The Classic Philip José Farmer, 1964–1973

Hold on to your space helmets and get ready for a bumpy ride through the wild and wonderful universe of Philip José Farmer, the critically acclaimed author of some of the most unusual and provocative stories ever to stretch the definition of science fiction. Here is the bizarre ”Riders of the Purple Wage”, a baffling and indescribable story full of Joycean puns and witticism. Farmer plays games with time in ”The Sliced-Crosswise Only-on-Tuesday World”, where the planet is so overcrowded that people are permitted to live only one day each week and are stored in hibernation for six days out of every seven. Again, in ”Sketches Among the Ruins of My Mind”, a mysterious object orbiting Earth makes people forget the past four days every time they go to sleep. In ”Jungle Rot Kid on the Nod”, Farmer asks what would have happened if William Burroughs instead of Edgar Rice Burroughs had written the Tarzan novels. In these wide-ranging parodies Farmer reveals himself to be a writer of many styles with a propensity for surrealist experimentation and as a man who believes that there is no reason why science fiction can't borrow from and be part of the mainstream literary tradition.