<span class="SFPTagline"> From SCIFIPEDIA </span>

Philip Jose Farmer (January 26, 1918-) began testing the borders of what was acceptable in SF almost from the outset of his writing career, starting with the shorter version of the novel, The Lovers, when it first appeared in Startling Stories in 1952. Farmer's interest in sexual themes, often with bizarre variations involving alien forms of life, recurred frequently in his career, and four of his novels, three SF and one horror, were originally published as erotica. His first published novel, however, was the fascinating but much more conventional The Green Odyssey (1957), set on a featureless planet where wheeled vehicles are powered by sails.

Farmer's inventive imagination has given birth to a number of fascinating concepts throughout his career. The Maker of Universes (1965) was the first in a series of five novels about people who literally had the power to make small universes of their own, each with a separate set of natural laws. Inside Outside (1964) suggested that science might find a way to create a workable, attainable afterlife. The Dayworld series suggests a solution to overcrowding—the population is divided into segments and each segment is kept in suspended animation for six of the seven days in the week.

His most famous work is the "Riverworld" series. Mysterious aliens restore the entire human race to life and use it to populate an enormous world ribboned by an endless river. Historical and fictional characters interact while the aliens remain enigmatic. The original concept was developed in the early 1960s, but the manuscript was lost and Farmer did not return to the project until several years later. The first short stories were blended into the novel, To Your Scattered Bodies Go (1971), which won the Hugo. A made for television movie of Riverworld was produced for the SCI FI Channel.

A long standing interest in the pulp fiction of Edgar Rice Burroughs and Lester Dent is apparent in Farmer's work, which includes several novels about Tarzan and Doc Savage, or thinly disguised copies of those classic heroes. Farmer also wrote The Wind Whales of Ishmael (1971, which is a sequel to Moby Dick, A Barnstormer in Oz (1982), based on the work of L. Frank Baum, and The Other Log of Phileas Fogg (1973), a nod to Jules Verne's Around the World in Eighty Days. Late in his career he wrote an excellent detective novel, Nothing Burns in Hell (1998).

Farmer's short fiction has been sporadic in quantity but almost always very high in quality. The Father Carmody stories are superior other worlds adventures and "Sail On, Sail On" is a particularly clever story of alternate history. The satiric "Riders of the Purple Wage" (1968) won a Hugo. Almost all of his short fiction has been collected in various volumes over the years.