Flesh (30 page)

This revelation demonstrates that Nephi Sarvant was probably wrong when he predicted that the faith in Columbia would eventually wane, since the Priestesses were slowly and carefully expanding their faith, and so their influence, over the region. It also demonstrates that unless forced, the Priestesses did not like to show their hands but rather preferred to work behind the scenes. There is a telling anomaly in
Flesh
which may indicate just how powerful and influential the Priestesses truly were.

This anomaly is in the science that the Priestesses possess. Deecee was a civilization barely above the Iron Age. The Priestesses were fundamentally anti-technology and regarded the men from the stars as both a curse and blessing. No doubt the Priestesses were interested in the genetic diversity they could bring to the relatively small population of Deecee, but also felt that their knowledge was dangerous. This is undoubtedly why they separated Stagg from his crew and then set the crew to fare for themselves, knowing it would most likely fail to become part of Deecee society in a month.

We know through the experiences of Churchill and Sarvant that the Priestesses only allow certain professions to attain any sort of literacy. By controlling literacy they also control how knowledge and information are disseminated. Also by making science heretical they restrict technology and so maintain their power.

The Priestesses, however, possess some scientific knowledge, their crowning achievement being the artificial organs shaped like horns that they implanted into Peter Stagg’s head. Even if they had somehow inherited the ability to grow these organs, they still needed the ability to perform microsurgery to graft them into his tissue.

Yet this is not all that they can do. When Sarvant was cut by a knife, a Priestess covered the wound with a pseudoflesh that not only sealed the wound and would heal it, but also allowed him to use his hand as if nothing had happened. They also have the ability to tell how fertile a man is by examining his sperm; they can determine the early stages of pregnancy and also tell the sex of a child.

How are these Priestesses who exist in a culture barely above the Iron Age such wizards at biological sciences? One has to wonder how much scientific and historical knowledge was truly lost during the Desolation.

According to the Priestesses, most knowledge about the past was lost, and for most of the people this was undoubtedly true. Yet some interesting bits of Americana have been woven into the fabric of Deecee’s mythology. The most obvious ones, of course, are the turning of the female personalization of America, Columbia, into the Great White Goddess, and of George Washington, into Wazhtin, the Father of his Country. I say the most obvious because there are physical representations of these two figures in the Deecee versions of the Capitol Building and the Washington Monument. In the Deecee version the Capitol has two domes which represent the bountiful breasts of Columbia and the Washington Monument has been turned into a giant phallic symbol to demonstrate that Wazhtin was literally the father of his country. The Miss America contest was used as a means of choosing the virgins who would be favored by the Sunhero. The girl chosen as Miss America became deified as Virginia, the Virgin of Columbia, the Queen of Deecee, and the chosen mate of the Sunhero. How this selection was done was never specifically stated; however, we know that Virginia was a graduate of Vassar College for Oracular Priestesses, and so had been trained for her role.

While it is possible that these were the only surviving bits of knowledge about America that survived, it also seems possible that the Priestesses tailored this knowledge to structure their religion to fit their own ends, as they seem to have done with their knowledge of biology and their transformation of the game of baseball.

It might be easy to categorize
Flesh
simply as a post-apocalyptic novel that involves a fertility cult. Although
Flesh
deals with a fertility cult, the sexual content is actually tamer than many of Philip José Farmer’s other works. And as in most of his works, there is more going on than first meets the eye. As we have seen in the closing section of the book, not everything is as it appears. We leave the book with several unanswered questions, not simply about the culture and society of the world of
Flesh,
but also about some of the adventures of Stagg, Calthorp, and Churchill that were glossed over. Did Farmer simply leave these mysteries unsolved due to space considerations or did he, as I would like to think, do so deliberately, believing that in a novel about a mystery religion, there should be some mysteries left to ponder?

* * *

Dennis E. Power is a contributor to
Myths for the Modern Age: Philip José Farmer’s Wold Newton Universe
(MonkeyBrain Books). He also contributed several essays to
Farmerphile,
a quarterly magazine completely dedicated to works by and about Philip José Farmer. His sequel to Farmer’s novel
Flesh
appeared in
The Worlds of Philip José Farmer 1: Protean Dimensions
(Meteor House, 2010). He also served as continuity editor of
The Worlds of Philip José Farmer 2: Of Dust and Soul.
His short fiction about Arnould Galopin’s time traveling Doctor Omega has appeared in
Glimmerglass: The Creative Writer’s Annual, Volume 1
(2009) and in
Doctor Omega and the Shadowmen
(Black Coat Press, 2011). He was the coauthor of “Gribardsun through the Ages,” which appeared in
Time’s Last Gift
(Titan, 2012). His current project is a series of stories about the early life of Jules Verne’s Passépartout, two of which have appeared in Black Coat Press’ annual anthology
Tales of the Shadowmen.
He is the editor of the websites The El Head Homepage and The Wold Newton Universe: A Secret History. He holds a B.A. in History and a Ph.D. from the school of hard knocks. He lives in St. Louis, Missouri in an ancient house with an ancient guardian dog.

_______________________________

¹
Part of Titan Books’ series of Philip José Farmer reissues.

²
The latter book was written with Christopher Paul Carey; all three novels were collected by Subterranean Press in an omnibus edition entitled
Gods of Opar.

Philip José Farmer was the master of the big idea. Like all great science fiction writers he looked at society and extrapolated. What if we went this way? What if we went that way? What if the internal combustion engine did not exist? And he did it independently of the zeitgeist or any mass societal movement. Where Asimov and John Brunner dwelt in politics, Farmer dwelt at a more fundamental, subsistence level, breaking society down to barbarous levels into which he inserted his enlightened heroes.

He did it in his World of Tiers series, a primer on world-building, the clash between primitive and sophisticated cultures, and the inspiration for my
Nexus
saga, “The Bowl-Shaped World” He did it in the Riverworld series, perhaps his crowning achievement, reducing mankind to serfdom and letting loose some of his favorite historical characters including Sir Richard Burton and Samuel Clemens. My introduction to Burton came through the Riverworld series.

Farmer also ventured into human sexuality daring to ask questions that other sci fi writers shunned.
The Lovers
is about a man who falls in love with a symbiotic insect that perfectly mimics a beautiful woman. He recast Tarzan and Doc Savage as sexually charged creatures in
A Feast Unknown
and several other books. As most Farmer fans know, Farmer sought to integrate the world’s greatest fictional (and real life) heroes into a single tapestry known as the Wold Newton Universe, named after a meteorite that fell in Britain and may have led to genetic mutation.

Heroes of Wold Newton include Solomon Kane; Captain Blood; The Scarlet Pimpernel; Sherlock Holmes and his nemesis Professor Moriarty (aka Captain Nemo); Phileas Fogg;
The Time Traveler;
Allan Quatermain; Tarzan and his son Korak; A.J. Raffles; Professor Challenger; Richard Hannay; Bulldog Drummond; the evil Fu Manchu and his adversary, Sir Denis Nayland Smith; G-8; The Shadow; Sam Spade; Doc Savage, his cousin Pat Savage, and one of his five assistants, Monk Mayfair; The Spider; Nero Wolfe; Mr. Moto; The Avenger; Philip Marlowe; James Bond; Lew Archer; and Travis McGee.

I have only claimed four influences, including Farmer and John D. MacDonald, who created Travis McGee.

Perhaps his most daring venture into human sexuality is his novel
Flesh,
about an Earth 800 years in the future. This Earth has been utterly transformed by nuclear holocaust which destroyed civilization and gave rise to a new/old religion: worship of Gaia, the Earth Mother, elevating human reproduction to a holy imperative. Captain Peter Stagg departed with his crew from 21st century Earth. Their faster-than-light drive meant that while the Earth aged 800 years, they barely aged a year and returned to an Earth they could barely recognize.

America has been reduced to a series of sparsely populated city/states ruled by a capital city, Deecee. The Great White Mother resides in the White House with her vestal virgins. Every year they choose a new Sun King, some unlucky stud chosen to impregnate half the available females before being put to death in a horrible manner. All ambitious youth must join a guild: The Elks, The Moose, The Elephants, The Mules, The Jackrabbits, The Trout, The Billy Goats, The Queen Bees—all known for their virility and fertility.

“
Man, in his blindness, greed, and arrogance, has fouled the Goddess-given earth. His ant-heap cities have emptied their filth into the rivers and sea and turned them into vast sewers. He has poisoned the air with deadly fumes. These fumes, I suppose, were not only the products of industry but of radioactivity. But the Deecee, of course, know nothing of atomic bombs.”

So says Stagg’s second in command, Calthorp. Farmer’s description could serve the basis for any number of dystopian science fictions from John Varley’s
Millennium
and Frank Herbert’s
Dune
to Brunner’s
The Sheep Look Up.
It’s the science fiction writer’s job to show the consequences of our actions. But few do it as objectively and analytically as Farmer. His brave new world is not attractive. Mankind persistently learns the wrong lessons.

Into this frothing Petri dish falls Stagg, tall and handsome, riding on a column of fire. They force him through a ritualistic rebirth, graft a pair of antlers to his forehead and when the antlers get stiff so does Stagg. He travels from city to city amid great pomp and bloodshed copulating with screaming virgins who fight for the honor.

He ran faster, now and then giving great bounds into the air and uttering strange cries. They were sheer delight, exuberance, and nameless longings and their fulfillment. They were spoken in the language of the first men on Earth, the broken chaotic feeling-toward-speech the upright apes must have formed with clumsy tongues when they were trying to name the things around them. Stagg was not trying to name things. He was trying to name feelings. And he was having as little success as his ancestors a hundred thousand years before.

This cuts to the heart of the human experience. “Ontogeny recapitulates phylogeny”—the theory that a single organism goes through stages representing the evolution of the entire species. One of Farmer’s recurring themes is man reinventing himself. A professor passes through a secret door in a closet and becomes a warrior. An astronaut returns from a long voyage and becomes a primitive tribal king. We see this again and again in Farmer’s writing, and it is something he shares in common with a great many science fiction authors from Robert Louis Stevenson (
Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde
), Mary Shelley, A.E. van Vogt, and Asimov, right up to the present day.

It is science fiction’s job to examine the human experience through every lens and Farmer excels at it. Nor does he shy away from homosexuality. A gay tribe captures Stagg and the jockeying among its members for Stagg’s favors is pretty funny until he escapes and kills about a dozen.

Farmer failed to envision the threat of AIDS. No one faults him for all science fiction fans understand that life keeps throwing curves at you, faster and faster. Life keeps getting more complicated. Used to be you got ill you went to a doctor. Now you must appeal to a government board for treatment. There was no internet. Now it poses an addiction as serious as crack. Many modern problems are the direct result of intellectuals trying to solve problems. Farmer’s worlds aren’t like that. He goes in the opposite direction—stripping government of its authority if not doing away with it altogether, and decentralization.

Decentralization is a recurring sub-theme in
Flesh,
as society once again grows from the ground up. But to do that, Farmer had to depopulate the world, another Farmer obsession perhaps best exemplified by “Seventy Years of Decpop” but also present in the World of Tiers series. Stories dealing with depopulation, such as
I Am Legend,
appeal to an atavistic impulse to withdraw. They appeal to the greatest right not enshrined in the Bill of Rights, the right to be left alone which lies at the heart of much science fiction. Robert Heinlein comes to mind.

The sheer press of humanity, especially in cities, adds a level of stress for which the human body is not well prepared. “Hell is other people,” as Sartre observed. At the same time as Farmer correctly, sympathetically predicts the more extreme elements of the Green movement. He longs for a simpler time, more specifically, the period of manifest destiny before Americans had fully tamed their new continent. It is as central to the World of Tiers series as it is to
Flesh.

Another recurring Farmer theme is the role of religion and faith. Farmer visits this time and again, most notably in
Jesus on Mars
and
Night of Light,
and he does so here in the person of returning astronaut Sarvant, a devout Christian determined to proselytize while fighting his inner demons. As you can imagine, things do not end well for Sarvant.