The city life book of Manchester short stories Book

So, here's an anthology of work by Philip Jose Farmer, noted and notorious science-fiction provocateur who died in February after a long life that produced many children and many more grandchildren.

Science fiction is not my bag. Well, certain kinds of sci-fi. I like Bradbury, I like Ballard, I like Burroughs. Don't get me wrong - I *respect* the great sci-fi authors, but you can't really pay me good money to read any space operas or hard sf.

But I kinda like Farmer. I dig the fact that he was the first sci-fi writer to grapple with the idea of sex, and that it would be and should be an important consideration in conceptions of the future. I love his bibliomania and love of pulp aesthetics. He's a fun writer, and writes in a lot of different styles, so this sampler is something of a mixed bag.

There's some of his "fake biography stuff" here - interviews or essays on fictional characters like Edgar Rice Burroughs' Tarzan (a Farmer touchstone character if ever there was one) and Kurt Vonnegut's Kilogre Trout - that eventually led to the enthralling, frustrating, both wonderful and embarrassing Wold-Newton concept (wiki it, but be prepared to immerse yourself - no one did it as good as its creator, unfortunately.). There are some cute Joycean/Freudian short pieces he calls "paramyths", kind of like vaudeville sketches with resonant figures ("The Sumerian Oath", with a secret conspiracy of Doctors revealed to be manufacturing disease since ancient Babylonia, is particularly good, with many many pop-cult doctors getting referenced, from Kildare to Mabuse and Caligari). "Only Who Can Make A Tree" is also pretty cute, envisioning the three stooges as genetic scientists who later get turned into walking trees - really!). There's a western ("Uproar In Acheron") and even a Lovecraft homage ("The Freshman", which is better than I expected it to be, and not merely the excuse for cute name dropping that I feared). There's another short horror tale - "Father's In The Basement" (which Farmer claims is a Gothic tale, but I beg to differ) and even a bit of religious sci-fi in "Toward The Beloved City", in which the last surviving Christians (after the horrors of the Book of Revelations have laid waste unto the earth) squabble and nearly descend into murderous paranoia (it kept my interest, but only just, and the ending was meh). And, of course, there's sex - alien sex in "My Sister's Brother" (which is a pretty good example of the kind of sci-fi I don't like, in which the story stops for a lesson in alien biology, and yet it still has a fairly moving ending in its condemnation of the violence that males are prone to commit), sex with a machine (saying more would give it away) in "Skinburn" (which is kind of like a sci-fi detective story and was probably read by a young William Gibson) and libido as metaphorical allegory in "The Last Rise of Nick Adams". This last story, pretty much a shaggy dog tale, is interesting for Farmer's thinly veiled sketches of various sci-fi writers at a convention - both the old guard (L. Ron Hubbard is referenced and possibly A. E. Van Vogt or Hugo Gernsback, hard to say) and the young-ish (J.G. Ballard and William S. Burroughs both get fairly scathing caricatures but, shrug, I like them both more than most of the sci-fi I've read). Finally, there is the long-ish "The Alley Man" which is a hell of a fun story about an ugly, brutish but charismatic junk-man who may be the last surviving member of a neanderthal tribe. Or maybe not. The ending of "The Alley Man" might have been a bit underwhelming (if appropriately poetic and dramatic) but there's so many ideas packed into this one it was a gas to read.

So, there you go. This is probably not a good sampler of Farmer's key work - in fact, it's almost an anti-sampler, as it strives to show the vast range of stuff that he wrote (his infamous initial foray into alien sex, "Mother", is nowhere to be seen, for example) but I liked it for precisely that reason. In THE BOOK OF you get to see Farmer as the imaginative, cockeyed oddball throwing ideas onto the page regardless of what genre they fall into. Much more interesting for me, personally.