A Feast Unknown
Authors: Philip José Farmer
Tags: #Science Fiction, #Fantasy, #Adventure
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PREHISTORY
Time’s Last Gift
Hadon of Ancient Opar
SECRETS OF THE NINE: PARALLEL UNIVERSE
Lord of the Trees
The Mad Goblin
GRANDMASTER SERIES
Lord Tyger
The Wind Whales of Ishmael
Flesh
Venus on the Half-Shell
JOSÉ
FARMER
VOLUME IX OF
THE MEMOIRS OF LORD GRANDRITH
EDITED BY PHILIP JOSÉ FARMER
TITAN BOOKS
A FEAST UNKNOWN
Print edition ISBN: 9781781162880
E-book edition ISBN: 9781781162897
Published by Titan Books
A division of Titan Publishing Group Ltd
144 Southwark St, London SE1 0UP
First edition: October 2012
13579 108642
This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents either are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously, and any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, business establishments, events, or locales is entirely coincidental. The publisher does not have any control over and does not assume any responsibility for author or third-party websites or their content.
Copyright © 1969, 2012 by the Philip J. Farmer Family Trust. All rights reserved.
Introduction & Afterword © 2012 by Art Sippo.
Postscript © 1969 by Theodore Sturgeon. Renewed 1997 by the Theodore Sturgeon
Literary Trust.
No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means without the prior written permission of the publisher, nor be otherwise circulated in any form of binding or cover other than that in which it is published and without a similar condition being imposed on the subsequent purchaser.
A CIP catalogue record for this title is available from the British Library.
Printed and bound in the United States.
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an Evolution strange
two Tongues touch
exchange
a Feast unknown
to stone
or tree or beast
Evolution
May Swenson
INTRODUCTION
BY ARTHUR C. SIPPO MD, MPH
In the summer of 1969, at the tender age of sixteen, I made my weekly trip to the Bookmasters store in Times Square, Manhattan and I was shocked at what I saw in the science fiction section. There was a book from a publisher that I did not recognize with two naked men on the cover wrestling with each other. One of those men had bronze skin and blond hair with a pronounced widow’s peak. The other man had lighter colored skin but wore his black hair long and feral-looking. The two looked suspiciously like Doc Savage and Tarzan, Lord of the Jungle, both of whom were favorite characters of mine. The blurb on the book described these characters as Doc Caliban and Lord Grandrith. I caught on that this must be a pastiche of my two favorite pulp heroes and was immediately hooked.
The name of the author was familiar to me. Philip José Farmer had written several strange science fiction novels and had recently won a Hugo Award for the novella
Riders of the Purple Wage.
I was an avid science fiction fan, but up to that
time the themes in Mr. Farmer’s books were a little bit extreme for me. Now it looked like he had written something that I could not resist.
I read this book in one sitting. I was simultaneously intrigued, repulsed, disgusted, titillated, and entertained. I reread the book several times that week, at first trying to edit out some of the objectionable material. Ultimately, I realized that the work was an integral whole that dealt with issues of life, death, sex, violence, mortality, immortality, religion, and moral responsibility. It was written for adults who had enjoyed the juvenile stories, with the intention of introducing graphic material that would not have been permitted by the literary standards of earlier times. These were the pulps without censorship or moral limits. These were old heroes made into anti-heroes and let loose in our world.
Reading this book was a turning point in my life. It not only got me thinking about what it really meant to be a superman among ordinary men, it also made me think about what it meant to be a hero in a world where there were no purely white or black hats. As in the real world, gray hats predominated. It also made me an instant Philip José Farmer fan and opened up an entirely new world of imaginative and weighty fiction.
I invite you to enter the wild and extreme vision of Philip José Farmer as he reimagined the world of pulp adventure for grownups in the late 1960s.
EDITOR’S NOTE
BY PHILIP JOSÉ FARMER
Lord Grandrith has written nine volumes of autobiography, totaling close to a million and a half words. Yet this volume, the latest, covering only a part of 1968, is the only one published. Lord Grandrith had planned to publish all the volumes someday, when it became possible to reveal his true identity and true story. However, Grandrith turned against the Nine who had given him the elixir of prolonged youth.
The first eight volumes are hidden in a place only Grandrith and his wife know. He made arrangements through the editor to publish Volume IX after he had failed to get it published in England, France, Sweden, South Africa, and at several houses in the United States. Grandrith states the Nine were behind the rejections and the various “accidents” to and “losings” of the mss. he sent out.
Fortunately, he had met the editor at the home of a common friend in Kansas City, Missouri. The editor did not then know the true name of James Claymore, as he was calling himself at the time. A letter sent from Lima, Peru, told the editor of Claymores actual name and identity It also outlined the danger that Grandrith, his wife, and several others were in. The next letter came from Dublin, Ireland. The third had no postmark and was left in the editor’s mailbox between midnight and six a.m. The editor sent his reply to a man in Stockholm, Sweden, as requested. The ms. of Volume IX was mailed from Western Samoa.
The editor has Americanized various English terms, changing bonnet into hood, petrol into gas, lorry into truck, etc. The locations of various places in Kenya and Uganda were purposely made vague by Grandrith. This was not done to protect the Nine but to protect those foolhardy people who might try to seek out the Nine or the now-buried gold mines of the valley which Grandrith named Ophir.
In addition, the incident of the landing at Penrith is not quite accurate. Penrith has no airport. The events after the landing did happen as described, but the airport was created by Grandrith to obscure the actual event. He wants to protect a friend who set out lights on a meadow so the plane could land there. Grandrith refuses to change the incident to bring it closer to reality. We can only respect his reasons without understanding them.
In his last letter, Grandrith says that “almost nobody will believe this. Not at this moment, anyway. But events conceived and brought forth by the Nine will soon convince the world. I hope then that it will not be too late for the world. Meanwhile, we are all alive and fighting, though doing more hiding than fighting. And I have added another book to the autobiography.”
FOREWORD
BY LORD GRANDRITH
Since the first eight volumes of his memoirs have not yet been published, Lord Grandrith has written a special foreword which encapsulates the early part of Volume I. Without this, the reader would be puzzled by some of the references in this volume.
I was conceived and bom in 1888.
Jack the Ripper was my father.
I am certain of this, although I have no evidence that would stand up in court. I have only the diary of my legal father. He was, in fact, my uncle, although he was married to my mother.
My legal father kept a diary almost up to the moment of his death. Shortly after he had locked it inside a desk, he was killed. His last written words recorded his despair because his wife had just died and I, only a year old, was wailing for milk. And there were no human beings within hundreds of miles, as far as he knew.
I alone have read the entire diary. I have never permitted
anyone else to read any of the diary preceding the moment when my uncle and my mother sailed from England for Africa.
My “biographer” would have been too horrified by the truth to have written it if I had been unkind enough to reveal it to him. He was a romanticist and, in many ways, a Victorian. He would have made up a story of his own, ignoring the real story, as he did with so many of my adventures. He was interested mainly in adventure for its own sake, although he did describe my psychology, my
Weltanschauung.
However, he never really transmitted the half-infrahuman cast of my mind.
Perhaps he could not understand that part of me, although I tried to communicate it as well as I could. He tried to understand, but he was human, all-too-human, as my favorite poet says. He could never grasp, with the human hands of his psyche, the nonhuman shape of mine.
That part of the diary which I had forbidden others to read describes how my mother happened to be with her husband in Whitechapel on that fog-smothered night. She had insisted on going with him to look for his brother, who had escaped from the cell in the castle in the Cumberland County. Private detectives had quietly tracked John Cloamby to the Whitechapel district of London. His brother, James Cloamby, Viscount Grandrith, had joined the hunt. My mother, Alexandra Applethwaite, related to the noble family of Bedford, had insisted on accompanying him.
My uncle objected to bringing his wife along for several reasons. The strongest was that his brother had attempted to rape her when he had broken out of his cell after bending several iron bars and uprooting them from their stone sockets. Only her screams and the prompt appearance of two manservants
armed with pistols had saved her. Alexandra, however, persisted in her insane belief that she alone could make him surrender voluntarily when he was found. Also, she said that she alone could locate him exactly. There was, she claimed, a psychic bond between them, “vibrations” which enabled her to point toward and track him as if she were a human lodestone.