My personal favorite was "Riverworld". .
Philip José Farmer, Science Fiction Writer, Dies at 91by Gerald Jonas
Philip José Farmer, a science fiction writer who shocked readers in the 1950s by depicting sex with aliens and who went on to challenge conventional pieties of the genre in caustic fables set on bizarre worlds of his own devising, died Wednesday. He was 91 and lived in Peoria, Ill..
His official web site announced his death, saying he "passed away peacefully in his sleep."
Mr. Farmer's distinctive blend of intellectual daring and pulp-fiction prose found a worldwide audience. His more than 75 books have been translated into 22 languages and published in more than 40 countries.
Though he wrote many admired short stories, he was best known for his multi-novel series. These sprawling, episodic works gave him room to explore every nuance of a provocative premise while indulging his taste for lurid, violent action.
In his Riverworld series Mr. Farmer imagined a river millions of miles long on a distant planet where virtually everyone who has died on Earth is physically reborn and given a second chance to make something of life. In his Dayworld series, Earth's overpopulation crisis has been relieved by a technical fix; each person spends one day of the week awake and the other six days in suspended animation. In his World of Tiers series, mad demigods create pocket universes for their own amusement, only to face rebellion from their putative creatures.
In a genre known for prolific writers, Mr. Farmer's output was famously prodigious. At one point in the 1970s he had 11 different series in various stages of completion. Even some of his admirers deplored his tendency to write too much too fast. The literary critic Leslie Fiedler agreed that his work was sometimes "sloppily" written but found that that was a small price to pay for the exhilarating breadth of his imagination.
Mr. Farmer himself made no apologies for his excesses. "Imagination," he said, "is like a muscle. I found out that the more I wrote, the bigger it got."
Philip José Farmer was born Jan. 26, 1918 in North Terre Haute, Ind. He grew up in Peoria, where his father, a civil engineer, was a supervisor for the power company. A voracious reader, he resolved early on to pursue a literary career: "I knew I wanted to be a writer ever since I was in fourth grade," he said.Turned down for military service in World War II, he went to work in a local steel mill while attending Bradley University in Peoria at night and trying to write in his spare time.
His first success came in 1952 with a short story called "The Lovers," about a man seduced by an alien with an unusual reproductive system. The story was rejected by the two leading science fiction editors of the day; both said that its graphic description of interspecies sex made them physically ill. Published in a pulp magazine called "Startling Stories," the story won Mr. Farmer his first Hugo as "most promising new writer" of the year.
Emboldened, he quit his job to become a fulltime writer. Entering a contest sponsored by a specialty publisher, he won the $4,000 first prize, for a novel that contained the germ of his Riverworld series. But an unscrupulous editor failed to deliver the money, and the manuscript was lost. Beset by financial difficulties, Mr. Farmer left Peoria in 1956 to become a technical writer. He spent the next 14 years working for defense contractors, from Syracuse to Los Angeles, while continuing to write science fiction on the side.
With the general loosening of societal taboos in the 1960s, Mr. Farmer emerged as a major force in the genre. In a 1966 story set in Riverworld, one of the resurrected is a resentful Jesus, angry that he had been deceived about the nature of the afterlife.
In 1967, Mr. Farmer won a Hugo for best novella for "Riders of the Purple Wage," a satire on a cradle-to-grave welfare state, written as an exuberant pastiche of James Joyce's "Ulysses." The first Riverworld novel to be published, "To Your Scattered Bodies Go," was awarded the Hugo for best novel in 1971.
The 1970s saw the publication of 25 new works, as well as reprints of some of Mr. Farmer's earlier books. A 1975 novel, "Venus on the Half-Shell," created a stir beyond the genre. The jacket and title page identified the author only as "Kilgore Trout" -- a fictional character who appears as an unappreciated science fiction writer in several of Kurt Vonnegut's novels. Although Mr. Farmer claimed he had permission for this playful hoax, Mr. Vonnegut was not amused to learn that some reviewers not only concluded that he had written "Venus on the Half-Shell" but that it was a worthy addition to the Vonnegut canon.
Mr. Farmer's eclectic approach to storytelling reflected what Mr. Fiedler called his "gargantuan lust to swallow down the whole cosmos, past, present, and to come, and to spew it out again." In the Riverworld series, Mr. Farmer resurrected not just historical personages like Samuel Clemens and Sir Richard Burton but mythological figures like Odysseus and Gilgamesh. He also wrote full-length, mock-scholarly "biographies" of Tarzan and Doc Savage, two of the pulp heroes whose stories had inspired him to become a writer in the first place.
Having grown up and attended college in Peoria, Mr. Farmer moved back there, from Beverly Hills, Calif., in 1970.
Mr. Farmer is survived by his wife, Bette, his son, Philip, and his daughter, Kristen, as well as grandchildren and great-grandchildren
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