Today, for enthusiasts of classic speculative fiction – a detailed review by Dave Brzeski of the latest Philip José Farmer volume from Meteor House.
RIVERWORLD ODYSSEY
Author: Philip José Farmer
Editor: Michael Croteau
Publisher: Meteor House
Limited Edition Hardcover (300 copies) $75
Trade Paperback $29
Meteor House website (http://meteorhousepress.com/ in case the link doesn’t copy over.)
I was immediately faced with a couple of temptations when it came to reviewing this 600+ page tome.
1) Reread the core novels first: To Your Scattered Bodies Go, The Fabulous Riverboat, The Dark Design, The Magic Labyrinth and Gods of Riverworld. A nice idea, but not possible if I wanted to get this review out in a timely manner (which I didn’t in any case). I soon came to the conclusion that there was much to be said for rereading them after reading this book.
2) Paul Spiteri’s excellent introduction, “Hinterlands” made me wonder if I might get away with simply paraphrasing that and call the job done… No, they’d notice.
“Hinterlands” gives us more than a list of the delights to come. Spiteri expertly lays out the purpose of this book, in that it explains how an idea that was initially written in a rush for a competition, ended up over a period of some 19 years being expanded into one of the best-loved classic science-fiction series of all time.
Spiteri discusses the developing philosophy behind it as it changed through early versions, the reasons behind some early decisions and how a huge let down, that came close to ending Farmer’s career ended up giving birth to one of his most popular concepts. As I hinted above, Spiteri had me convinced that rereading the series after everything we learn in this volume was a very good idea.
THE CONTEST
This section gives us a photograph of Farmer and others, including people involved in Shasta Publishers taken at Chicon II in 1952; a copy of the original announcement of that contest, with the $4000.00 dollar grand prize (which would tempt a lot of beginner authors today – back then it was an awful lot of money). This is followed by a reproduction of an article from Science Fiction Times from 1957, over four years later, containing correspondence between Shasta Publishers and Pocket Books, who wanted their advance for the planned paperback edition back since Shasta had failed to publish the hardback edition – thus earning Farmer nothing more than an expensive waste of his time.
The reason behind this section being so sparse becomes immediately apparent, as we then get Farmer’s “Author’s Introduction” at the beginning of the 1983 version (that being the second written) of River of Eternity.
Here Farmer tells us in great detail the entire sad saga of the Shasta Publishing rip-off, and how he, along with several others, didn’t get paid. Particularly shocking was the revelation that when he chased them up, they told him that Pocket Books had demanded a rewrite, because 150,000 words was too big for them to publish, He produced the shorter version only to find out later that Pocket books hadn’t demanded a rewrite, in fact Shasta hadn’t even sent them the original version!
He also covers the confusion over the three different versions of Owe For the Flesh / River of Eternity, what happened to them, and how this one came to be published after the main series. This is followed by the Phantasia Press edition of River of Eternity.
This was interesting. I should’ve known better, of course, but after having read the story of how Riverworld went through various versions before becoming the major work that so many people know and love, I somehow expected less of this earlier version. Yes, some of the ideas were much improved in the expanded five book series, but that didn’t stop River of Eternity from being good… very good indeed. Honestly, had those later expanded books never have been written, River of Eternity would still be hailed as a classic now.
The Afterword by Alex Berman of Phantasia Press, being a series of anecdotes on his changing relationship with Farmer, from adoring fan to respected professional, included the Shasta Press debacle, of course. But it was the details of the deal he made with Farmer to republish The World of Tiers series in revised editions, corrected from the “butchering” that, in Farmer’s opinion, Ace Books inflicted on them that interested me the most. Having been on my list of books to reread after all these decades, I discovered that I now needed to find those rewritten versions. It’s somewhat disturbing to note that, despite the fact that we all read and adored The World of Tiers series as published, Farmer was upset by the way they’d been edited by the publisher. This discovery cost me rather a lot of money, but I will now be able to read Farmer’s preferred text.
Berman then goes on to tell us how he gradually acquired three first edition copies of Robert A. Heinlein’s Stranger in a Strange Land, all signed and dedicated to one of the three people mentioned in the dedication, one of which, of course, was Philip José Farmer. No I’m not going to tell you who the other two dedicatees were. You’ll have to buy this book and find out for yourselves.
RELAUNCH
This section charts the development of Riverworld into its final form.
In the Valley is a letter from Farmer to Fred Pohl, describing the plot for Day of the Great Shout, which appeared in the January 1965 issue of Worlds of Tomorrow. It was Pohl who told Farmer that his concept would be well worth expanding into a series of novelettes. In this letter, Farmer also discusses his MA course, which he hoped to complete in 1964. His thesis was to be on Taki Taki, the pidgin English of the indigenous tribes of the Dutch Guianan Bush. This says a great deal about the extent to which Farmer goes to make sure he knows what he’s talking about when describing the various races and cultures of the people who are resurrected on the banks of Riverworld.
He goes on to précis the full intended plot of what would become Day of the Great Shout. I found myself wishing we also had Pohl’s reply to this letter.
This is, of course, followed by the complete text of Day of the Great Shout, which would later be rewritten and expanded slightly to form the first half of the novel To Your Scattered Bodies Go. I have this in the original magazine, so it was a third, or fourth reading for me – except for the fact that my copy has a printing fault on page 21, the whole page being slightly skewed with a small section of the top right of the page where something evidently got between the paper and the ink obscuring the end of several lines. This, therefore, was my first reading of the story that didn’t involve a modicum of guesswork. I was bemused to see that the magazine boasted that it was a complete novel. Being somewhat used to this sort of bovine waste matter from the pulps and digests, I took advantage of having a pdf copy to check the word count. It’s somewhat over 26,000 words, so it definitely qualifies as a novella at least.
Again, I’ll avoid discussing plot points here, except to say that by this time, Farmer had been assured that he could indeed use real historical figures in his fiction. Thus Richard Black became Richard Burton. It almost feels as if Farmer was genuinely working without shackles at last, because the story becomes so much more alive.
Next comes the “Riverworld” novelette, which was published in Worlds of Tomorrow in early 1966. It was later expanded from 12,000 words to 33,750 words for Riverworld and Other Stories in 1979. Again, this volume collects the original short version.
There’s much philosophy and religion covered here, as the inhabitants of Riverworld start to fall into some of their old Earthly habits, and beliefs. Religious nuts are driven rather more nuts by being resurrected in a world they didn’t recognise – along with everyone else.
Tom Mix is an interesting choice of heroic lead for a Brit like me, but I soon got used to him. Maybe I should look up some of his real life and fictional adventures sometime.
“The Boss” is a letter, addressed to “Jake”, Ejler Jakobsson, who replaced Fred Pohl as editor of Galaxy and Worlds of If magazines in 1969. It’s an outline of a story with the working title “The Boss” which would eventually be printed as “The Fabulous Riverboat” parts 1 and 2 in 1971.
We are missing several of the magazine series in this volume, as “The Fallen Star” parts 1 and 2, and “The Fabulous Riverboat” parts 1 and 2 were both collected as The Fabulous Riverboat novel later in 1971, and so didn’t need to appear here.
What makes “The Boss” valuable is the insight it gives us into Farmer’s work ethic and attention to detail. He not only tells us who appears, and what happens, he explains why. The depth into which Farmer researched the lives of his historical characters, and the time periods in which they originally lived is simply amazing. I’ll say one thing: Farmer’s outlines were detailed, not short. More on that later.
“The Riverworld Inheritance” is a letter Farmer sent to his friend Roger Zelazny in early 1971, three months after the publication of To Your Scattered Bodies Go and eight months before The Fabulous Riverboat would be published. It’s rather sobering as Farmer details his depression at the state of the world, and its headlong path into the abyss.
He’s so concerned about the very real possibility that he might not see his story to its completion in his lifetime that he follows this with his entrusting of Zelazny to finish the saga for him. While we are all very grateful that this never came to pass, I confess that I’d have been interested to see what Zelazny would have done with it.
“The Trickster-Skipper: Sailing Riverworld” is a short essay by Mary A. Turzillo, Farmer fan and author of The Starmont Reader’s Guide: Philip José Farmer. Turzillo talks of how she loved the Riverworld series, how she came to be offered a chance to write a book in the Starmont series, and how differently she might approach it if she were writing it now.
She also tells of her meetings with Farmer, and shares a photograph of Farmer with her, holding her baby son. She mentions that that particular issue of the Starmont Reader’s Guides is still available on Amazon. I checked, and there was just the one copy on amazon.co.uk. Don’t bother to go looking. It isn’t there any more. 😉
THE QUEST COMPLETED
“The Storming” comprises a short outline which Farmer sent to Richard Posner (his agent at the time) in 1972 of what would eventually be published some five years later as The Dark Design. Having read one of Farmer’s very detailed outlines earlier in this volume, it was amusing to note that Farmer had boiled it down from the original eleven pages for the reading convenience of Putnam’s staff. Someone obviously said something to him.
In “This Is Your Afterlife” we have an interesting situation. The general advice regarding bad reviews is for the author to not respond, as it can cast them in a bad light. Not Farmer, who accepts a few valid points, albeit fairly weak ones, and goes on to pretty much take the review to pieces point by point, at length. It ends with a very amusing, if terse, joke from Farmer, about the “perceptivity pill” he’s working on so he could supply them to reviewers who needed it.
“The Source of the River” is an article that Randall Hagan wrote for Moebius Trip Library’s S.F. Echo, 22, April 1975, under the title “The Possible Subconscious Sources of Philip José Farmer’s Riverworld.” It just so happened that Hagan was a local fan, who discussed the article with Farmer while he was writing it, and Farmer was able to comment on it in the same issue. This is a truly fascinating read.
In “The Long Wait”, Michael Croteau very helpfully clears up any confusion that readers may be experiencing due to the dizzying number of proposed versions and alternative versions of various parts of the Riverworld saga.
In case any readers were wondering exactly what Farmer was doing during those long waits between the books, Croteau also outlines Farmer’s entire publishing history for that period. He certainly wasn’t being lazy, having published no less than eleven books between The Fabulous Riverboat (1971) and The Dark Design (1977). Croteau lists them all in detail, which will likely have a serious effect on many readers’ To be Read piles.
If you aren’t one of those lucky enough to own a copy of Riverworld War: The Suppressed Fiction of Philip José Farmer (The Ellis Press, 1980), you likely won’t have read this and possibly never even knew about it. A copy of that short book would cost a lot of money now, if you could find one.
In the second half of his preface, which deals with the work at hand, Farmer tells us how The Dark Design got longer and longer as he revised it, and ended up running to about 220,000 words, which was impractical for a single volume, so Farmer agreed that cuts needed to be made. The bulk of what was lost was the battle between the two mighty riverboats, which alone ran for 50,000 words.
In The Dark Design as finally published, we learn that many historical characters who played a prominent role in the first three books died during that battle. In this excised material, which stretches over five chapters, we learn how they met their ends in great, and gory detail. It might be interesting for a full re-read of the saga to slot this material in.
“Buddha Contemplates His Novel… or, God and Humankind Redefined” was a speech Farmer gave at an event sometime in the late summer of 1981, in which he talks about the influence theology has on his fiction. It’s absolutely fascinating. I would love to have been present to hear the inevitable arguments during the audience questions section. I don’t like to be dismissive of anyone’s deeply held beliefs, but I’m sure there were quite a lot of “It says so in the bible, so it is,” arguments. Farmer tells of a story he was working on, tentatively titled “The Bronze Serpent” – a theological private eye story, which I really wish had seen the light of day, but alas it didn’t.
“Riverword Dawn” is in equal parts fascinating and depressing, here we have a letter from Farmer to Phyllis Grann, President of Putnam’s, with the proposal for one of Farmer’s long-promised “sidestream” novels, in which we’d learn what various other characters, both historical and invented, got up to during the events of the main books. We also get some brief notes that Farmer made for the project, which sadly never came to pass. Some of the ideas were eventually used in the short stories. “Crossing the Dark River” and “On the Bright River”, which appeared in Tales of Riverworld (1992) and Quest to Riverworld (1993) respectively. It isn’t enough, but we must make do!
“If R.I.P.” is as the title suggests, is an obituary of sorts that Farmer wrote for Worlds of If magazine, which had eventually become the first home for Riverworld stories. The article was one of several such, printed in Worlds of If: A Retrospective Anthology (1986). Here he talks about how he tried to sell the story to Galaxy, but was talked into expanding the idea into a series of novelettes, to be published in Worlds of If, and after that magazine folded, in Worlds of Tomorrow.
“The Fabulous River” is Bruce Sterling’s Essay on his hero-worshipping attitude to Farmer in his youth, Farmer’s influence on his own writing career and how he views Farmer now he’s older. It’s really interesting. I have to say that I’d love to see Farmer’s response to some of the points he makes. I could see it becoming quite a discussion.
RIVERWORLD REVISITED
In this final section in this huge book, we get to read Farmer’s own contributions to the two shared world anthologies Tales of Riverworld and Quest to Riverworld.
The section opens with “Playing in Farmer’s Sandbox” in which John Gregory Betancourt tells us how he came to discover Farmer’s work, the part Farmer played in Betancourt becoming a professional writer and how he got invited, by Martin H. Greenberg, to submit a story for an anthology of new Riverworld stories which Greenberg was editing with Phil Farmer. He was later invited to submit a story for the second anthology.
Don’t get too excited here. This book doesn’t reprint any of the non-Farmer material from those two anthologies. You’ll have to find the books if you want to read those… except for one. More on that shortly.
After “New Voices on the River”, Farmer’s introduction to Tales of the Riverworld. we come to “Crossing the Dark River”, which is Farmer’s own contribution to the book. I can’t help but think of the 1960s UK children’s television show, Tales of the Riverbank, when I hear that title. British readers of a certain age will understand. I’m confident that Farmer would have found that hilarious.
This is the first of two stories that uses material that Farmer originally wrote for the never published Riverworld Dawn. All of the characters bar two are actually ancestors of Farmer’s, which is a concept that few other authors would have even thought of. Farmer presents them here, warts and all… and there are plenty of warts.
Doctor Andrew Paxton Davis is in search of the Madonna and child. That is to say he’s trying to find proof of the rumours he’s heard of a woman actually becoming pregnant and giving birth on Riverworld – which as we know is impossible. He finds himself taken into slavery by one of two conquering tribes on either side of the river who are in a very shaky alliance. It’s no spoiler to reveal that it all goes very wrong.
The high point for me was the explanation given by the, to say the least, neurally diverse Doctor Faustroll for the non-science of pataphysics, or the science of imaginary solutions. I read that four times before I could move on. For the origin of that concept, Google pataphysics and Alfred Jarry.
But that turned out not to be Farmer’s only contribution. Farmer mentions in his introduction to Tales of Riverworld that “ ‘A Hole in Hell,’ a very short but powerful story is by Dane Helstrom, a name appearing in print for the first time.” I wonder how many people caught the clever wording there? He didn’t say “a writer appearing in print for the first time.” Dane Helstrom was, of course, eventually revealed to be a pseudonym for Farmer himself.
Quite why we didn’t immediately know this was Farmer’s work is beyond me.
You only truly realise how most books, including the Riverworld novels, employ a modicum of tasteful reticence in their description of man’s inhumanity to man (and most definitely woman) when Farmer really lets loose, as he does in “A Hole In Hell,” he manages, as Farmer so often does, to portray some serious nastiness while remaining fun to read.
“Up the Bright River”, which opens Quest For Riverworld, continues the journey of Andrew Paxton Davis and his companions from where we left them in Crossing the Dark River”.
The quality is maintained, and no little passage of time is covered, as they have to organise yet another plan of escape from another captor. Faustroll remains as bizarre as ever, but Farmer is so good at making his adopted philosophy almost seem logical.
Which brings us to “Coda”, which is the last contemporaneously published story Farmer ever wrote. Several other stories were published after Quest for Riverworld, but they were all posthumous items found in his “magic filing cabinet” after he passed.
By this time, my expectations for “Coda” were high. Farmer topped them with what has to be the closest to perfection a last Riverworld story – or indeed a last Farmer story could be.
A fictional character turns out to be his creator, now making perfect sense as he tells of his personal journey.
Does it answer all the questions? – emphatically no.
Does it leave stories as yet untold? – yes, of course.
Will those stories ever be told? – I don’t know. Maybe. Maybe not. I will say this, though. While it might be nice to see some new stories, there really doesn’t need to be.
In “Life and the Search for Meaning”, clinical psychologist, retired professor, author and friend of Farmer, writes about the significance of the questions suggested by the title of this piece to Riverworld and Farmer’s work in general.
I’m sure that Mr Knight will forgive me when I admit that the initial reason I was so delighted to acquire a copy of the signed limited edition of his novel, The Astonished Eye (PS Publishing, 2001) for a very reasonable price was that it was signed by Farmer, who provided the introduction.
This just leaves the “Riverworld Timeline”, which lists all the important events involved in the history of this series in order. Nowhere more than here is the effect on Farmer and his wife, when he was shafted by Shasta in 1953 brought home more effectively. He lost his home, and was forced to give up his plan to become a full-time writer – an ambition he wasn’t to be able to go back to until 1969.
How would things have been different had that not happened? It’s hard to say. There’s some justification for the idea that the Riverworld Saga may not have grown in the way it eventually did. On the other hand, how much did we lose by Farmer having to hold down a day job for almost 15 years?
I have yet to mention the art. The version we show here of the front cover doesn’t begin to do justice to Mark Wheatley’s magnificent wraparound cover for this book. He also contributes a very nice black and white frontispiece.
As for the internal art… everything that is in the hardcover is also in the paperback with one major difference. The hardcover presents all the book cover scans, in fact everything for which a colour version was available, in full colour, whereas the paperback has them in black and white. This really does make a huge difference to the look of the book.
In conclusion, is this book, mainly reprint as it is, worthwhile?
I think so, yes – absolutely. I’d go as far as calling it essential. Unless you’ve been a Farmer fan for many decades, the chance of you having all the material found herein is slim, and it won’t be easy, or cheap to find it all now.
No Riverworld collection can be considered complete without those final few stories.
I like to think of Farmer – Phil, if I might be so bold – wandering the banks of that river, knowing that he would eventually find his Bette again.