But I’m not too unhappy about being who I am. I just have one worry that nags at me whenever I lie awake at night unable to sleep (because I don’t exist; whoever heard of a nonexistent entity sleeping?) And that worry is this: I was created as a byproduct of writer’s block. If my father, Farmer, hadn’t had that block at that time, it’s very unlikely I would be here.
Now then, birth is the opposite of death. So if I was created by a block, then what will kill me will be the opposite of that, in other words creative flow. Farmer is no longer with us. He’s on the other side now. And that’s the biggest block any writer can ever have: to have shuffled off this mortal coil. But what if he starts writing again on the other side? Creative flow is the opposite of a writer’s block and the opposite of a block is death to me. If Farmer starts writing again, wherever he is now, I might somehow vanish… I know that’s bizarre logic and an obscure thing to fret about. But I am bizarre. Remember: I’m writing this article even though I’m fictional!
I can almost feel someone walking over my grave right now, even though I won’t have a grave because I don’t have a solid body to bury, but the figure of speech is appropriate; and rather bizarrely I can reveal that its first recorded use in print was in Simon Wagstaff’s A Complete Collection of Genteel and Ingenious Conversation, published in 1738. The date isn’t an error. This was a different Simon Wagstaff, one of the pseudonyms of the satirist Jonathan Swift. Talk about recursion!
And where is Farmer now, I hear you ask? Well, I don’t know. But I’ll say this: a great many obituaries pictured him waking up along the banks of the million-mile-long river that was one of his most amazing creations in a creative life full of astounding concepts. And yet… As I mentioned earlier, Farmer was the greatest ever master of a type of writing called Bangsian Fantasy. I’d never even heard of Bangsian Fantasy until recently. It’s named after the mostly forgotten writer John Kendrick Bangs (1862-1922), whose most famous book was House-Boat on the Styx, in which Charon upgrades from his leaky old skiff to a luxurious boat capable of holding many dead people at once, dead people who happen to have been real in your world and not just invented by Bangs.
What if Farmer is a guest on that house-boat right now? What if he has managed to get hold of some writing materials? What if he’s saying to himself, “Hey, Charon, let’s do a collaboration! Why don’t we write a story pretending to be Trout; maybe a story about what happens when Jonathan Swift Somers III dies and wakes up on the banks of a million-mile-long river!”
That’s my worry. Or my hope. I’m not sure which.
AFTERWORD
MORE REAL THAN LIFE ITSELF: PHILIP JOSÉ FARMER’S FICTIONAL-AUTHOR PERIOD
BY CHRISTOPHER PAUL CAREY
“The unconscious is the true democracy. All things, all people, are equal.”
By one count, Philip José Farmer, a Grand Master of Science Fiction, has written and had published fifty-four novels and one hundred and twenty-nine novellas, novelettes, and short stories. Creatively, Farmer’s work is equally ambitious. In 1952, he authored the groundbreaking “The Lovers,” which at long last made it possible for science fiction to deal with sex in a mature manner. He is the creator of Riverworld, arguably one of the grandest experiments in science fiction literature. His World of Tiers series, which combines rip-roaring adventure with pocket universes full of mythic archetypes, is said to have inspired Zelazny’s Chronicles of Amber series and is often cited as a favorite among Farmer’s fans. And in the early 1970s, he penned the authorized biographies of Tarzan and Doc Savage and inspired generations of creative mythographers to explore and expand upon his Wold Newton mythos. Yet among all of these shining minarets of his opus, Farmer has stated that he has never had so much fun in all his life as when he wrote Venus on the Half-Shell.
I believe it is no coincidence that this novel belongs to what Farmer has labeled his “fictional-author” series. A fictional-author story is, as defined by Farmer, “a tale supposedly written by an author who is a character in fiction.” Many of Farmer’s readers are aware that Venus on the Half-Shell originally appeared in print as if authored by Kurt Vonnegut’s character Kilgore Trout. However, most are not aware that Farmer, in league with several of his writer peers and at least one major magazine editor, masterminded an expansive hoax on the science fiction readership that spanned a good portion of the 1970s.
As with Farmer’s usual modus operandi, the plan was ambitious. Beginning in about 1973-74, in true postmodern reflexivity, a whole team of writers acting under Farmer’s direction were to begin submitting fictional-author tales to the short fiction markets. Farmer’s files, to which the author kindly gave me access, reveal that his plan of attack was executed with focus, precision, and a great deal of forethought.
The authors queried to write the fictional-author stories were instructed that “the real author is to be nowhere mentioned; it’s all done straight-facedly.” Each story would be accompanied by a short biographical preface giving the impression that the fictional author was indeed a living person. However, all copyrights were to be honored; those who chose to write stories “by” the characters of other authors would need to contact those creators for permission. Sometimes Farmer himself wrote the creator and, having received permission, then handed over the fictional-author story to his fellow conspirator to complete. Authors were encouraged to submit their stories to whatever market they pleased, although the majority were to appear in The Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction, whose editor, Edward L. Ferman, was in on the joke. Once enough of the stories had been published in various markets, Farmer himself planned to take on the role of editor and collect them all in a fictional-author anthology.
Writing even before the fallout with Kurt Vonnegut (which is described in great detail by Farmer in his “Why and How I Became Kilgore Trout”), Farmer placed great emphasis on literary ethics during the execution of his hoax. Even authors whose characters had lapsed into the public domain—and whom Farmer and his cohorts could have used legally without payment of royalties—were offered 50% of any monies made by the publication of a fictional-author story (a stipulation that appears to have been waived by all of those who granted Farmer permission). Provisions were made for the original authors and their agents to receive copies of the stories upon publication. And always, Farmer made clear that his request to write a story under the name of an author’s character was his intimate tribute to said author.
While the vast majority of those queried for the use of their characters granted permission, a couple did not. Farmer wrote respectful, though clearly disappointed, replies to these authors, explaining again that he only meant to honor them with the stories, but that in deference to them he would withdraw his offers and pursue them no further. Most authors, however, reacted much differently and became infected by the passion that seemed to ooze from Farmer when he proposed to them his audacious hoax. Nero Wolfe author Rex Stout, besides granting permission to write the story “The Volcano” under the name of his character Paul Chapin, was tickled enough to suggest that Farmer should also author stories by Anna Karenina and Don Quixote. Farmer’s correspondence indicates that he planned on doing just that. P. G. Wodehouse, author of the Jeeves and Blandings Castle stories, also tried to come up with alternative fictional-authors among his own works that could be used, and it is telling of the excitement surrounding Farmer’s fictional-author conceit that multiple authors queried for permission enthusiastically consented by exclaiming the phrase “Of course” within the first paragraph of their replies. Occasionally, permissions went in the other direction. J. T. Edson, the author of many Westerns, sought permission to use Farmer’s Wold Newton genealogy as the basis for his own characters’ ancestry in his Bunduki series, a request Farmer happily approved; and while the Wold Newton genealogy was not exclusively related to the proposed fictional-author series, it remains clear that Farmer was pleased to interweave the two concepts in several instances.