette, a fabulously feminine alien and, throwing off a lifetime’s conditioning, dumps Pornsen, the Sturch and the whole expedition for love.
    The sex here is so discreet that you wonder how anyone could have been offended, even 20 years ago. This combination of foolish love, the strangest evolution on record, and Farmer’s fabulous style won him a Hugo as 1952’s most promising young writer. His subsequent body of work, including the best-selling Riverworld series, shows that the fans in those days knew what they were talking about. This is an important book in the history of SF and one that still holds up as an interesting and entertaining tale. (Bob Mecoy)
Thrust #15, Summer 1980
Paperback Inferno, December 1982
CACHE FROM OUTER SPACE/THE CELESTIAL BLUEPRINT
FIRE AND THE NIGHT
THE ALLEY GOD

Analog, August 1962
(Ballantine Books, N.Y. No. F-588. 1962. 176 pp. 50¢) The three novelettes collected in this volume have the strong maverick brand of the author's unconventionality on them. One, "The Captain's Daughter" - originally published in the October 1953 Science Fiction Plus as "Strange Compulsion" - is Farmer and science fiction at their best. The third, "The God Business," is Rabelasian fantasy. The opener, "The Alley Man," is another example of the innate variety of science fiction.
    The idea of a surviving Neanderthal man has been used many times in science fiction, and I think I am safe in saying that no two stories have been alike. L. Sprague de Camp's "The Gnarly Man" and my "Old Man Mulligan," planned at the same bull-session, were completely different, and "The Alley God" is utterly so. It is a robust, rambling comic tragedy of a dying species, trying to keep its heredity straight, clinging to its old legends, holding its own against the G'yaga, the False Folk who have inherited the Earth. The roaring, rutting, one-armed Old Man Paley who lives on the city dump and hunts the Old King's hat of power through its alleys, who guzzles beer and seduces social workers with equal facilities, is Alley Oop as seen by Eugene O'Neill. The story is negligible; the character is everything.
    "The Captain's Daughter," on the other hand, is pure science fiction - an intensely detailed biological mystery, one of the strange reflections of sex which the author has adopted as his hallmark since "The Lovers" appeared. It is as craftily and solidly fitted together as the best locked-room mystery John Dickson Carr ever constructed, and forces you to create an image of the strange thing that possesses the Captain's daughter, from the accumulating evidence of what it does to her.
    "The God Business," from Beyond, is fantasy of a style that was popular in Greek and Roman times and deftly revived by Thorne Smith. A bottle of the legendary brew of a Celtic god, let loose in central Illinois, has converted the valley of the Illinois River into a Never-Never Land of demigods out of Pogo and Apuleus, where symbols take flesh and the dead may rise. Into this place of solidified hallucination, stark naked by way of a disguise, venture an irrascible agent of the Food and Drug Administration and a Major in the Marines, female. What follows they bring upon themselves - which is another way of saying it was fated, or planned by the Great God Mahrud, nee "Bull" Durham.
    If you've learned by now that you never know what to expect from a Farmer story - then you know what to expect in "The Alley God." (P. Schuyler Miller)
Amazing, September 1962
(176 pp. Ballantine Books. Paper: 50¢) This is a rather disappointing trio of short novels. Each story contains both good and bad elements – enough good ones so that it is possible to be entertained and enough bad ones so that no lasting impression is made.
    In the title work, the author has created a memorable blood-and-guts character called Old Man, who possesses probably the most astonishing family tree this side of Venus. But the character of the girl sociology student who is supposed to be Old Man’s antithesis is not nearly so strong as it could be.
    The second tale is, to my mind, the weakest of the lot. It is cast in Farmer’s familiar biological-sexual framework, but in this instance it’s not a very striking or original example of this genre, which is so much the author’s personal hallmark. Perhaps this is a format not capable of limitless variation, though I find it hard to believe. For those readers interested, it is called The Captain’s Daughter and is another story revolving around a type of human parasite.
    In the third story, Mr. Farmer tries for something very different – humor so broad that it’s almost farce. The main trouble is that it is a bit too drawn out. Titled The God Business, it is a fantasy about a place in Illinois transformed, by some highly developed wishful thinking on the part of a college professor, into a land of bacchanalian orgies. Most of the action occurs as the armed services bring all forces to bear to put a halt to matters.
    I hope that Mr. Farmer has better, or rather, more consistent, good fortune next time around. (S.E. Cotts)
Cypher #3, December 1970
INSIDE OUTSIDE

Science Fiction Review, #22, June 22 1964
(Ballantine U2192 1964, 156 pp. 50¢) This interesting, amusing, and, at times, confusing fantasy novel covers a vast array of topics ranging from sex to philosphy. It concerns humans on an obscure world called Hell which, evidently, had been constructed in the past by a gradually dwindling race of fiends, who are now the slaves of mankind. Jack Cull's natural curiosity leads him to attempt to discover the secret of the world where nonexistence is nonexistent. (Grace Rider)
National Review, August 11 1964
(Ballantine U2192) Philip Jose Farmer who once set the whole science fiction world on its ear with an extraordinarily powerful story called The Lovers, in the days when everyone thought the field had no glands, has again turned his considerable skills to the end of disturbing, unsettling, sometimes puzzling, yet completely fascinating the reader. Any attempt to describe in detail this world (or hell) or this plot (or fable) must fail; Farmer barely manages it in and by the book. Is it satire? Very probably. Does it contain a warning? For some, surely. It is one of those rarities which yields to the degree the reader participates in it; which gives back quantitatively what the reader brings in - but gives back something vastly different in kind. It is rife with horror that intrigues, with blood which somehow does not come off on one, with apparent sacrileges which may well be admonishments to those who have lost devotion. An oddment. A most worthwhile oddment. (Theodore Sturgeon)
Moebius Trip, May 1975
(Equinox, $1.95) This 11-year-old novel is about Jack Cull in Hell, a curious other-world existence that Farmer has created which is filled with wonder, with puzzlement, and which has some curious similarities to his Riverworld.
    Here is a hollow sphere, with the living-space on the inside. Up in the middle of the sphere is the sun (always, of course, directly overhead). Cull has an apartment in a tower of one of the cities; out his window he looks over the desert to mountains but the terrain curves upward, fading away into the distant "sky."
    While Cull must shave with a flint razor, he has the use of a telephone:
(Telephones in Hell? Why not? They were the work of those who had been here before man, "demons." There was a vast complex of lines over the city; lines strung, not on wooden poles, but on the gargoyle faces that jutted in profusion on the front of every building or else on the branches of the rocktrees.)
    Yes, the "demons" had been there first. But as Earth's population of humans expanded, more and more of them (it was supposed) had died and come to "hell." And the "rind" of hell has to keep expanding (earthquakes are frequent) to make room.
    The fiends, once masters, had long since become slaves.
    The humor in these pages is subtle, Farmer at his peak -- surpassing Hank Kuttner at his best.
    Leaving for work, Cull notes that a falling stone has killed someone; he joins the expectant crowd. An ambulance comes to pick up the dead man. Disappointment; "X" has not come this time. "X" is, apparently, something not human.
    And people killed here didn't stay dead; the ambulance -- with silent, unknown propulsion -- took away the corpse but it was expected that within a few hours the man would be back, alive.
    All are naked in Cull's city, with the same age and body (with certain exceptions) as when they "died." There is no one under twenty, however, and no one ages; all are sterile. Diseases, insanity, have disappeared.
    Buy oddity continues to pile onto oddity, in this outre tale. The reader cannot help but be intrigued, is forced to read on in ever-building fascination. What is going on here? What is going to happen? This is truly "a book that cannot be put down."
    In a remarkably few pages Farmer has created an incredible environment. Then, Cull arrives at work, answers his phone, and the game is afoot.
    Suffice to say that Cull and two others, after "X" is torn apart by a mob, go on a chase into the sewers, finally into and down an air shaft, and then ----
    Then comes the discovery that their world -- this "Hell" -- is artificial, a titantic ship! They can look out a port and see the stars.
    They manage to make it back to the interior. New earthquakes have flattened their city. And then, they capture the "demon" who had fled with "X's" head; he admits that he is not really a demon, but an extraterrestrial humanoid. And he reveals that this "world" is controlled by powerful beings of great antiquity.
    The humanoid escapes, as more quakes come, the a "final" cataclysm; gravitational attraction ebbs and everything floats freely into the inner void. Eventually, Cull and his two friends drift into a large mass of stone, tubing, etc., which they enter, reaching a control center. Cull finds that he can use certain discs to create duplicate "X's." This brings contact from the "Outside," from one of a race 50,000,000,000 years old, who reveals much, including the fact that his kind have long since perfected the artificial "soul."
    "We are what you would call highly ethical beings. We are not just interested in our own kind and its preservations...."
    Things, though, are not quite as simple as you might suppose. The ancient race of Immortals has set up "soul" stations throughout all creation, supplying souls to all creatures (because if left to their natural fate, death would bring total obliteration). This "Hell" is one such station, its occupants being ethically conditioned while awaiting the births of the creatures to whom they'll become attached.
    So it is with Cull and his cohorts. But as I said, there is more to it than that....
    And how much of Farmer's explanations for this setup will parallel his final "Riverworld" explanations? Will his background Immortals-Ethicals here be behind the setup there?
    It will probably be quite some time before we get the answer to that.
    But all Riverworld addicts will want to -- must! -- read this yarn, Inside Outside. It may very well give you at least a hint of what is to come. (Edward C. Connor)
Locus #174, June 3 1975
Books Received: (Avon Equinox 22830, March, 156pp., $1.95) #7 in the Rediscovery series is a fascinating novel first published in 1964. Farmer was obviously tinkering with the Riverworld series when he wrote this and it contains all the concepts he used later plus an actual ending that pretty well explains things to some degree. Recommended. The cover by Jack Wyrs in impressionistic of something.
Science Fiction Review Monthly #3, May 1975
(Avon, $1.95, Reprint) Farmer and Robert A. Heinlein, throughout the course of their respective careers in SF, have had a fascination with the idea of immortality and the transmigration of souls. Stranger in a Strange Land and I Will Fear No Evil, both by Heinlein, and Farmer's Riverworld stories are major examples. Inside Outside is another.
    Jack Cull lives in Hell, which is populated by resurrected humans and demons and ruled over by The Authorities. He remembers his life on Earth vaguely and has adapted to his hellish existence by getting a job with the local equivalent of Bell Telephone (combined with the Secret Service). Hell is much like Earth, except for the demons and the periodic earthquakes. And the fact that no one knows quite what is going on - it may be Purgatory, not Hell, for instance. So Jack, Phyllis and Fyodor (who may or may not be a Russian writer whose last name is Dostoievsky) set out on a journey into the bowels of Hell to track down the mysterious X, who may or may not be Christ, still in hell, because -- oh, never mind.
    If this is beginning to sound a bit like Riverworld, well, it is. A fact that illuminates Farmer's career as a writer is that Riverworld was originally a single book, written in the 1950s -Farmer's first SF novel. He won a prize for it from a publisher that promptly went out of business and didn't pay him. Riverworld remained unpublished until the 1960s, when Farmer began to re-write it as stories and novels. Meanwhile, it must have struck him that he could do a kind of Riverworld in reverse in Inside Outside.
    The world is actually the inside of a spherical shell in space, with an unmoving light source that dims regularly (at night). Jack and his companions discover that humans and demons alike are prisoners. Then, in a final switch, the transmigration of souls is explained and the whole thing turns out to be different than we thought - but that need not be given away here.
    Inside Outside is a justifiable SF rediscovery - original, sloppy, provocative, hard to classify - a Farmer novel. It is one of those SF books that is better in the seventies somehow than when it came out in 1964. And a pleasant way to pass the time until we get the final novel in the Riverworld series next year. (David G. Hartwell)
SFRA Newsletter #40, May 1975
SFRA Newsletter #43, September 1975
SF&F Journal #86, February 1976
Science Fiction Review #33, November 1979
(Berkley Paperback, 169 pp., $1.75) This is a reissue of Philip Jose Farmer's grizzly little tale of life in a unique version of Hell, which was first published in 1964. Jack Cull (jackal), a sexy lady and a character that's supposed to be Fyodor Dostoevsky but comes out more like Mr. Natural, are caught up in a revolution that literally sweeps Hell off its foundations.
    Fast paced and gripping despite plenty of "theological" small talk between Cull and Fyodor, Farmer's short novel starts out as pure fantasy but ends up science fiction if you can buy the all-powerful pseudo-science that's revealed in the end. Jack Cull is convincing enough and Fyodor is an amusing cartoon, but the sexy lady is so nondescript as to be nonexistent. Too bad Farmer didn't make her at least as real as Cull -- if he had this would be an outstanding novel than just above average.
    Nevertheless, it's a good read. (Neal Wilgus)
Locus #240, December 1980/January 1981
Books Received: (Gregg, $11.95, hc) Reprint novel (Ballantine 1964); "a kind of RIVERWORLD in reverse". New introduction by Lou Stathis. This library edition, offset from the original text, is the first hardcover edition.
Paperback Inferno, December 1982
TONGUES OF THE MOON

Science Fiction Review, #29, September 28 1964
(Pyramid, R-1055 1964, 143 pp. 50¢) This novel opens on the Moon as agents of the South Atlantic Axis stage an attempt to take over the System by destroying the Russian-American Soviets. The Ultimate Weapon is set off on Earth, effectively obliterating life. An intra-Soviet struggle between the American and other remaining factions of the survivors on Luna begins, while hanging over the Soviets' heads is the knowledge that the Axis fleet was in space, probably near Mars, at the time of holocaust.
    The book is notable only for the interrelations of the characters; the science is not explained and the future society is not as fully developed as it could be. A good time-passer, but not memorable. (Robert W. Franson)
Locus, #71, January 6 1971
(Pyramid T-2260, 75¢) This appears to be a potboiler, written hurriedly in 1964 during one of Farmer's less productive periods and reissued for heaven knows what reason by Pyramid this year. The idea upon which the story is based is by far the most interesting thing in the book: a variety of Terran colonies on the moon and elsewhere continue to exist after a devastating nuclear war, and carry on the hostilities of their parent societies. But Farmer does little with the idea after presenting it, and the novel sort of drags along for 140 pages. (Ted Pauls)
Luna Monthly #26/27, July/August 1971
(Pyramid T2260, 1970. 143p. 75¢) Earth is virtually wiped out by nuclear blasts, leaving survivors on the moon, Mars and some other off-planet colonies, as well as a few very scattered remnants in deep caverns and on the sea bottom. International politics -- only the names have been changed from today's bloc-building -- continue after the bombs. The survivors engage in senseless squabbles, barely political considering the number of people left; moon base against moon base, wiping out some of the people the bombs missed, before the hero finally triumphs.
    This book moves very rapidly, and is basically an action story. Farmer seems to be saying that humans will fight, even if there are only two left in the world. I've seen better elsewhere. Read this as a space war adventure, if at all.
THE MAKER OF UNIVERSES

Locus #180, October 27 1975
Books Received: (Garland ISBN 0-8240-1408-1, Oct., 155pp., $11) Photo-reproduction of the 1970 Sphere edition. This book, first published by Ace 1965, is the first volume in Farmer's "Tier of Universes" series. It's good Burroughs type adventure fiction, but I can't really see it as an important enough book to rate this hardcover reprint.
Science Fiction Studies, November 1975
(Garland Publishing, $11.00) Farmer was at his best in the magazine stories of the 1950s based on biological speculation, such as those collected in Strange Relations (Ballantine pb 1960). In the first half of NIGHT OF LIGHT he is close to his best (which makes the book well worth attention), but in its second half he gives us merely a series of violent adventures which add nothing that could not have been said in five or six pages. In THE MAKER OF UNIVERSES we have van Vogt's favorite plotline, the amnesiac protagonist who turns out to be a god, together with another series of violent adventures out of Edgar Rice Burroughs. In the SFRA Newsletter #43 (Sept 1975) there is a review by Mary S. Weinkauf from which I learn that Farmer writes "mythic fiction...for grownups who know Notes from Underground, Freud, Jung, and Plato," which may well be why I have never been able to read most of his fiction. (R.D. Mullen)
SF Booklog #7, January/February 1976
Science Fiction Review Monthly #15, June 1976
Garland, $11.00 (Reprint); and The Maker of Universes, Garland, $11.00 (Reprint) As with other titles in The Garland Library of Science Fiction, Lester del Rey's selection of work by Philip Jose Farmer is curious. No matter how high the quality of the work chosen by Del Rey, the fact remains - Farmer is best known and generally appreciated for his early (mid '50s) experimental work combining sex, biology, and traditional science fiction themes. In Seekers of Tomorrow, Sam Moskowitz credits work like The Lovers and the stories collected in Strange Relations as the cause of a "traumatic revolution contributing toward the maturation of science fiction". And in Billion Year Spree, Farmer's early forays into sexuality are described by Brian Aldiss as "breaking tabus before the s/f field knew it had them". Indeed, Farmer's early work represents one of the few generally recognizable landmarks in the modern history of science fiction, but, whatever his reasons, del Rey chose to reprint examples of Farmer's later work.
    Maker of Universes (1965) is the first of the five volume Kickaha-Wolff series (followed by The Gates of Creation, A Private Cosmos, Behind the Walls of Terra, and the yet to be released Lavalite World). It's a poor choice for an $11.00 hardcover, despite its merits, unless Garland plans to follow with publication of the remaining volumes, but series and monetary considerations aside, it's a stunning book with its marvelously complete and intricately detailed World of Tiers inhabited by some of the better-drawn and unusual characters of the genre. In this, the first volume, Robert Wolff finds and uses an alien instrument to gain access to a parallel universe and then attempts to unravel the mysteries of world built in tiers, each one apparently representing a different period of Earth's history and/or mythology.
    See NIGHT OF LIGHT for the rest of this review.
    All considered, more significant or singularly outstanding examples of Farmer's work might have been chosen, but both of these volumes are representative of his better work in the 60s and deserve a place on the serious reader-collector's shelves. (L.J. Knapp)
Analog, December 1977
(Ace, 247pp. $1.50, reprint) And speaking of the works of Philip José Farmer, there's another series of his again available - and one that shows the fine inventive turn of mind he has in a quite different form. This is his "World of Tiers" series. These began in 1965 and numbered five books altogether. (For some reason, I never found the fifth, so I'm hoping to rectify this lapse soon.)
    Ace Books, in its most welcome new policy of putting the best of its backlist out again rapidly, is now issuing the series on a one-a-month basis. So far, The Maker of Universes and The Gates of Creation are available (247 pp. and 188 pp. respectively, each $1.50.)
    These books deal with a decadent race who once mastered all science. Each Lord, as he calls himself, can now literally build himself a private universe - a pocket universe, as it is called - to his own design and with its own laws of physics. The first book shows us Robert Wolff being called into one of these universes - a world laid out something like a Babylonian ziggurat. The Lord had peopled it with all sorts of mythical beings, abducted from Earth or created. And now the Lord is missing, and the universe is going to hell in a hurry. Wolff and the mischievous Kickaha the Trickster set out to rescue damsels and restore order. It's a romp of adventure and marvelous inventions. After that, the second book takes off on another wild romp as the Lords fight each other in their own vicious way through a perfidious ubiquity of pocket universes.
    The books are totally lacking in significance, relevance, or symbolism - and they are just pure fun to read. (Lester del Rey)
SF&F Journal #90, May 1978
Locus #238, October 1980
Books Received: (Phantasia Press $15.00 220pp hc) Fantasy adventure novel first published by Ace in 1965. This first volume of the "World of Tiers" pentology has been specially revised for this 1200-copy limited edition. There is also a new introduction by Farmer. 200 signed and numbered copies are available for $25.
Review by Christian "naddy" Weisgerber
DARE

Fantasy & Science Fiction, September 1965
Universe #6, November/December 1975
Paperback Parlour, April 1977
Science Fiction Review #32, August 1979
(Berkley, 1979, 201 pp., $1.95) This is apparently the work bought but never published by Startling Stories in the early 1950s which is described by Sam Moskowitz in SEEKERS OF TOMORROW. The title in those days was A BEAST OF THE FIELDS, which strikes me as a better one. I don't know if the book has been revised since it was written, but if so Farmer did it on a whole series of off days.
    It is decidedly minor, and had it been published by Starling in the wake of his other two novels of the period, THE LOVERS and MOTH AND RUST (variously retitled since), I think the readers would have been disappointed. The main problem is that the plot runs continuously and dangerously close to standard cowboys and Indians. There are some good science fictional ideas, notably a huge underground being in whose "horns" one can live symbiotically, and there are some rather charming intelligent dragons, but none of these are integral to the story. It's the old favorite about the young man caught up in the unjust war between the settlers and the natives and unable to decide which side he's on.
    Conrad Richter did a bang-up version of it in THE LIGHT IN THE FOREST. Farmer's is a lot more superficial, with strictly one-dimensional characters and so much action that in a stricter sense very little happens. Nothing interesting goes on between the people involved.
    There's a very rudimentary interspecies love affair, but, especially when compared to THE LOVERS, it seems flat and unconvincing. The title, by the way, isn't daring you to read this book (which has a naked lady on the cover), but refers to a planet named after Virginia Dare, the first English baby born in North America. The Roanoke colony was spirited off to the stars, it seems, for reasons never quite made clear.
    Also, for unclear reasons, the descendants of the settlers seem to be Roman Catholics and used to hearing masses in Latin, even though 1588, the year the colony was "lost" was also the year of the Spanish Armada, and being a Catholic in Protestant England was less fun than being a Communist in America in 1950.
    Of course, the book maintains a certain level of readability, but Farmer has done a lot better. (Darrell Schweitzer)
Locus #240, December 1980/January 1981
Books Received: (Gregg $11.95, hc) Reprint novel (Ballantine 1965). First hardcover edition; library binding and good paper. New introduction by Moshe Feder & David G. Hartwell.
THE GATES OF CREATION

Analog, December 1977
(Ace, 188pp. $1.50, reprint) And speaking of the works of Philip José Farmer, there's another series of his again available - and one that shows the fine inventive turn of mind he has in a quite different form. This is his "World of Tiers" series. These began in 1965 and numbered five books altogether. (For some reason, I never found the fifth, so I'm hoping to rectify this lapse soon.)
    Ace Books, in its most welcome new policy of putting the best of its backlist out again rapidly, is now issuing the series on a one-a-month basis. So far, The Maker of Universes and The Gates of Creation are available (247 pp. and 188 pp. respectively, each $1.50.)
    These books deal with a decadent race who once mastered all science. Each Lord, as he calls himself, can now literally build himself a private universe - a pocket universe, as it is called - to his own design and with its own laws of physics. The first book shows us Robert Wolff being called into one of these universes - a world laid out something like a Babylonian ziggurat. The Lord had peopled it with all sorts of mythical beings, abducted from Earth or created. And now the Lord is missing, and the universe is going to hell in a hurry. Wolff and the mischievous Kickaha the Trickster set out to rescue damsels and restore order. It's a romp of adventure and marvelous inventions. After that, the second book takes off on another wild romp as the Lords fight each other in their own vicious way through a perfidious ubiquity of pocket universes.
    The books are totally lacking in significance, relevance, or symbolism - and they are just pure fun to read. (Lester del Rey)
Paperback Inferno, April 1981
THE GATE OF TIME

Luna Monthly #26/27, July/August 1971
(Belmont B75-2016, 1970. 176p. 75¢)"The Gate of Time" is a nice blending of science, fanasy and myth as modern day Iroquis meets his ancestors as an accident in time throws him out of the twentieth century. The frustration of his knowledge, no longer 'modern' and the knowledge of the world in which he finds himself is played off neatly against his growing realization and gradual acceptance of new values. Roger Two Hawks may remind some of Andre Norton's protagonist in "The Beast Master," which is all to the good -- both are fine characters, as are both fine books. (David C. Paskow)
Paperback Parlour, April 1977
SF & Fantasy Review, July 1979
NIGHT OF LIGHT

Fantasy & Science Fiction, May 1967
(Berkley 50¢) In NIGHT OF LIGHT Philip Jose Farmer is concerned with the nature and significance of ‘miracles’ and ‘divine manifestations’, and the ethical and theological conflicts posed by diverse manifestations in a universe in its ‘realities’. Farmer has tacked together two widely separated episodes in the career of John Carmody, the criminal-turned-priest with whom many F&SF readers are familiar: the book suffers not only from the characteristic stiff joints of such novelets-become-novel, but also from the unhappy improbable-quasi-caricature feeling so many ‘series character’ stories seem to acquire in the introductory scene-setting sections and of course, there are two such bits to get through in this one. But the last halves of both sections are integrally related and powerfully modeled, in full depth and dimension. (Judith Merrill)
Kliatt Young Adult Paperback Book Guide, February 1973
Locus #190, June 30 1976
(Garland 0-8240-1490-X, 160pp., $11) Photo-reproduction of the first edition (Berkley 1966). This is the first hardcover edition of one of Farmer's odd imaginitive novels. It's part of the Father Carmody series and is a successful blend of fantasy images and SF themes. I'm glad to see it finally in hardcover. My paperback copy is falling apart. Limited edition, good paper.
New Worlds #166, September 1966
Science Fiction Review Monthly #15, May 1976
(Garland, $11.00 Reprint) As with other titles in The Garland Library of Science Fiction, Lester del Rey's selection of work by Philip Jose Farmer is curious. No matter how high the quality of the work chosen by Del Rey, the fact remains - Farmer is best known and generally appreciated for his early (mid '50s) experimental work combining sex, biology, and traditional science fiction themes. In Seekers of Tomorrow, Sam Moskowitz credits work like The Lovers and the stories collected in Strange Relations as the cause of a "traumatic revolution contributing toward the maturation of science fiction". And in Billion Year Spree, Farmer's early forays into sexuality are described by Brian Aldiss as "breaking tabus before the s/f field knew it had them". Indeed, Farmer's early work represents one of the few generally recognizable landmarks in the modern history of science fiction, but, whatever his reasons, del Rey chose to reprint examples of Farmer's later work.
    In Night of Light (1966), Farmer combined his use of sexual material with an equally unaffected use of religion. The protagonist, John Carmody, travels to the planet Dante's Joy to investigate its religion, the worship of a continually reincarnated god called Yess and his mother Boonta, and a regularly recurring madness and loss of communication tied into the religious rites. With the help of special equipment, Carmody hopes to stay awake during The Night, a period of intense solar activity and radiation that results in intense psychic activity when the unconscious mind's archetypal images are given physical reality and loosed on the planet. Carmody experiences gods, demons, archetypes, symbols, and mythical realities sufficient to cow Freud, Jung, and Campbell. As with much of Farmer's work, Night of Light is an intensely interesting action tale set against an incredibly bizarre, almost hallucinogenic background that warrants re-reading and closer examination.
     See THE MAKER OF UNIVERSES for the rest of this review.
    All considered, more significant or singularly outstanding examples of Farmer's work might have been chosen, but both of these volumes are representative of his better work in the 60s and deserve a place on the serious reader-collector's shelves. (L.J. Knapp)
Science Fiction Studies, November 1975
(Garland Publishing, $11.00) Farmer was at his best in the magazine stories of the 1950s based on biological speculation, such as those collected in Strange Relations (Ballantine pb 1960). In the first half of NIGHT OF LIGHT he is close to his best (which makes the book well worth attention), but in its second half he gives us merely a series of violent adventures which add nothing that could not have been said in five or six pages. In THE MAKER OF UNIVERSES we have van Vogt's favorite plotline, the amnesiac protagonist who turns out to be a god, together with another series of violent adventures out of Edgar Rice Burroughs. In the SFRA Newsletter #43 (Sept 1975) there is a review by Mary S. Weinkauf from which I learn that Farmer writes "mythic fiction...for grownups who know Notes from Underground, Freud, Jung, and Plato," which may well be why I have never been able to read most of his fiction. (R.D. Mullen)
SF Booklog #7, January/February 1976
Son of WSFA Journal #119, January 1974
Son of WSFA Journal #125, February 1974
Paperback Inferno, August 1982
Biased and superficial Science Fiction reviews
A PRIVATE COSMOS

Science Fiction Review #28, November 1968
(Ace G-724, 25¢) It is almost impossible to criticize any reasonably well done adventure fantasy of the ERB school—you either like it or you don't. If you don't, then you can put down the characteristics of the school itself. If you do, you can defend them. But there isn't much you can say about an individual book except to point out how well the author operated within the rather restrictive format.
    To have swashbuckling adventure you have to have phoney swashbuckling, adventurous heroes and villians. You can't use real people except as minor characters; if you try, the effect isn't worth the effort. (For instance, the hero of Glory Road is Heinlein's attempt to combine a swashbuckling hero with a clearly drawn "real person", and that's all Oscar Gordon is, a combination—elements of several types of personality thrown together in one body.) And you can't even use the real swashbucklers of history as an example—they're all such mean, brutish, immoral bastards the reader wouldn't want to identify with them. So all that's left is to use a personality type that exists only in literature—the stereotyped violent but virtuous hero. (And that's why villians are usually so much better portrayed.)
     A Private Cosmos is the third book in Farmer's "World of Tiers" series. The other two are The Maker of Universes and The Gates of Creation. If you haven't read the first two books, you really should before you read the third—the series is set in this very complex universe that's hard to figure out even when you read the books in order. All three are in print from Ace right now, or at least Bookmaster has all of them displayed.
    In any case, the whole series is worth reading. If you are an ERB fan, though, maybe you'd better not read it—"The World of Tiers" is Farmer's attempt to write washbuckling adventure fantasy in the ERB vein, and he shows Burroughs up just about any way you judge the stories.
    I have an idea that Farmer designed his "World of Tiers" universe with a fairly lengthy series in mind, and it's the best fantasy universe I've encountered outside Tolkien. First, there's the world itself—an artificial construct of "The Lords", an alien super-scientist race who act as movers behind the scenes in all the books. Farmer has constructed his world in tiers, each tier with more area than an Earthly continent and with its own distinct civilization(s), each people patterned after some people on Earth or from some other sf or fantasy series. (Farmer has lifted elements from just about all his competitors, and manages to use each element as well or better than its originator.) Then there are the Gates—teleportation devices built by the Lords—which allow his heroes to pass from one tier to another and allow the Lords to get around behind the scenes.
    (Of course some of the Gates lead to Earth, which is how Kickaha—Paul Janus Finnegan, the hero of A Private Cosmos got into the "World of Tiers" in the first place. And there is some indication in Cosmos that the fourth book of the series will be set, at least partly, on Earth.)
    The real fantasy element is the science of the Lords, who are portayed as the typical hedonistic, lazy, and generally neurotic descendents of the creators of all the shiny machines. Only in this case they aren't actually descendents: all the Lords in the series so far are around ten thousand years old—immortal. The swashbuckling elements are provided by Farmer's heroes, and by the inhabitants of the Tier World itself—the technological level of the world being pre-gunpowder, with swords, etcetara being the order of the day.
    You can see the complexity of the background from my brief sketch, but you can't see the details that make the series the best of its kind—just about every background detail Farmer brings in comes from either the real world or from other sf or fantasy. For instance, A Private Cosmos starts on the Amerind level of the Tier World and is peopled with Amerinds of various types, from tribes of Plains Indians to the more civilized Tishquemetmoac, who seem to be patterned after the Incas. The rest of the details are straight anthroplology, history, archeology, etcetera. As I say, a good deal of the appeal of the series comes from sorting out the various details and trying to figure out which element is based on fact, which is lifted from a particular piece of fiction, and so on. In any case, the elements are fitted together reasonably well...well enough to keep the plot moving swiftly and provide believable motivation for the action. Of course, virtually all the action is deus-ex-machina: the protagonist rarely does anything on his own initiative, but just rolls with the punches and tries to get out of trap after trap and fight after fight. He always triumphs in the end, but his actions from beginning to end are all defensive. As far as I'm concerned this is perfectly all right. I don't think any other type of story could be set in this type of universe.
    The story line of A Private Cosmos isn't particularly believable in summary, (and I'm not going to summerize it) but the action keeps your eye moving fast enough so you don't notice. The details of background keep the inquiring part of your mind busy, so reader identification is almost total, which is about the best the writer of adventure fiction can hope to achieve.
    All three "World of Tiers" books are a hell of a lot of fun to read, and I'll even recommend them to more "serious" sf readers who don't usually go for ERB-type adventure fantasy. (Earl Evers)
Vector, May 1971
THE IMAGE OF THE BEAST

Science Fiction Review #29, January 1969
(Essex House 0108, $1.95) To a lot of unperceptive people this book will seem a come-down for Philip Farmer, a descent into simple pornography. And to a person who can see only the sex in a book where sex is used as a tool, then the issue is settled and the work labeled.
    Except that Philip Jose Farmer is not a simple man, not is he a simple writer, and any book he writes is always more than it seems.
    The Image of the Beast begins sometime after 1970 with the city of Los Angeles covered by a penetrating green smog. Private detective Herald Childe is in the folm room of the L.A. Police Dept. He views a film showing his partner's shocking murder: a woman using steal teeth half-severs the man's penis at the moment of ejaculation, and a man dressed in formal clothes, a cloak and blue sneakers enters, cackling, and finishes the "beheading". The film ends with the message: TO BE CONTINUED. The film has been mailed to the police.
    Herald sets out to find the weird killers.
    On the surface this is a grotesque private-eye story. Yet what are we to think of a name like Herald Childe? And on the title page the book is ammended: (An Exorcism: Ritual 1). And we learn on the opposite page that there will be a continuation of The Image of the Beast titled Sketches Among the Ruins of My Mind.
    What happens when Childe finds the mand the woman of the film in an old, secret-passaged mansion in Beverly Hills? He encounters a very horny ghost, a woman with an incredible snake-like creature living in her womb which emerges to enter her throat during a solitary sex act, plus assorted werewolves, witches, vampires.
    Is there erotic sex in the book? Yes, some. Mostly the sex is too strange, and humorous, and grotesque, and mind-stopping to be arousing. The text may produce an erection or two in readers, but Farmer's intent isclearly not pornographic. He is using sex as a tool, perhaps as a weapon, as symbol; using it...for what purpose? Toward what end?
    I'm not sure. The book ends with death and destruction of the mansion by fire. Herald kills or causes to be killed most of the supernatural creatures in the old house, yet the book is obviously only an episode, part of a larger whole, because so many, many questions are left unanswered, and in the end Childe is marked for further contact with the Outside forces.
    There are indications that the supernatural creatures are aliens who come into our universe through cracks, rifts, "gates" in the "walls." But this is presented as theory and speculation.
    In a postscript Theodore Sturgeon mentions shock at encountering in the book the woman who has sex with the creature in her womb. He had never run across an image of that nature before. Yet Farmer used this same idea in his novelet, "Open To Me, My Sister," in 1960.
    Until I have read the forthcoming Sketches Among the Ruins of My Mind I must withhold a final opinion of the series. There is more to it, I suspect, than meets the eye. Perhaps more to it than meets the mind. (Richard E. Geis)
Amazing, July 1969
(Essex House, North Ho1lywood. Calif., No. 0108, 1968. 255pp., paper, $1.95) It is 1970 or not long after. A terrible smog holds Los Angeles in its grip. And somebody has captured Harold Childe’s partner, put the man through sexual tortures and mutilated him, and then sent a filmed record of the tortures and mutilations to the L.A. Police Department.
    Harold Childe is a private detective, and he was about to ditch his partner. But, stomach still writhing from his viewing of the film, he vows to get the person or persons unknown who have done this terrible thing. He is working with a cop named Bruin.
    "'See you,' Bruin said. He put a heavy paw on Childe's shoulder for a second. 'Doing it for nothing, eh? He was your partner, right? But you was going to split up, right? Yet you’re going to find out who killed him, right?'"
    Right. And thus opens Philip Farmer’s The Image of the Beast.
    In his eloquent, if misplaced, postscript to the book, Theodore Sturgeon asks that we not label — ah, Label — this book. And he preaches us a sermon on the terrible consequences of Labelling — which, apparently, can be ranked as a Major Sin and perhaps the Cause of Mankind’s ills. I think it is a shame that Farmer did not have the opportunity to read Sturgeon’s message before he wrote the book in question; we might thus have been spared one of the most lugubrious attempts to combine sex and science fiction ever written.
    If we avoid Labels in judging the novel, what are we to make of its slapdash pastiche of three old-fashioned pulp genres — the private-eye story, the 'spicy' horror story, and the monsters who turn out to be from another dimension — all served up between lip-smacking sex scenes?
    "A handful of poor tilted souls," Sturgeon tells us, in reference to the pornographic scenes, "will drool wetly all the way through, skipping all the living connective tissue and getting their jollies out of context." He seems to feel that these readers will be missing the "Truth" of the book, but I suspect they will be better rewarded than those of us who had hoped for a novel of some genuine merit.
    Let’s talk about some of those Labels we have been cautioned against. To begin with, there is the label the publisher has placed on the book. Along with a price-tag which automatically brands it a sex-novel (no one pays $1.95 for a cheaply produced paperback for any other reason), the front cover is blurbed "A Remarkable Adult Novel." Now, anyone who browses the newsstand in these enlightened times knows very well what an "Adult" novel is, and the juxtaposition of this blurb with the adjacent price-tag underlines the point. Opening the cover we find a page on which the sole legend, in very black type, reads "This is an original Essex House book — the very finest in adult reading by the most provocative modern writers." A page further, in a biographical sketch of Farmer facing the title page, we encounter this remarkable opening phrase: "PHILIP JOSE FARMER spurted on the scene in 1952..."
    So perhaps those "poor tilted souls" may be forgiven the waste of their buck-ninety-five on a book which purports to seek after Truth. After all, even the device of a postscript or introduction is no novelty to them; a great many of the works of hard-core pornography presently flooding the newsstands have similarly erudite introductions, all designed to give weight to the publisher’s fondly-held notion that these are indeed works of "redeeming social value". (A much better case could be made for the actual value of pornography, qua pornography, than the present-day hypocritical stand these publishers so half-heartedly pursue.) And after all, the book does indeed contain a number of sex scenes, all of them written with exactly the same monotonous attention to lubricious detail which the sex-book reader has come to expect in his purchases.
    But what about that "living connective tissue" of which Sturgeon spoke? What of the book’s "context"?
    Dreary pickings, actually, and the quote from Officer Bruin should tip a hint in that direction. Farmer writes from one of the most brilliantly untrammelled imaginations I’ve ever known, but he has often seemed lacking in that self-critical faculty which would allow him to shape and edit his own work. The results have usually, in recent years, been abortive and Farmer’s hallmark has been the imprisonment of his glowing ideas in wooden and inflexible prose. Farmer is a classical case of the "uneven" writer.
    I’ve rarely encountered any real sense of involvement between Farmer and his fiction — his protagonists are usually unendearing and he often places them in emotionally sterile settings — and perhaps the reason in his intellectualization of Theme and his apparently determined desire to write Literature rather than Entertainment. Whatever the causes, he manipulates his characters unmercifully, often in flagrant contradiction of the motivations he has previously established for them, or — as in the case of this book — he sets them to walking woodenly through his plot without the whisper of life to them. Harold Childe (a name only slightly less ham-handedly Symbolic than Bruin) is explained to us on several occasions, but never demonstrates the slightest personality, talent at his profession, or intelligence. He is a faceless automaton (despite the fact that everyone notices his resemblance to Lord Byron, of all people!) and he exists solely to allow the reader a handy vehicle for vicarious adventures.
    Unfortunately, the story itself is cobb1ed together from some pretty hoary o1d plot ideas, as previously noted, and Farmer tells it without a sense of pace, movement, style or color. What could at least have been passed off as "camp" is merely dreary.
    Under the circumstances, what fare best in the book are the sex scenes. In his descriptions of mutilation, torture and horror, Farmer evokes the psycho-sexual with a vivid imagination (the implication of which I will leave for others to analyze). But nobody ever told Farmer that sex could be realistically described in terms not weighted with all the cliches of hackwork pornography, and so even these, his best scenes, suffer from inept writing.
    Under the circumstances, Sturgeon’s perorations on behalf of this novel are not merely presumptuous, they are unfairly patronizing. Thus, in the long run, not one, but two reputations will suffer from the publication of The Image of the Beast. (Ted White)
New Worlds #192, July 1969
Fantastic, August 1969
New Worlds #194, October 1969
Analog, November 1969
(Essex House No. 0108; 255 pp. $1.95) {continued from a review begun with FLESH} In one of the new books he has a theme vaguely related to his alien sex stories of twenty-odd years ago, which mixed with a limping private-eye plot and stops at regular intervals for a slobber of exotic sex. This one is called "Image of the Beast". For your $1.95 you get the kind of paper and binding that go with class paperbacks—this is permanent pornography, evidently—and comments by Theodore Sturgeon, who seems to wish he were defending a better story.
    In "Image," which may be one of a series if the faithful buy it, private eye Herald Childe sets out to find out what manner of monsters killed his slob of a partner by, among other things, biting off his penis in a moment of good fun. Said monsters turn out to be strays from that old stereotype of SF, the parallel universe. Vampires, werewolves, and one wench that the original Bluebeard knew. But it's a bad book, and the sex and sadism don't help it. {see A FEAST UNKNOWN for the rest of this review}.
Cypher #4, April 1971
The Science-Fiction Collector #8, October 1979
(Essex House, paperback, 1968) Philip José Farmer is no stranger to the pages of The Science Fiction Collector. In our fifth issue, we presented a bibliography of his work. Certainly the rarest of his works are the adult novels he wrote, which were published by Essex House. THE IMAGE OF THE BEAST was the first book by him published Essex House. Subtitled AN EXORCISM: RITUAL 1, the book is a strange amalgam of the surreal, the erotic, the grotesque, and the bizarre. The hero, whose name is an unlikely Herald Childe, is a private detective who is trying to find out who was responsible for his partner's mutilation and death, and, more importantly, why.
    What seem at first to be a mixture of standard occult and weird beings (werewolves, etc.) and unexplained monsters, turn out to be from parallel universes. Their true intents and visages cannot be known by man, but materialize as grotesque physical caricatures of man, with strange sexual appetites.
    In the course of an exiting though bizarre novel, our hero escapes with his life, having defeated or destroyed many of the foe, yet having also lost something himself. The book ends with as many questions unanswered or newly set, as it began with.
    A lengthy postscript by Theodore Sturgeon provides perhaps the best explanation of the novel, along with a diatribe against those who would Label - in this case, those who would label this book as pornography, or science fiction, or whatever. I agree thoroughly with him that a work such as this transcends ordinary labelling.
    While on one level, it may be read as pornography (although the scenes set are more grotesque than erotic), it may also be read as science fiction. Most of all, however, it may be read as allegory. The characters are symbols from the darker side of man, and the novel is a quest for truth. (J. Grant Thiessen)
Thrust #14, Winter 1980
Paperback Parade #13, June 1989
(This review is taken from the article Essex House: The Rise and Fall of Speculative Erotica)
    THE IMAGE OF THE BEAST (1968) is a tongue-in-cheek horror cum porno sf thriller set in an eerie smog ridden Los Angeles where Herald Childe, a laconic gumshoe down on his luck gets involved in gruesome encounters with a curious sexual underworld where Farmer blends vampirism and alien invaders to good effect. If the symbolic structure of the book is somewhat awry at times, the shock effects and perverse encounters Farmer literally scatters throughout the plot are genuinely original.
    Farmer calls both THE IMAGE OF THE BEAST and BLOWN (1969) its less assured sequel (where Forry Ackerman and his famed book collection become major characters), excorisms, and one supposes that what needs exorcising is the beast in man, the terrifying Dionysian destructiveness his hero encounters.
    The images Farmer uses are outrageous: we see the detective's partner being castrated by a beautiful woman with a set of false iron teeth and a sinister, almost parodic Dracula figure; another major character has a snake-like symbiotic character living in her vagina. Farmer had of course become a past master at outre' "biosexopsychic" situations in his earlier books and better short stories, but the editorial carte blanche of Essex House allowed his imagination to take full, fluent flight. It is not always in the best of taste, but he is certainly a master of startling speculative concepts. (Maxim Jakubowski)
SFX, #86, January 2002
(Creation Books, 319pp, £9.99, ISBN 1-84068-028-8) (with BLOWN) With a cover that says "Busty naked woman sprouting human-headed snake from the nether-regions", and a gory opening sequence that'd make Clive Barker reach for the sick-bag, it's clear that subtlety is well and truly off the menu. Not a book for the weak of stomach, this collection of two 1960s erotic horror novels comes from Philip Jose Farmer, best known for the mindbending Riverworld series, but also the man credited with introducing explicit sex into SF. Starting of as a pastiche of hard-boiled crime fiction, the two books quickly zoom off into an uncanny and violent world of their own, all the while spiced with a mixture of hardcore sex and gruesome splatter.
    Image of the Beast kicks off in a smog-choked Los Angeles, where world-weary detective Herald Childe is on the trail of his partner's killers. The clues lead him to the house of the mysterious Baron Ignescu, where Childe is understandably surprised to find himself abducted by a gang of perverse shape-shifters and forcibly ravished by a sex-crazed ghost. Events get even dafter in Blown, when after having been thoroughly abused and escaping the shape-shifters, Childe discovers that they're actually a warring gang of aliens, and that he himself is their new leader (thanks to being a descendant of Lord Byron). The result is plenty of orgies and accidental monkey-sex, before the saga comes to an utterly peculiar and cosmic conclusion.
    With barely a page going by without some graphic carnal shenanigans, the overall effect is like a psychedelic remix of Channel 5's dodgy late night "adult dramas". Despite all this, the book is saved from being one-dimensional horror porn by the power of Farmer's grotesque but brilliant imagination, and the fact that he's obviously not taking any of it remotely seriously. (Saxon Bullock)
SFF Sandcastle, 8-18-07
A FEAST UNKNOWN

Luna Monthly #2, July 1969
(An Essex House Original (0121), with postscript by Theodore Sturgeon, "for adults only", 1969. 186p. $1.95) Well, this one is really in class by itself and there is nothing handy to compare it with. Farmer is a superb storyteller, as always and his narrative gallops at breathtaking pace. I can't see this story boring anyone, although it may offend some with delicate stomachs.
    Plotwise it is something of a mish-mash. Sturgeon points out in his postscript that Farmer is exploring the relationship between violence and sex, and Sturgeon draws the conclusion that unlimited violence and unlimited sex add up to unlimited absurdity. That would seem to make this an absurd book since it has both, but one must halt and observe the author's tongue in cheek, which is the most innocent place for it in these pages. Certainly he carries the proposition close to the logical end with a hero who can only have an erection, and ejaculation, when killing someone, a condition he came by honestly, having inherited it, more or less, from his father, Jack the Ripper.
Actually, both he and his father were victims of the same elixer of youth, whcih like the miracles of modern pharmaceutical science had its own side effects.
    The plot is a pot-pourri of myth, legend and fictional characters durable enough to have become legends, all blended together. The main character here is Tarzan, but a Tarzan who expects to live to be 30,000 years old by virtue of the elixer if his Jack the Ripper proclivities do not get him bumped off. The elixer is supplied by a group of ancients called the Nine, many of whom are at least 30,000 years old and who certainly numbered amongst them such individuals as Wodin and lesser-known gods.
    The mayhem in this little tale is beyond belief -- it outclasses many a small war. For a simple duel between two characters the weapons employed run to missles, bazookas, hand grenades, tommy guns, simple pistols and knives of various sorts whil I did not attemp to count the bodies. I'd make a quick guess that it would run to 400 at least. The violence is vivid too. Take as a small example, Tarzan dispatching one enemy.
    "With my knife. . or with my fingers, I had cut around his anus and severed it from the connecting tissues. And then, while he screamed, I raised him by one buttock, while holding the end of his bloody anus with the other (hand). I shot him away with my arm, giving him a half-spin, so that until then I ejaculated. Screaming he soared... His intestines approximately 24 feet long, trailed out behind him and then tore loose from his body..."
    So much for unlimited violence. Sex? There is considerable sucking of penises and a little eating (actual) of testicles. In the final battle between Tarzan and his adversary, who is similarly afflicted with this problem of erection only during violence -- well you can imagine the diffculties these two would have in a hand-to-hand combat.
    Good clean fun, but probably not for the whole family. (Samuel Mines)
New Worlds #194, October 1969
Analog, November 1969
(Essex House No. 0121, 286 pp. $1.95) {continued from a review of IMAGE OF THE BEAST} "A Feast Unknown," on the other hand, is quite good in its own perverted way. It's No. 0121 from Essex—286 pages—same good typography—and it will drive the Burroughs Bibliophiles up the wall. For this is a sexed up pastiche in which the "real" Tarzan (Burroughs changed names, places, et cetera, to protect the innocent and the puritan proprieties) feuds with the "real" Doc Savage, assorted baddies, and a powerful clique of bestowers of immortality, the ageless Nine. Lord Grandrith (whose ancestral castle is near the village of Greystoke) and Doc Caliban have had a puritanical upbringing, and they are acutely embarrassed by the sexual adventures that come their way—the more so since they have both become impotent except when they are trying to kill someone. Farmer debunks both series of stories very logically and plausibly and his four-letter words and multi-lettered sex intrudes less. (For good measure, he has made Tarzan and the Bronze Man half brothers and sons of Jack the Ripper—courtesy, doubtless, of Robert Bloch, who may be parodied in "Image of the Beast.") "Feast Unknown" is pornography only because Farmer intends it to be and because that is what Essex is selling. It could have been a lovely straight parody.
    But, until people grow bored with it as they seem already to be bored with open sexual calisthenic on the stage, there'll be more exotic sex and more four-letter vocabulary in much of our science fiction ... in books, at least. If it's well done and belongs to the plot and the situation, no harm done. If it's dragged in for shock appeal, you can forget it. It won't last.
Science Fiction Review #37, April 1970
(Essex House 0121, $1.95) Philip Jose Farmer's A Feast Unknown has a postscript by Theodore Sturgeon which is a craftily worded excuse for a worthless book; if Sturgeon would write so convincingly for a cause, heavens, no telling what the result! Lord Grandrith and Doc Caliban are Farmer's slanderous counterparts to Tarzan and Doc Savage in this spoofs that aborts itself with every juvenille analogy, meaningless simile, and tired pun. Farmer does manage to turn sex and violence topsy-turvey, but he screws his values around so much that nothing ends up making any sense and the absurdity becomes so intense as to be, much before the long delayed ending, painful. The book is overstuffed with violence and horror and, like a child overfed with candy mints, the result can be (and in this instance, is) awfully messy. There's a satirical subplot involving the mysterious, world-dominating Nine, as well as various diversionary forays into scatology, bestially and other less appealing sidelines. The book becomes an unhappy glut of any- and everything, finally becoming so exceedingly messy that even Farmer runs out of steam and sperm and just drops it all with loose ends dangling like spaghetti ends. I won't deny Farmer the right to write such drivel because he's proven to me many times that he can write well; I only find it very disappointing that he would willingly claim it under his own byline. (Richard Delap)

    This review is taken from Piers Anthony's column, Off The Deep End, which he wrote about Essex House and five of their novels. A Feast Unknown by Philip Jose Farmer. This is a breath of fresh air, after Evil Companions. But it has its own intrigues. The story has similarities to Farmer's DOUBLEDAY item, Lord Tyger, and both, by no coincidence, resemble Tarzan. Lord Tyger might be a Tarzan juvenile—except that children are never permitted to be portrayed as they are, in their natural insensitivity and sexuality, lest this corrupt adult notions. Funny world we struggle in, no? Strangely there is no scene in the ESSEX book that quite matches one in the DOUBLEDAY, in which the heroine gets raped by half a beating crocodile heart. You just never can tell.
    A Feast Unknown is a substantial fantasy/SF story, with the jungle-man protagonist reacting to assorted crisis somewhat more realistically than the original Tarzan might. But he does have a sexual hangup: it is violence that makes him ejaculate, not pulchritude. "As the knife sank into the flesh, I spurted over his belly and the knife."
    This is a pretty good story, that picked up a Nebula nomination or two and deserved them. But for me there was one major drawback. In the latter portion we are treated to an extended automobile chase/battle. I'm sure it was well done, but somehow it turned me off, and I suspect it offered scant pickings for the hard-core sex reader. Maybe it's that a chase is one way to get from point A to B, and too much chase dilutes the content.
    The Postscript this time is by Theodore Sturgeon. "Farmer," he says, "...makes it clear that unlimited violence coupled with unlimited sex is an unlimited absurdity." And I won't argue there. It is violence which makes our society ejaculate, while genuine pleasures are suppressed. (Piers Anthony)

The Gridley Wave 27, May 1970
(A FEAST UNKNOWN Volume II of the memoirs of Lord Grandrith. Edited by Philip Jose Farmer. Essex House. 1969. 286 p. $1.95)
    Would you like to read a brand-new Tarzan story? Sure you would! Do you enjoy a Doc Savage adventure? How a super-special epic thriller in which they both appear; a violent physical confrontation between these two legendary supermen of fiction? Wowie!! Speculation can be endless when one considers the possibilities in such a story.
    Well, the story has yet to be written, although Philip Jose Farmer almost persuades us that he has done it. If they are really meant to be Tarz and Doc, then they are dwellers in some alternate time-stream. His two might heroes are called James Cloamby, Lord Grandrith, demi-god of the jungle, and Doc Caliban, all-around scientist and fighter against the forces of evil. Doc even has two henchmen whom you may think that you recognize. However, Grandrith and Caliban are definitely not the Tarzan and Doc Savage you know. Grandrith himself admits to the seperate existence of Tarzan, who by the way, and as you should know, is not the same as Tarzan.
    The tale is told by Lord Grandrith, whose better-known identity we do not learn. He is the natural son of Jack the Ripper, who as it turns out, is also the father of Doc Caliban. Both heroes are members of a secret organization of near-immortals headed by the mysterious and sinister nine, who seem to be the real rulers of the world. The global intrigues of the Nine are carried out by the rank-and-file, bound to them by the dependance on the elixer of prolonged youth. For reasons of their own the Nine pit Grandrith and Caliban against each other in a contest to the death. The struggle of titans carries on from Africa to England to a terrific and bloody climax, where the true evil of the Nine is eventually realized.
    The simple plot outlined above is but the overstory and should be great fun, especially to a bibliophile, if he can refrain from losing his temper at the understory, where the meat is. This is the age of Tell It Like It Is! Say it right out there in cold print with lots of good old four-letter Anglo-Saxon words, so that the previously unread may find his way without difficulty. Don't pussyfoot around coyly speaking about a commodity usally found in a corral; call it something more terse. "A FEAST UNKNOWN" is published by a firm which seems to be making a shrewd effort to combine pornography with s-f, thereby appealing to the purchasers of two of the present better selling types of paperbacks. There should be a large enough Pavlovian response among s-f and ERB fans alone to ensure a good sale without the seekers of blatant sexual situations.
    Telling It Like It Is also includes exposing to the light anything currently within the totality of human experience, or whatever may possibly be imagined, no matter how unpleasant. Perhaps Farmer had long had the feeling that ERB, that hopeless old Victorian, both because of the publishing restrictions of his day, and because of the social milieu that formed him, had left a lot untold about his ape-man. Grandrith admits that there was much he kept from his biographer, not wanting to shock him, and who, even if he did suspect, chose not to tell anyway.
    You know, for instance, that Tarzan, because of his Mangani upbringing is essentially a loner, with many of the habits and characteristics of the beasts. He has, among other things, their unquestioning reactance to injury, a stoical acceptance of what cannot be changed, and unlike his harried civilized brother, an apparent perfect obliviousness to the passing of time. What Farmer has done here is to throw some light on the murkier implications of environmental indluence upon a while man raise from infancy among a tribe of apes, herein called the Folk. Perhaps long exposure has inured your stomach to a reasonable fortitude while contemplating Tarzan's gustatory delight in slugs and bugs. Your civilized and squeamish stomach must learn to endure the knowledge that there are things much worse than nice fat grubs and worms that a true apeman may eat. Farmer also tells you that your jungle lord not only has feet of clay and gonads of flesh, but most certainly will enter a bathroom for the same purpose as you and I. Also that the entirely uninhibited and guiltless sex-play or pre-pubertyMangani young cannot failt to have left its influence on an impressionable young Taramangani.
    It is a shocking book, with gobs of very bad taste, requiring an extremely strong stomach, but it is an honest book. I think seekers of pornography will be disappointed, for it strikes out in that department, even though there are many assorted repellent, perverse and perverted practices on display. The mayhem and brutality in the fighting sequences are about par for today's readers. We cannot advocate entirely the convenient sweeping of unpleasant things under the rug, for the hinges on the lid of Pandora's box are sprung beyond any possibility of closing. Nevertheless, simple good taste and not old lady Grundy should tend to make us go along with Kipling when he observed that, "there are things in the breast of mankind that are best, in darkness and decency hid." (Allan Howard)

    Ad-lib: It may surprise P. Shuyler Miller to learn that Farmer's book did not, as he clairvoyantly foretold in his November '69 Reference Library column, "drive the Burroughs Bibliophiles up the wall." At least, not this Bibliophile! Admittedly, I was a bit perturbed at first, then I realized that Farmer's Lord Grandrith was no more Greystoke than JW was Tarz and that Caliban was no moreDoc Savage than Doc Savage was the man from Glad! After that, I had a lot of fun reading the book. Frankly, I haven't enjoyed so many belly-hurting laughs in ages...and I'll bet Phil had just as much fun writing it. Maybe after fifty and some years of actually living life, I've learned the necessities and nastiness of it all. Maybe my stomach is tough after years of eating in restaurants, cook houses, grease joints, mess halls, and out of army messkits and various and sundry tins and boxes. I recall the billions of flies on Corregidor and wonder how many I unwittingly consumed along with my C ration. I recall the mutilated bodies of comrades which we found...because the Nips were hungry! What else is in that beef, or pork, or hamburger you had for lunch? Haven't you wondered why your canine friend's breath is so hot and fetid? Or what the acute alcoholic drinks when he is broke and thirsty? How does your garden grow? Is it all so very repugnant? When was the last time you swallowed your pride. Whatever else Phil's book is, as Al sezs, it's honest, but the casual reader will think it is not dirty enough. Any Burroughs Bibliophile who does not read it and place it in his library--along with the forthcoming sequels from Ace--is chicken....!

Science Fiction Review Monthly #12, February 1976
(Fokker $12.50) "Adults Only." That's the first thing you see on this reincarnation of Farmer's camp send-up of Tarzan and Doc Savage. What? You say that it isn't a spoof; that it's a further extension of the prototype hero-mythos making use of the simulacra of familiar popkulchur figures in order to deepen its racial-subconscious prevelence and provide a traumatizing shock of recognition. Heaven forfend, though I don't doubt that you have a point imbedded there.
    For those new to Farmer's naughty books, A Feast Unknown is the ninth volume of Lord Grandrith's autobiography, the first eight of which haven't been written -we're led to believe that they remain hidden, be we know better. In this episode Grandrith (who henceforth will be called Tarzan because it's easier to spell) trots about Africa and England wearing little but a knife and a hyperbolic erection ("Adults Only."). He fights, kills, eats animal wastes, battles Doctor Caliban, the bronze . . . . . . . . you know . . . and ejaculates at every gush of blood. T and DS even come together, as it were, while hand wrestling on a tight-rope bridge over a proverbial yawning chasm. To quote T: "We swayed back and forth in this footless dance." Onan haunts this book! With women both of our heroes are a flop; is it the lack of the wound that keeps them detumesced? Or are they just peculiar?
    DS gets T to England, ancestral England, by threatening T's wife, Lady Grandrith; she hasn't been in Africa of late. After much nastiness DS is killed by T. Or is he? No, certainly not. T and DS are now brothers in league against The Nine. Who are The Nine? That's the part I didn't get into above.
    All of the routine and cliched plot is tossed off by Farmer with a kind of rapturous insouciance. It's kind of like that wondrously picaresque "Noah" section of the John Huston film, The Bible; the creator is having a ball, and you're invited if you wear the right attitude. But if you are going to wear your serious clothes, don't come, you'll only be miserable.
    Odd that this long out-of-print collector's itme shoudl appear simultaneously from Fokker in the U.S. and Quartet books in London. Fokker's edition has naughty illustrations by Richard Corben. The Quartet edition leaves it all to your imagination. (Martin Last)
SF Booklog #8, March/April 1976
Son of WSFA Journal #24, June 1971
The Wold Atlas vol 1 #1, January 1977
(Quartet Books, $4.00) What can I say ebout this book? I can say it's one of the strangest I've ever read, but I haven't read much fantasy. I can call it the dirtiest book I've ever read, but I haven't read much pornography. I think it's great adventure, but once again, I haven't read mush adventure.
    A Feast Unknown is brawling, sprawling, exciting, terrific and terrifying. It is weird, strange, fantastic. It is dirty, filthy dirty. It is funny. It is disturbing. It is unique.
    But these are just adjectives. Perhaps a plot description and anal­ysis would help.
    At first, the book appears to be pornography. Sensationalized pornography. Pornography and vio­lence. There is sex and homosexual­ity. There is cannibalism, castration, rape, and death. Sex and death are both the theme and the plot.
    The chief protoganist is one Lord Grandrith, a wealthy peer raised in the jungle by primitive men. He suffers from what he calls a small aberration, a strange mental problem that causes him to ejaculate whenever he kills. He is persued through the book by Doc Caliban, a huge bronze-skinned good-1ooking genius of a crime-fighter (makes you wonder, doesn't it?).
    I can't tell you what the plot's about. First, I don't want to beat Mr. Farmer out of his royalties, and second, it would take a good three pages. Suffice it to say that Caliban is chasing Grandrith with murder in his gold-flecked eyes. Grandrith supposedly killed Caliban's cousin, but no one really cares. The import­ant thing is the chase.
    But the plot is not nearly so important as the theme. Mr. Farmer sets out to show (and succeeds admir­ably) that sex and death are linked. Thus the reason for the heavy sexual undertones. You don't have to be Freud to see the link between stabbing or shooting and sex. Grandrith's "aberration" is merely one of many visual links.
    Perhaps the most confusing and disturbing element, at least to ad­venture lovers, is the darker side of the two heroes revealed for the first time. Grandrith is portrayed as a much more believable wild man than Burrough's version. He runs around naked. He is totally free sexually. Be is animalistic. Cal­iban, on the other hand, is simply crazy.
    The spirit that Farmer wrote the book in is hard to pinpoint. Is it, as the forward states, part of the memoirs of Lord Grandrith (read Greystoke)? Or is Lord Grandrith simply Farmers idea of what a Tarzan-like character would act like? Or is it simply a pastiche, written for the sheer pleasure of a Tarzan-­Savage adventure?
    Most likely it is a combination of all three. The Voice of Ignorance (yours truly) says, "I like it!" may­be you will too. (Todd Rutt)
Analog, December 1980
Paperback Inferno, August 1988
Paperback Parade #13, June 1989
(This review is taken from the article Essex House: The Rise and Fall of Speculative Erotica)
    Farmer's next novel for Brian Kirby was A FEAST UNKNOWN (1969), another of his apocryphal Tarzan adventures, where the Lord of the Jungle is revealed as the son of Jack the Ripper and is seen fighting that other immortal Doc Caliban (a Doc Savage figure) in a bloody, no-holds-barred battle full of sexual atrocities. A companion volume to Farmer's LORD TYGER (1970), TARZAN ALIVE (1972) and the bowdlerised Ace Double LORD OF THE TREE (1970)/THE MAD GOBLIN (1970), A FEAST UNKNOWN sees the first appearance of the Nine Immortals, the secret rulers of the world who will not, I sincerely hope, be Farmer's way-out explanation in solving the final Riverworld mysteries. (Maxim Jakubowski)
BLOWN

Luna Monthly #10, March 1970
(Essex House 020129, 1969. 208p. $1.95p) If you go to any West Coast SF conventions, and a good many Worldcons, you are likely to encounter a dignified, silverhaired, gentleman wearing a dark grey business suit, patronly, pleasantly smiling.
    He writes pornography.
    For Essex House, which puts out Adult Entertainment in quality bindings (would that other paperbacks could be bound so well) Mr. Farmer has written A Feast Unknown and The Image of the Beast and now Blown. Blown is a sequel to The Image of the Beast, and it continues the saga of the Tocs and the Ogs. The Tocs require sex to survive, the Ogs require blood. Both find peculiar ways to satisfy their cravings -- and that's putting it mildly.
    Whether Farmer has a personal demon to excise (or exercise) or is just in it for the money or for some other inscrutable reason has been turning out this sort of work, is the subject of a good deal of debate in "the sf community" to coin a cliche. I doubt that very many people begrudge him his right to do so, but from a literary standpoint the work is disappointing. The writing is imprecise and often stilted in Blown; I have yet to read the others) and the action, to a person not used to the excesses of pornography, a little startling at times. As in most pornography, what you end up with is a sexual tour de force, and from a physiological aspect, its a tour de force.
    There are two subtitles to the book. They are, "(An Exorcism: Ritual 2)" and Sketches Among the Ruins of my Mind. Take whatever meaning you will from these hints. Farmer has written much better, and very little worse. And yet, it's by far better-than-average pornography. Take your choice. (Greg Bear)
Science Fiction Review #35, February 1970
(Essex House 020129, $1.95p) With the passing from the scene of Essex House, Phil Farmer and other writers have been deprived of a unique market. Essex was a pornography publishing house that was willing—and apparently eager—to purchase novels so far out in the outre bordelands that most straight porno publishers would not have touched them with a ten-foot dildo. Certainly Farmer's The Image of the Beast and Blown are not simply pornography, that is merely their starting point, and any regular purchaser of Essex House wares who blew two bucks on either book in the expectation of being titillated must have been safly disappointed. There is plenty of sex in Farmer's "Exorcism" (Image was subtitled "An Exorcism: Ritual 1"; Blown is Ritual 2), but practically no eroticism. The sex depicted by Farmer is so grotesquely strange as to be, in general, bereft of any capaciy to stimulate.
    Blown consists of the further adventures of Herald Childe, and ties up the ends left dangling by The Image of the Beast. It opens with childe following the car in which Vivienne Mabcrough is riding with a man she has picked up. Vivienne, introduced in Image, is an exceptionally beautiful woman whose womb contains a small snake-like organ with a miniature face framed by greasy black hair and a goatee. She is one of a weird group which, in the first book, murdered a close friend of Childe's in a bizarre manner and apparently kidnapped his wife. Entering Vivienne's house, he interupts her perverted tryst with the man and in the process becomes involved in the same kind of situation as in Image. Gradually, Herald Childe learns the truth about the creatures with whom he is dealing—and about himself.
    Vivienne, Fred Poa, Standing Grass, Woolston Heepish, Baron Igescu and the other sinister and extraordinary inhabitants of these pages are, it developes, Ogs and Tocs, representatives of two hostile races of a solar system in the Andromeda galaxy. They came to Earth thousands of years ago, via a form of teleportation which requires two elements in order to function: a Captain, a specially gifted member of the race, and a Grail, a chalice made of some ultru-rare and arcane metal. Having killed off each other's Captains in the couse of their hostilities, they were stranded on Earth. They possess a number of powers, including the ability to change shape, and are effectively immortal. (They can be killed but return to life again when conditions are proper.) The Ogs and Tocs account for a good bit of Terran legend, such as witches, vampires, werewolves, fairies, etc. Herald Childe, who, incidentally, turns out to be the son of George Gordon, Lord Byron, is a latent Captain, the only live one known, and hence of great value to both sides. His power is released in a sex ritual, which culminates in an entire roomful of people forming a giant daisy chain. Eventually, Childe transports the whole lot, Ogs and Tocs alike, to a far world and returns to Earth with Delore del Osorojo (whom he met in Image) to live happily ever after.
    The novel is marred by one piece of inane cuteness: the Tuckerization of Forrest J. Ackerman. Farmer uses Ackerman as one of his major characters. He does not merely use the name which would not be objectionalble (Dick Geis has used my name, among others, in an Essex House book ((Raw Meat)); he uses Ackerman himself—name, personality, hobbies, occupation, house, etc., described down to the smallest detail—as a character. This is a bit of irrelevant frivolity which, for me, considerably weekened the book. The character is not even necessary, except in one small respect which could equally well have used a greengrocer named Phil Schlabotnick, and the reviewer found the references and Ackermanesque puns an irritation with which he could quite nicely have dispensed.
    Other than that, however, Blown is a worthy sequel to The Image of the Beast, with the same use of sex as an entirely different element than it is in most novels (indicated by the somewhat ironic fact that, despicte the sheer amount of sex in Blown, there is not a single sex scene which is extraneous, i.e., that does not bear on the advancement of the plot), the same excellent portrayal of the central character, and the same effective use of a ubiquitous background fact (in Image is was the smog, here it is rain). (Ted Pauls)
Science Fiction Review #37, April 1970
(Essex House 0139, $1.95) In Blown Philip Jose Farmer isn't really writing a sex novel at all. I've finally realized that the book's sub-heading — Sketches Among the Ruins of My Mind (An Exorcism: Ritual 2) — really does indicate indicate a self-purge, and since the proceedings involve sex the publisher is only doing the obvious. The novel is a follow up to The Image of the Beast, and awful book of adventures involving private-eye Herald Childe in a series of sex-and horror-oriented shenanigans. Woolston Heepish, a satire on Forrest J. Ackerman, has been replaced in the present book by Forry himself (who, in realiry has to be a very good friend of Farmer's else we'd soon hear of a libel case). There are two alien races, the Tocs and the Ogs (miscegination between which has produced Childe himself), a search for the Grail (a theme being done to death these days in SF), page after page of sexual bladerdash too stupid to be funny, and consistent idiocy (par example — hearing a yell through a roomful of cascading water) that would make the kackest of hack writers hang his head in shame. The book seems only to emphasize the loathing Farmer holds for humanity, self, and any imaginary beings that either may dream up, and the title simply indicates what you've done with your money if you waste it on such trash as this. (Richard Delap)

    This review is taken from Piers Anthony's column, Off The Deep End, which he wrote about Essex House and five of their novels. Blown by Philip Jose Farmer. This is listed as the sequel to The Image of the Beast, a novel I have not seen. The subtitle is Sketches Among the Ruins of My Mind—and I presume that is Farmer's original title, certainly a far more evocative concept. My rule of thumb is that only the editors with the worst taste in titling insist on changing the author's title, with the result you see here.
((Editors Note: Brian Kirby, editor of Essex House, told me Blown was Farmer's own title for the book. I do not believe Brian changed any of Phil's titles.))
    Farmer's style here, to my surprise, is quite unlike that of Lovely or of his own novelette "Riders of the Purple Wage." The prose of Blown is lucid, simple, linear—in fact, pedestrian. Since I know how Farmer can sparkle when he chooses, I am amazed to discover a determinedly dull finish here. It is as though he wants nothing to detract from his story—yet the story, apart from certain remarkable exceptions, is routine science fiction.
    Let's skip the routine and concentrate on those exceptions. There is of course the sexula element. The book works carefully into a thoroughly compelling sexual episode. It begins voyeuristically: Herald Childe (others have remarked on the obviously literary symbolism of the name) watches the beautiful Vivienne anesthetize a mark and insert his penis into her anus. Her vagina then opens and a tiny human head emerges, mounted on a snakelike torso. This head glides down and enters the marks anus. Etc. I don't believe I need to point out the diverse elements of this concept; few if any beside Farmer seem able to achieve such effects. Some critics condemn him, some praise him; I doubt many are indifferent.
    Ted White has remarked on the confusion of those who fail to differentiate good and bad from type, and condemn a good story because it is of a type the critic doesn't happen to like. I suspect many critics have done this with Farmer's sexual concepts, including white himself: revolted by the aberated eroticism, they believe the writing is bad. I suggest the opposite: this is good writing, for it moves the reader, and plants an image in his mind he can not expunge. Good writing is not at all the same as nice writing.
    Another element is Forrest J. Ackerman. No, this is no coincidence of names. I don't know Forry, but I'm prepared to believe this is the Forry. Yet he is so determinedly mundane it's a crime. He resides in the 800 block of Sherbourne Drive. He has a left a party to get out a comic magazine. He has found a rare picture to be missing from his home, and now he is standing in the rain outside the house of Heepish, who has stolen the item, and he's mad. Good God, the contrast with the preceding episode is so sharp it's shocking; it's as though pages from another book have been spliced in. Yet Forry amounts to a co-protagonist with Herald. The two finally interact and consummate the story.
    I don't know what Farmer is doing here, but I certainly can't ignore it. I'm certain he is broadening the field in ways not purely sexual, and that must be good. More on that too, anon. (Piers Anthony)

Son of WSFA Journal #25, June 1971
SFF Sandcastle, 8-19-07
BEHIND THE WALLS OF TERRA

Scottishe, # 56, October 1970
(Ace, 71135, 75¢) This is another tale of the artificial worlds created by the Lords. Kickaha is the adventurer who follows a Beller back to an Earth he had left ages ago. It is his knowledge of Earth that may prove useful in tracking down the Beller which could take over all mankind if not stopped. Plenty adventure for him and his companion Lord, Anana. (Ethel Lindsay)
Analog, May 1971
(Ace Books, New York, No. 71135, 188 pp. 75¢) This is the fourth in the series of books Philip José Farmer has written about a race of human or humanoid super-beings, the Lords, who have created a series of independent but interconnecting universes for their own, often grotesque amusement. In the first books the hero was a man from Earth who broke through into a strange universe of levels, rather like a Victorian whatnot, each level seemingly frozen at a different level in the evolution of human society. Roving through the levels was the man or being known as Kickaha - among other names - who gradually usurped the readers' interest and took over the series.
    Now he and others are on Earth, looking for the Lord who made our own universe, for other refugee Lords, and for the creature known as a "Beller," whose bell brings destruction on men and worlds. In the beginning he is handicapped by the changes that have taken place in American society in the generation since he last visited us. Later he is fully immersed in the bizarre melodrama of interuniversal manhunting … which is just getting well under way when the book ends.
    The result is a lively enough action story, but if you have read the earlier books you are bound to miss the trickster character that made the original Kickaha so attractive. He was the Loki of Farmer's Adgard, and now he seems to have diminished into just another vigorous hero. Maybe he is just resting between exploits. (P. Schuyler Miller)
Son of WSFA Journal #21, May 1971
Locus #87, June 25 1971
(Ace 71135, 75¢) A novel that is essentially one extended chase scene, with hero and heroine attempting to outrun and outwit a bunch of hired guns directed by several imortals cal