Riverworld and Other Stories by Farmer Philip José

Author:Farmer, Philip José [Farmer, Philip José]
Language: eng
Format: mobi
ISBN: 9781504046091
Publisher: Open Road Media Sci-Fi & Fantasy
Published: 2017-05-05T00:00:00+00:00

The Jungle Rot Kid on the Nod

Foreword

I’ve written a number of Tarzan pastiches and also a biography of the lord of the jungle, known in England as the very cosmopolitan and cultured nobleman, Lord Greystoke. (Yes, Virginia, there is a real Tarzan.)

Edgar Rice Burroughs wrote highly fictionalized books about Tarzan, and it is his name that leaps to the mind when Tarzan is mentioned. (Unless you’re one of those people who know Tarzan only through the movies, and if you are you don’t know the real Tarzan.) I became hooked on Burroughs’ Tarzan books when I was very young and haven’t quite overcome this addiction yet.

But in recent years I’ve read and admired (though I’ll never get hooked on them) the works of another Burroughs, first name William. His stories, if you can call them stories, are composed in a wild absurdist style and put together with some very unconventional techniques. I especially recommend his Nova Express.

Almost all his works contain large elements of homosexuality, drug addiction, violence, sadism, masochism, paranoia, an aversion to and contempt for women, and an emphasis on the more nauseating aspects of this world (and other worlds, too).

The mixture of these sounds very unattractive, but his vaulting imagination and wild metaphors make his unique works mentally stimulating.

Unfortunately, even the most erudite reader is often puzzled by many of the references. They’re too subjective. Many of these can be understood by reading William Burroughs’ autobiography. Junkie. A reader shouldn’t have to go to this to comprehend William’s fiction. Nevertheless, even if the reader fails to grasp these references, he or she may find that his fiction is well worth reading and, in fact, mentally stimulating.

And so, one day, while rereading Nova Express. I thought: What if it had been William Burroughs, not Edgar Rice Burroughs, who had written the Tarzan books?

I was sure that there would be no market for such a double pastiche if I wrote it. The so-called obscenity and pornography in it would not keep it from being published. This was 1968, Henry Miller and William Burroughs were being published, and my own “Riders of the Purple Wage” had appeared in Harlan Ellison’s Dangerous Visions the year before. But the pastiche would not be accepted by any science-fiction magazine. For some reason I didn’t think of sending it to Playboy magazine. However, I doubt they would have taken it. The editors might have enjoyed it but would have thought it unsuitable for the majority of their readers.

Despite the lack of a sale, I wrote it because it seemed as if it would be fun doing so, and it was, and I wanted to find out if I could emulate William Burroughs’ style. It took three hours for the first writing. Two days later I went back to it and did the second and final draft in an hour.

Well, it did sell and almost immediately. But to a very strange publication. I mean by strange that it was the very last place I would have thought it would be sold to.

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