Seekers of Tomorrow (53 page)

His spare time was heavily occupied with reading. Already Edgar Rice Burroughs, H. Rider Haggard, A. Conan Doyle, Jules Verne, and Carl H. Claudy were at the top of his list, and when he spotted the first (June, 1929) issue of science wonder stories it was as if Diogenes had found a reason to blow out his lamp. His first job, in 1935 and 1936, was summer work as a ground man for Illinois Central Power and Light, Peoria, where his father was employed as engineer and supervisor. He tried attending Bradley College during 1936-37 and then dropped out for full-time work as a ground man. He reen-tered Bradley in 1940, and there he met Bette Virginia Andre, then a freshman. They were married the spring of 1941. A first child, Philip Laird, was born in 1942 and a second, Kristen, in 1945. To support his family, he worked eleven straight years from mid-1940 as a laborer, billet-chopper, and inspector for Keystone Steel & Wire, Barton-ville, Illinois. It took him until 1950, attending nights, to secure his B.A. in English from Bradley. Farmer had written imaginatively and at length since his fifth grade. His early efforts were in the heroic tradition, placed in the eras of the Romans and the Vikings with an occasional venture in the African and Malayan jungles. Farmer wrote and had rejected by astounding science-fiction two short stories highly imitative of Stanley G. Wein-baum. A science-fiction novel had been returned from argosy with a polite letter. Controversial stories submitted to the Saturday evening post and good housekeeping were "hurled back."

Nevertheless, the first tale was a good one. He had written a story called
O'Brien and Obrenov,
in which American and Russian soldiers jointly occupy a German town. They draw a chalk mark through the center of it separating zones of influence. A Nazi war criminal they flush out, when subdued, is flat on his back across the division line. He is held supine four days while O'Brien and Obrenov, the American and Russian commanders, negotiate over who is to claim him. The matter is solved when a statue of Goethe, with a sword in his hand, is pushed over, splitting the prisoner's head open. The Saturday evening post offered to buy the story if a drunk scene were excised. Farmer refused and sent it to argosy. They didn't want it, but passed it on to their compan-ion magazine, adventure, where it was purchased by editor Kenneth White and run in the March, 1946, number. Two more tries at adventure were refused. Farmer decided he just didn't have it and went back to working hard in the steel mill days and reading omnivorously nights.

One evening in 1951, something in a book on biology he was going through reminded him of another volume he had recently read on ant parasites. He vividly recalled the use of the subject matter in Bob Olsen's
The Ant with a Human Soul
(in amazing stories quarterly for Spring-Summer, 1932). He began to amplify possibilities and the next he knew he was immersed in writing the first draft of
The Lovers.
The final version was turned down by John Campbell at astounding science-fiction as "nauseating." H. L. Gold of galaxy science fiction sent it back and later offered divers justifications, including the fear that the story supposi-tion of the rise of Israel to world power and the springing up of a new religion led by a half-Jewish character might be misunderstood. He also felt the story should have been rewritten in the present with the lalitha as historical influ-ences on earth.

When the story was sent to startling stories, it was first read by assistant editor Jerome Bixby, a well-known author in his own right, who enthusiastically recommended it to Sam Mines, the editor, and science-fiction history was in the making.

A man with a T-bone steak on his mind is not likely to be distracted by the offer of crepes suzettes, no matter how tasty. So it was that Farmer's next story, a short titled
Sail On! Sail On!,
was dismissed by readers as an appetizer rather than heartier fare.

That was a mistake.

Sail
On! Sail On!
is a story of parallel worlds, where Ptolemy is right. Where Roger Bacon is encouraged by the Church and begins an age of invention including electricity, radio, and the electric light. Where Columbus is turned down by Queen Isabella of Spain and sent out by the Church instead. Where frantic messages from outer space are decod-ed too late to prevent the ships from sailing off the edge of the Earth.
Sail
On! Sail On!
is a classic, not merely because of its clever ending, but because in plan and execution it is no less than brilliant. Few who have read the story are likely to forget the punch line: "They had run out of horizon."

The lack of response did not discourage Farmer. The readers' columns of startling stories were still full of letters of comment on
The Lovers,
most of them highly laudatory. Shasta Publishers, a Chicago firm specializing in science fiction, had contracted to put
The Lovers
out in book form. Hugo Gernsback, who had returned to science-fiction publishing with science-fiction plus, a slick-paper, large-size magazine, solicited stories from the new sensation. Farm-er was feeling no pain.

On rush order Farmer turned out a novelette for science-fiction plus called
The Bite of the Asp,
in which the protag-onist is injected with a protein molecule which causes his body to expel matter that arouses an unreasoning fear in any living creature approaching too closely. Hastily written, the story required rewriting. When finally published as
The Biolog-ical Revolt
in the first issue of science-fiction plus, March, 1953, the work was badly mangled editorially. Despite this, it won an overwhelming first place in readers' preference from a return of 2,000 return-postage cards bound into the magazine. The anger Farmer felt at the published version of
The Biological Revolt
was quickly dissipated by the reader reac-tion to his novelette,
Mother,
which appeared at almost the same time in the April, 1953, thrilling wonder stories. In many ways this story was even better than
The Lovers.
From reading a criticism of Freud, Farmer had conceived of a plot involving a literal return to the womb. The "womb," in this case, is a tremendous otherworldly female, outwardly resem-bling a rock-encrusted hill, forever stationary, and able to reproduce only by attracting roving beasts with blasts of appropriate mating scents. Any moving creature that gets close is seized and dragged into a gigantic womb. When the trapped animal attempts to claw its way out of a prison of flesh and muscle, the irritation it produces on the walls provides the stimulus for conception. Having performed its function, it is then digested.

Mother
is the story of an Earthman, always dependent on his mother, who is thus trapped by one of the organisms, communicates with the organism that has captured him, and then makes the gigantic womb his permanent home.

The announcement that
Moth and Rust,
a sequel to
The Lovers,
would appear in the June, 1953, startling stories was big news in the science-fiction world. The story, howev-er, substantially longer than
The Lovers,
received only a lukewarm reception. It was not a sequel at all. The only points of similarity were that it took place in the Earth culture that had made contact with the Wogs and the lalitha. Actually, it is a fast-moving cloak-and-dagger novel of the future, comparable in theme to
1984.
Isolating and outlining the nature of the sex in the story would suggest pornography, but in context it must have proved rather disappointing to those who read the novel for kicks. Religion rather than sex is the major story ingredient. Farmer explores the rise and nature of hypothetical new religions of the future with the same scientific objectivity with which he previously outlined the sex life of aliens. His sex stories are no more off-color than his religious prognostications are blasphemous, which is not at all. This was particularly true of his handling of
Strange Compulsion
(science-fiction plus, October, 1953) in which the theme of possible involuntary incest brought about through parasite infestation was handled so clinically that it almost slowed the story to a stop.

By the time of the 11th Annual World Science Fiction Convention in Philadelphia, September 6, 1953, Philip Jose Farmer seemed to be riding on the crest of a wave. He was presented with the first of the series of awards later to become known as Hugos as the best new science-fiction author of 1952. Appropriately enough, the subject of his talk that day was "Science Fiction and the Kinsey Report." Startling stories had announced that it was going to run its first serial novel ever, an 80,000-worder by Farmer entitled
A Beast of the Fields.
The story was paid for but never published, because startling stories had become a bi-monthly. The action takes place fifty years hence on a planet around a nearby star. "The hero is a descendant of one of the members of the so-called Lost Colony of Roanoke, Virginia, having been forcibly removed from North America, along with the baby Virginia Dare, and trans-planted to the far-off planet," according to the author's summary.

The most dramatic event of the year for Farmer proved to be a contest sponsored by Shasta Publishers, offering $1,000 for the best new novel submitted, plus $3,000 for paperback rights from Pocket Books, Inc. Farmer spent every working hour for thirty days producing a 100,000-word novel,
I
Owe for the Flesh.
The plot dealt with all of humanity being resurrected along the banks of a river ten million miles long on a faraway planet, with Sir Richard Francis Burton brought to life as the major character. Sent in just under the wire,
I
Owe for the Flesh
won the contest, beating out, among others,
The
Power
by Frank M. Robinson, which since has become, financially, one of the most successful contemporary science-fiction novels. Ecstatic, Farmer left Peoria for Chicago to be photographed with the top men of Shasta and the vice president of Pocket Books, Inc.

In the early flush of accomplishment, he threw up his job at Keystone Steel & Wire for full-time writing. He secured an agent to help him sell to the big-time markets, and when he sold
Queen of the Deep
to argosy (March, 1954), concern-ing a robot Russian submarine which captures an American and then is outdone in a game of wits, man against machine, it appeared that he was really on his way. This story is better known as
Son,
under which title it appeared in the 1960 Ballantine Books collection of Farmer's stories,
Strange Rela-tions.

Undeterred by a number of rejections, he made the pages of the magazine of fantasy and science fiction with
Attitudes,
the first of a series of tales about a space priest named Father John Carmody, who was to become a popular character.

But then Shasta asserted Pocket Books was not satisfied with
I
Owe for the Flesh
and had requested a revision. This done, a second rewriting was asked for. Because of the novel's length, months passed by and no money came in. Payments on the mortgage fell in arrears. Finally, Farmer had his agent get in touch with Pocket Books to find out just what it was they wanted. He learned that they had never asked for any rewriting, that they had sent their $3,000 through some time back and were waiting for hard-cover publication. Full payment never came through and the book was never pub-lished because Shasta foundered. Farmer lost his house, his wife became ill, and, in desperation, he secured a job with a local dairy. His literary career seemed to have blown up in his face. Depressed, he ceased writing. Stories continued to appear through 1954, but they had been previously writ-ten.

Of special interest was a long novelette,
Rastignac the Devil,
which was published in the May, 1954, issue of Leo Margulies' new magazine, fantastic universe. Actually this story was related to
The Lovers,
for the protagonist, Rasti-gnac, will eventually become the sire of Jeannette, the unfor-tunate lalitha who died for the love of Earthman Yarrow. Like
More Than Human,
by Theodore Sturgeon, it explores the area of gestalt relationships, in this case made possible by "skins," living organisms voluntarily worn by the inhabitants of the planet New Gaul which keep them attuned to other wearers and prick them like a physical conscience when they do wrong.

There is a wealth of fine ideas in this story, including a philosophical justification for a cult of violence (as opposed to Gandhian nonviolence) to counter the conditioning leading to the enslavement by the "skins." Here, Farmer's om-nipresent sense of humor, which grimaces in even the most solemn of his efforts, plays him false.
Rastignac the Devil
degenerates into a satiric farce where the "ancient secret" of using alcohol to get drunk renders the "skins" ineffective, and the obvious parody of Seabury Quinn's popular occult detec-tive, Jules de Grandin, with exclamations of
"Sacre Bleu!"
by clergyman Father Jules, makes it impossible to take the story seriously.

This same wild sense of humor came close to blasting Farmer's reputation in
Daughter
(thrilling wonder sto-ries, Winter, 1945), a sequel to
Mother.
Expecting something equally fascinating and thought-provoking, readers were giv-en a spoof of
Mother,
told in the vein of
The Three Little Pigs.
Actually,
Daughter
is extremely clever and good fun, but to readers approaching it without warning soon after reading
Mother
it was devastatingly disappointing.

Only a single story by Philip Jose Farmer appeared during 1955 and 1956 when he all but abandoned writing to nurse his economic wounds and regain the will to try again. That story was a not altogether successful novelette,
Father
(fan-tasy and science fiction, July, 1955), with a plot so ambi-tious that it must have been a prime factor in provoking Alfred Bester to comment: "Mr. Farmer has too much engine for his rear axle." The story concerned one gigantic "Man" who has fathered an entire planet's life forms and offers a Bishop, a friend of Father Carmody's, a chance to play temporary God while he is on a leave of absence. It is in this story that Father Carmody takes on character as a rather pious incarnation of Jack Williamson's Giles Habibula. How he got that way was revealed two years later in
The Night of the Light
(fantasy and science fiction, June, 1957).