Tag Archives: Philip José Farmer

Flight to Opar

Hermetic Library Fellow T Polyphilus reviews Flight to Opar [Amazon, Abebooks, Local Library] by Philip José Farmer, illo Roy G Krenkel.

Farmer Flight to Opar

Flight to Opar is the second of two Opar books that Farmer set in 10,000 BCE Africa. Because the first (Hadon of Opar) ends on a cliffhanger, and Flight includes some digestible recapitulation, the second could stand alone while its predecessor does not. Roy Krenkel’s art is more legible and engaging in this volume than in the previous one (in my copies anyhow).

Even without the incompleteness of its predecessor, this one gathers speed towards its abrupt finish and entirely dispenses with denouement. Character development is sparing, and the prose is workmanlike. Despite all of the abundant action, these are ultimately books of ideas, centered on the imagined world: the culture and vanished history of a pre-patriarchal human empire. There is even more attention in this second book to various ceremonial functions, technological circumstances, and modes of personal status, which are some of the features that go to make this world interesting and credible.

Although Farmer’s nods to model literature are mostly to Burroughs’ Tarzan (whence the city of Opar), he has clearly incorporated a lot of ideas from H. Rider Haggard’s “lost civilizations” of Africa, and mixed in his own readings of Frazerian anthropology and 20th-century gender theories.

Hadon of Ancient Opar

Hermetic Library Fellow T Polyphilus reviews Hadon of Ancient Opar [Amazon, Abebooks, Local Library] by Philip Jose Farmer, illo Roy G Krenkel, with essays by Frank Brueckel and John Harwood.

Farmer Hadon of Ancient Opar

Hadon of Ancient Opar is a “prequel” to the Tarzan books of Edgar Rice Burroughs, if the term can be applied when the respective narratives are separated by a chronology of some twelve millennia! The story is set in and around the empire of Khokarsa, a civilization surrounding the interior seas of prehistoric Africa. 

During the events of Hadon, Khokarsa is on the cusp of potential change into a violent partriarchy from a matrifocal culture ruled by priestesses, with the eagle-headed goddess Kho being supplanted by the flaming god Resu. (The story thus bears interesting comparison to Aleister Crowley’s ancient Egyptian fantasy “Across the Gulf.”) Khokarsan religion involves a stunning frequency of blood sacrifice as a matter of routine, and the culture combines a high bronze-age level of technological development with totemistic, quasi-tribal social organization. 

The story begins with the youth Hadon going to compete in the great games of Khokarsa that are supposed to produce a suitor for the High Priestess of the empire. (Thus, the winner could become king.) Hadon encounters many obstacles to his ambitions, but remains a virtuous hero throughout the book. He is loyal to the old regime of Kho, and when a partisan of Resu proffers a paraphrase of Exodus 20:5, he characterizes it as “insanity” (159). There is a frank acceptance of sex in Khokarsan culture, but Hadon’s adventures here involve much more violence than sex.

Appendices to the book provide about twenty-five pages of maps and chronology, but they are largely superfluous, and they appear to have been the product of Farmer’s development of the Khokarsan context from the article “Heritage of the Flaming God, an Essay on the History of Opar and Its Relationship to Other Ancient Cultures” by Frank Brueckel and John Harwood in The Burroughs Bulletin. Roy Krenkel’s dozen or so illustrations for Hadon are ink renderings in a loose style, that were probably dynamic and exciting in the originals, but mostly come across as muddy and incoherent in their reproductions here. 

The most important observation I can offer to potential readers of this book is that it is not a stand-alone novel. It ends with a cliffhanger, and the sequel Flight to Opar takes up at the very instant that Hadon ends. Farmer repeatedly implies that he is kicking off a long series of books with Hadon, but Flight was the only other Khokarsa/Opar book to be published during his lifetime. It appears that Christopher Paul Carey has subsequently brought further materials into print, posthumously developed from Farmer’s MSS.

Venus on the Half-Shell

Hermetic Library Fellow T Polyphilus reviews Venus on the Half-Shell [Amazon, Amazon (1975), Bookshop, Publisher, Local Library] by Kilgore Trout (Philip José Farmer).

Kilgore Farmer Venus on the Half Shell 1975

Farmer Venus on the Half Shell

This interstellar picaresque novel by Philip José Farmer was written under a pseudonym taken from a fictional author described by Kurt Vonnegut. To pile Pelion upon Ossa, “Trout” has his main character refer often to the life and works of an imaginary 20th-century American science fiction writer named Jonathan Swift Somers III.

Many 21st-century readers will compare this book to Douglas Adams’ later Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy. Both begin with the destruction of terrestrial humanity, aside from the protagonist who then becomes a wanderer in outer space. The book is full of allusions to The Wizard of Oz, but I think that The Phantom Tollbooth is also a likely influence. The prose style reminds me of no one so much as R. A. Lafferty, for the sake of qualities I find difficult to describe. The humor in “Trout’s” book is a little more broad that what I usually find in Lafferty, the atmosphere decidedly less mystical. 

The book recounts the adventures of the banjo-playing Simon Wagstaff, a character who was promptly animated in my mind by the ghost of Duane Adam Rostoker. Following the calamity that visits the Earth during Simon’s visit to the Sphinx at Giza, he quickly acquires animal companions after the manner of Nietzsche’s Zarathustra, but Simon’s are a dog and an owl, perhaps figuring his “lower” and “higher” awarenesses. 

The proper names in the story are a raft of anagrams, from the randy cat planet Shaltoon that is a hot Salon, to the planet Longalor of nomadic wheel-creatures who roll aLong. The beautiful android Chwortkap is a patChwork of the optimized DNA of hundreds of donors. These and many others put me in mind of James Branch Cabell, whose Jurgen may also have been a model for Farmer here. 

Although replete with frank sexual content, Venus on the Half-Shell is not really erotic at all. It merely refuses to repress the importance of sex in the dilemma of life. It contains a variety of episodes with different intelligent species that demonstrate the illusions and falsehoods that enslave societies and individuals (“yet therein is the mystery of redemption” –Liber B). The whole thing reads quite quickly and can be written off as a farce, serve as a puzzle, or even inspire serious reflection.