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'''Philip José Farmer''' (January 26, 1918 – February 25, 2009) was a ground-breaking science fiction and fantasy writer. Farmer is best known for the ''[[World of Tiers]]'' and ''[[Riverworld]]'' series. He won three Hugo awards and had many nominations.
Farmer was born in 1918 in North Terre Haute, Indiana and grew up in Peoria, Illinois. He married 1941. His marriage produced two kids and lasted until he died. He tried and failed to become a fighter pilot in WWII.
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During his early writing career, science fiction publishers had an aversion to controversial subjects: sex and religion were out. Farmer's works had a generous helping both with plenty of edgy politics too.
That said, farmer's graphic descriptions of truly out-there sex acts do not pull any punches. Readers who are only familiar with his later, more moderate, work may find his early work challenging in
More generally, Farmer's approach to sex was the same as his approach to religion, government, politics, gender, everything: get it all out in the open and then make challenging statements about it. He wanted to get the reader thinking and entertain them, not caring who he offended along the way.
The ''[[Riverworld]]'' series is a good place to start reading. The series has an extraordinarily fertile conceit: in the distant future we are all (''all'') resurrected by the banks of a river. Everyone who ever lived. Historical figures such as Richard Burton, Samuel Clemens and Herman Goering appear as flesh and blood people and Farmer had the nerve to describe what he thought would happen when their paths collided. (Several of his other works, such as ''[[The Other Log Of Phileas Fogg]]'' are [[
In ''[[Riverworld]]'', the quest to solve the mystery of the resurrection and the river involves lots of vividly-described action adventure. As prose the action sequences have a great immediacy: combat seems at all times dangerous since the emergent chaos of battle is no [[Anyone Can Die|respecter of persons]].
If you only looked at the early covers of his books he would appear to be nothing more that a pulp writer obsessed with grim-looking, violent and [[Rated "M" for Manly|highly muscular men]]
''[[Riverworld]]'' addresses Big Ideas. Sex, politics, race, religion. Farmer loved messing with the divide between high and low culture. The deep problems of human life come up thick and fast in this series. Farmer broke new ground by having these themes coexist with fantasy action
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* ''[[The Lovers]]''
* [[Dangerous Visions|"Riders of the Purple Wage"]]
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* ''[[World of Tiers]]''
{{creatortropes}}
* [[After the End]]: See [[Apocalypse How]].
* [[Apocalypse How]]: ''Dark Is The Sun'' takes place on Earth billions of years in the future. At one point, humankind's civilization was so advanced that they found a way to move the Earth to avoid being burned away by the Sun when it eventually expanded into a red giant star. When the book starts, civilization has reverted to a primitive level, and eventually the group of protagonists discover that the universe itself is coming to an end via the Big Crunch. Their new goal is to find a way to enter another universe to avoid being crushed into a singularity along with everything else in their universe.
* [[Author Avatar]]: Farmer often put himself into his books, always with characters that share his initials - for example, Peter Jairus Frigate in ''[[Riverworld]]'' and Paul Janus Finnegan in ''[[World of Tiers]]''.
* [[Badass Family]]: The Wold Newton Family is a mixture of this and [[Massive Multiplayer Crossover]]. The family tree includes: [[Solomon Kane]]; [[Rafael Sabatini|Captain Blood]]; [[The Scarlet Pimpernel (
* [[Catgirl]]: Kilgore Trout's ''Venus On The Half Shell'' (ghostwritten by Philip José Farmer instead of Kurt Vonnegut <ref>Farmer was mistaken for Vonnegut by critics, which pissed Vonnegut off no end.</ref>) has a cat-like alien queen who makes love to the hero and grants him immortality.
* [[Deconstruction Crossover]]: This trope, combined with the [[Literary Agent Hypothesis]], is the main premise of many works taking place in Farmer's Wold Newton Universe.
* [[Defictionalization]]: One of the novels of Kurt Vonnegut's fictional author Kilgore Trout was ''Venus on the Half-Shell''. Farmer later wrote an actual novel titled ''Venus on the Half-Shell'' that he published under the pseudonym Kilgore Trout.
* [[Flat World]]: The [[Alternate History]] short story {{spoiler|''Sail On! Sail On!''}} turns out to be the grimly amusing story of how {{spoiler|Christopher Columbus discovered that the world is flat.}}
* [[Footnote Fever]] : The [[Sherlock Holmes]]/Tarzan crossover, ''The Adventure of the Peerless Peer'', has an vast number of pseudo-scholarly footnotes. At one point Holmes asks Watson, isn't that a<nowiki>***</nowiki><nowiki>**</nowiki>e firing a machine gun?", and a footnote explores whether Watson in writing this adventure used the wrong number of asterisks, or whether Holmes actually used the seven-letter rather than the appropriately British eight-letter form because the a<nowiki>***</nowiki><nowiki>**</nowiki>e under discussion was American.
* [[Gender Blender Name]]: In the ''Dayworld'' series, (set many centuries in the future) the custom of men's and women's names has died out. Several male characters have female names and vice versa.
* [[Hollow World]]: [[Hell]] in ''Inside Outside''. According to some characters, it used to be flat but changed as scientific knowledge advanced. {{spoiler|It's later revealed, however, that this is false and that hell is a space station.}}
* [[Humans Are
* [[Human Popsicle]]: The "stoning" process in ''Dayworld'' is a form of suspended animation not involving cryonics and anything suspended this way is pretty much indestructible. It's used to manage population; there's so many people in the world that not everyone can be around at once, so different populations come out on different days and remain suspended the rest of the week.
* [[Jack the Ripper]]: In ''A Feast Unknown'', Jack the Ripper is the father of the two heroes Lord Grandrith and Doc Caliban ([[Expy|expies]] of [[Tarzan]] and [[Doc Savage]], respectively).
* [[Literary Agent Hypothesis]]: In ''Tarzan Alive'' and ''Doc Savage: His Apocalyptic Life,'' Farmer claims that Edgar Rice Burroughs and Lester Dent were just the biographers of [[Tarzan]] and [[Doc Savage]]. He claims that their books were highly fictionalized and sensationalized and presents somewhat more mundane, but still sensational versions of the stories that correct various factual inaccuracies and continuity errors. For example, he explains that whenever Tarzan encountered a lion, a plains dwelling animal, in the jungle, it was actually a leopard and Burroughs exaggerated because lions were bigger and more dangerous looking.
** He also tries to explain away both characters' great strength and intelligence by claiming their [[wikipedia:Wold Newton family|ancestors were irradiated by a meteor]], and that other relatives of Tarzan and Savage whose ancestors were exposed to that radiation include [[Pride and Prejudice|Elizabeth and Fitzwilliam Darcy]], [[Sherlock Holmes]], [[Fu Manchu]], and [[Bulldog Drummond]]. Farmer is in a class of his own!
* [[Massive Multiplayer Crossover]]: The [
* [[Mass Super
* [[Meta Origin]]: The Wold Newton Family concept posited the Wold Newton meteorite as a source of mutation, which, while generally not producing metahumans, produced an extended family including Tarzan, Doc Savage et al.
* [[Perspective Flip]]: ''The Other Log of Phileas Fogg'' and ''A Barnstormer in Oz''. In the latter, Glinda the Good assassinates U.S. President [[Warren Harding|Warren G. Harding]].
* [[Powered
* [[Significant Anagram]]: In ''Venus on the Half-Shell'' many names are anagrams, for example {{spoiler|1=Chworktap = Patchwork, Gviirl = Virgil, Tunc = Cunt, Angavi = Vagina, Utapal = Laputa}}.
* [[Silicon
* [[Spy Satellites]]: Found in several novels. In the ''Dayworld'' series they are a weapon of a future <s>police state</s> sharing caring one-world government. Interestingly, even though the articles were written in the 70's/ early 80's Farmer has the satellites hooked up to gait-analysing computers. It adds to the paranoid atmosphere: once the characters become fugitives they have to wear widebrim hats and spend every moment on the street walking in a deliberately different pattern.
* [[The Von Trope Family]]: Ralph von Wau Wau from several stories including "A Scarletin Study," "The Doge Whose Barque Was Worse Than His Bight" (Via the [[Literary Agent Hypothesis]] framing device of it being written by Jonathan Swift Somers III.)
* [[Tangled Family Tree]]: The Wold Newton Family has several fictional characters, including [[Sherlock Holmes]], [[Tarzan]], and [[Doc Savage]] as part of a set of inter-married families descended from seven couples exposed to a [[Green Rocks|radioactive meteorite]].
* [[Two
* [[T
* [[Villainous Incest]]: In his Wold Newton works, Farmer suggests that Carl Peterson (archfoe of [[Bulldog Drummond]]) and his lover Irma (who sometimes posed as his daughter) were, in fact, father and daughter.
* [[Lottery of Doom]]: in his Father Carmody short story ''Attitudes''.
{{reflist}}
{{Damon Knight Memorial Grand Master Awards}}
{{World Fantasy Award Life Achievement}}
[[Category:Speculative Fiction Creator Index]]
[[Category:Authors]]
[[Category:
▲[[Category:Trope]]
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