Philippe Farmer Master Fantasy. Date of Birth: 26.01.1918 Country: USA

Biography of Philip Farmer

Philip Jose Farmer was an American fantasy writer and a Master of Fantasy. He is known for his novels in the famous series Riverworld and World of Tiers, as well as many other interesting novels, novellas, and short stories. On April 28, 2001, Philip Jose Farmer received the Grand Master 2001 at the Nebula Award ceremony. He was born on January 26, 1918, in North Terre Haute, Indiana. He attended the University of Missouri, Columbia from 1936-37, 41, the Bradley University in Peoria, Illinois from 1949-50, where he received a Bachelor's degree in Writing in 1950, and the Arizona State University in Tempe from 1963-65. He served in the United States Air Force from 1941-42. He is married to Betty V. Andre and has a daughter and a son. Farmer worked various jobs including a steel mill, technical writer in the defense industry at General Motors in Syracuse, New York from 1956-58, Motorola in Scottsdale, Arizona from 1959-62, Bendix in Ann Arbor, Michigan in 1962, Motorola in Phoenix, Arizona from 1962-63, and McDonnell-Douglas in Santa Monica, California from 1965-69. He became a professional writer in 1969. He won the Hugo Award in 1953, 1968, and 1972. This brief excerpt from the encyclopedia is perhaps the most modest thing that can be said about one of America's most well-known and controversial science fiction writers.

It is difficult to imagine what sparked a young Philip Farmer's love for science fiction. In his youth, he devoured science fiction magazines, but his career as a science fiction writer did not begin until relatively late - in 1946, with the story "O'Brien and Obrenov" published in "Adventure." According to the editor, the story "absolutely represented nothing." Perhaps such a review was the reason why the writer did not create any science fiction works for the next five years. Nevertheless, Philip Farmer remained a writer - if not in life, then in spirit. He was not very lucky. Despite studying at three universities (the University of Missouri, the Bradley University in Peoria, Illinois, and the Arizona State University), he managed to obtain only a Bachelor's degree in Writing. He changed jobs multiple times (from steelworker to popular science writer, in which he achieved great success, judging by his work at General Electric, Motorola, and McDonnell-Douglas), and even more cities, traveling across America from the East Coast to the West Coast. In the period from 1937 to 1952, he was only lucky once - with his wife, Betty Andre, whom he met in 1941. Their marriage has proven to be exceptionally strong, especially by American standards. They are still married to this day, and the writer dedicates his most interesting books to their children and grandchildren.

Fame came to the writer unexpectedly. The novella "Lovers" (1952), rejected by the renowned John W. Campbell, one of the "founding fathers" of American science fiction who was still the editor of "Astounding Science Fiction" at the time, and the equally talented Horace L. Gold from "Galaxy Science Fiction," appeared in "Startling Stories" and almost immediately earned the author the "Hugo" award as the "most promising young author of the year." Already in this work, the most characteristic features of Farmer's writing emerged: an obsession with sex, biology, Freudian motifs, and a lack of moderation. The love story between an earthling belonging to a repressive culture in the distant future and a lalite alien female of the mimicking insectoid species was depicted with shocking frankness; cruelty, tenderness, and zoophilia combined into a whole that was both attractive and repulsive. Encouraged by his success, Farmer sold the next novella to "Startling Stories" - "A Woman a Day" (1953, also published under the title "Timestop!") - and completed work on two more novels. Although in these books Farmer still unconsciously adheres to the clichés taken from the "Campbell Bible" - a sort of code allowing certain themes and forbidding others for writers - originality shines through the text, which has not yet acquired mature, established outlines. The amazing extrapolative abilities that appeared in his early stories, creating a bizarre world governed by the laws of the Western Talmud and the religion created by the deranged Isaac Sigmen, foreshadowed Farmer's exuberant world-building, which became characteristic of his later works.

However, failures continued to haunt the writer with unabated force. "Startling Stories" closed, the only magazine willing to publish the scandalous works of the young author, leaving the novel "Daire" unpublished (the book was only released in 1965). "Shasta" publishing, to which Farmer submitted the novel "I Owe for the Flesh," went bankrupt, and the manuscript was lost in the editorial archives. Later, this novel became the basis for the first book of the Riverworld pentology, which brought the writer a Hugo Award, and the rediscovered manuscript was only published in 1983 under the title "The River of Eternity." But that is another story, and it seemed that the career of the young science fiction writer was ready to end before it truly began. Nonetheless, Farmer did not give up, even though failures seemed to lurk around every corner. He wrote a series of stories about Father Carmody, a hardened killer who, after going through a surreal religious ritual on the planet Joy Dante, becomes a saint. This small series is known in Russia only for the novella "Night of Light" (1957). "The Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction" agreed to publish these stories, despite their content, capable of infuriating orthodox Christians of any denomination. It seems that the writer does not hold much respect for religions, whether it be Christianity - as in the novel "Jesus on Mars" (1979), where he returns to this theme - or Islam (as in "The Unreasoning Mask" (1981)), or modern cults and sects, about which Farmer had a particular penchant for writing, often in a venomous manner.

These and other stories and novellas ("Rastignac the Devil" (1954), "The Alley Man" (1959), "Open To Me, My Sister" (1960)), not to mention the quintessence of Freudism - the story "Mother" (1953), in which an astronaut finds inner peace in the womb of an alien creature - increased Philip Farmer's reputation as one of the most scandalous and anarchic science fiction writers. Critics accused him of offending public morality, religious sensibilities, and even corrupting minors. However, Farmer himself played a significant role in creating this image, actively and quite productively collaborating with Playboy magazine from the late 1940s to the early 1970s. Moreover, in the writer's bibliography, one can find not only science fiction works and biographies of literary characters but also blatantly erotic novels. His first book, "Green Odyssey," was published in 1957. It belonged to the genre of "planetary adventures," focusing not so much on the hero or his adventures but rather on the world into which fate throws him. Jack Vance devoted himself most to this genre among American science fiction writers, but Philip Farmer also made a significant contribution to it. "Green Odyssey" is considered one of the classics of this subgenre, along with Vance's "The Big Planet." The ever-changing exotic landscapes of a distant planet, the complexity of its medieval culture, the cruelty of its men and the amorousness of its women, the fascinated disgust with which the stranded astronaut perceives this peculiar world, create a lasting impression.

His next book, "Flesh" (1960), which has been reprinted several times in Russian, was a significant milestone in the writer's career. Many ideas in this book were drawn by Farmer from Robert Graves' book "The White Goddess" (1922), but despite some derivativeness, the writer managed to stay on the edge where the eroticism of the novel does not become an end in itself. The heavy-handed humor of the novel, reminiscent of "Gargantua and Pantagruel," was deemed "shocking," but the following year, the well-known writer and critic Alfred Bester named Philip Farmer one of the seven best science fiction writers in America, along with Robert A. Heinlein, Isaac Asimov, and Ray Bradbury, considering him the boldest among them. "He is the only one of the science fiction writers who is not afraid to take any idea to its logical conclusion, no matter how unpleasant that conclusion might be," Bester wrote. Farmer went on to justify such praise, although the shock value of his early works faded over time. Scenes that horrified the puritanical American public of the 1950s were within the realm of what was acceptable, if not expected, a decade later.

Sexual motifs are not the only ones that permeate the writer's work. His characters are usually mentally unstable, insecure, and prone to violence and aggression. They lack a foundation, an internal pillar. The theme of the search for God dominates many of Farmer's works. And who, if not the gods, the Lords of the World of Tiers and the Ethicals of Riverworld? But, like the gods of ancient times, they are indifferent to humans and at worst, hostile.

One could consider these motifs as exercises in applied psychology. Farmer often accuses himself of a lack of psychological depth and believable characters. This is not entirely true - the writer could be accused of excessive intensity in the emotional traits of his characters. They are not depictions of souls but rather comics, caricatures, psychological theories clothed in literary flesh. Farmer has a particular affinity for Carl Gustav Jung, whose theory of the collective unconscious, containing symbols (which Jung called "archetypes") accumulated by humanity throughout its history, fits perfectly with the later works of the writer about mass culture heroes.

Another idea that runs through all of Farmer's works is time travel. In fact, the first novel in this group could be considered "Dare" - the story of the descendants of 17th-century earthlings transported to the planet Tau Ceti by powerful arra to test whether the human race can heal itself from the torment of its xenophobia and learn to live in harmony with those who are not like them, the "loshetails." But truly, this direction began with "Flesh," in which the crew of an interstellar spaceship returns to Earth from Vega eight hundred years after their departure. And this is not the only example. In "The Stone God Awakens" (1970), physicist Ulysses Singing Bear awakens from suspended animation a million years after our era to find Earth cleansed of the corrupt humanity by extraterrestrial visitors from the Andromeda constellation (who act out of the noblest motives, it should be noted). And those creatures to whom mankind has given intelligence - descendants of elephants and cats, raccoons and bears, dogs and bats - are divided into two opposing camps: the servants of Vurutana, the Great Devourer, and its opponents. A similar premise is used in the much later (and voluminous) "Dark In the Sun" (1979), although the action of this novel is set not a million but fifteen billion years in the future, in an era when the expansion of the universe has given way to contraction, when Olbers's paradox causes the sky to blaze with the light of collapsing stars, and only the long-extinguished sun crawls across the burning sky in a dark circle.

In the novel "Time's Last Gift" (1972), scientists from the twenty-first century travel back in time to the Paleolithic era, twenty thousand years before our era. It seems that the novel follows the template - wise aliens from a civilized era study a moderately wild Cro-Magnon tribe. But Farmer remains true to himself, turning the cliché inside out, and the time travel becomes just a springboard. The Immortal Guardian of the history of humanity, the Eternal Savage, his own descendant and ancestor (bearing a suspicious resemblance to Farmer's beloved Tarzan), uses the expedition to begin his journey, a closed loop, and leaves the scientists a capsule containing all the information he has gathered over thousands of years of earthly existence.

In the novel "The Gate of Time" (1966), an American pilot on a bombing run against the Nazi-occupied Ploesti oil fields during World War II is sent sideways in time to a parallel world where the American continent is absent. So, the migration of Native American tribes was directed not eastward, across the Bering Strait, but westward, to Eastern Europe, and the Dnieper River is called the Ohio River (beautiful in Iroquois). Hungary is Dakota in this world. As usual, Farmer demonstrates his exceptional knowledge of history, mythology, and philology in this novel.

After "Flesh," the writer's work developed in two directions. The first, somewhat hesitantly begun in "Inside-Outside?" (1964), was continued in the famous "Riders of the Purple Wage" (1967; the title of the novella is a reference to Zane Grey's collection of sketches "Riders of the Purple Sage"), written specifically for Harlan Ellison's anthology "Dangerous Visions" and earned Farmer the Hugo Award for 1968, and "The Agenesis of Bird City" (1970). Reading the densely packed text, full of unimaginable (and at times obscene) images, reminiscent of Joyce's "Ulysses," is not an easy task even for die-hard fans of the "new wave." The agonizing search for meaning constitutes the essence of these works, and above all, the meaning of the artist's life. The main character of "Riders," Chaibaiabos Winnegan (whose last name again echoes Joyce, this time with "Finnegan"), is an artist living in a world where physical needs are no longer a problem for humans. But the needs of the soul remain. And it is upon the artist, the man of art, that the task falls to free people from this persistent hunger.

The second direction began brilliantly with the novel "Maker of the Universes" (1965), the first in the World of Tiers series. Over the next five years, Farmer wrote three more novels in this series ("The Gate of Creation," 1966; "A Private Cosmos," 1968; and "Behind the Wall of Terra," 1970), and in 1977, the fifth book, "Lavalite World," was published. He then left the series for nearly fifteen years. Only in 1991 did the sixth novel, "Red Orc's Rage," appear, followed by the concluding seventh novel, "More Than Fire," two years later. In these novels, Farmer demonstrated another facet of his talent, giving new impetus to the genre worn out by generations of science fiction writers. The world serves as a platform for the exploration of identity and the nature of reality. The World of Tiers series is a complex and intricate exploration of various dimensions and layers of reality, where gods and humans coexist and manipulate their environment to their advantage. The series delves into themes of power, identity, and the nature of existence, creating a rich and imaginative universe.

Philip Jose Farmer passed away on February 25, 2009, leaving behind a rich and influential body of work that continues to captivate readers with its provocative ideas, imaginative world-building, and exploration of the human condition.