Franz Rottensteiner - Playing Around With Creation Philip Jose Farmer

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Science Fiction Studies

#2 = Volume 1, Part 2 = Fall 1973

Franz Rottensteiner

Playing Around with Creation: Philip José Farmer

Writing in The Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction for March, 1961,

Alfred Bester singled out Philip José Farmer as one of seven SF authors

meriting special praise: "Mr. Farmer's is the true courage, for he has the

strength to project into the dark where no preformed attitudes wait to

support him .... Mr. Farmer often shocks because he has had the courage to

extrapolate a harmless idea to its terrible conclusion" (p80). Let's take a

look at such extrapolating; and To Your Scattered Bodies Go, the first of a

series of stories, might be an appropriate subject, having won a "Hugo" as

the most popular SF novel of 1971 among American fans.

The basic idea of that novel is imaginative enough, and does justice to Mr.

Farmer's reputation of daring to handle controversial topics. All human

beings that ever lived up to the year 2002, when all but a few were

destroyed by extra-terrestrial visitors, have been resurrected along the

banks of a river 25 million miles or so long, which zigzags its way in anarrow valley on some artificial alien planet. All these humans, from the

Neanderthals to the moderns, thirty-six billion, six million, nine thousand

and thirty-seven in number (Mr. Farmer has industriously counted them),

find themselves exactly twenty-five years of age, stark naked, totally

hairless, the females all virgins the men circumcised. Why this should be so



is anybody's guess, but one assumes that Mr. Farmer threw in the

circumcision as a joke on Jew-haters. The virgins seem to be a special

bonus for characters that like to deflorate, so that the state of virginity is

soon remedied--but without much explicit description.

Population is distributed in different areas of the river valley according to a

fixed ratio: 60% of a particular nationality and century, 30% of some other

people, usually of a different time, and 10% from any time ,and place.

Food is no problem, since every individual is equipped with a "grail" that

delivers to him sustenance, such as beefsteaks, and other commodities,

including cigarettes: as far as food is concerned, this afterlife is a Land ofCockayne if you are careful not to lose your "grail". But in most other

respects it is a jungle, with men preying on each other, with warfare among

the various groups and small states, and "grail slavery." In fact, this

episodic novel is a chain of various battles, adventures (mostly of a bloody

kind) and fights that the heroes experience while traveling in this

world--and what better excuse for a quest than a gigantic meandering river?

With all beings awakening naked, there are initially some problem of

decorum (among Victorians, say), and the author manfully pleads for a

breaking of taboos; and since the function of the grails isn't obvious at

once, and there are no animals, a few good words are put in for

cannibalism, a favorite pastime among more "iconoclastic" SF authors. But

while there is no food, and no clothes, luckily there are stones to batter

heads in with, and bamboo to make spears for impaling bodies.

Aside from these familiar concerns and dutiful motions of any adventure

story, in or out of SF, there is a Big Philosophical Question. Why have all



humans been resurrected? Are they in heaven, hell, purgatory or whatever?

It soon transpires that it wasn't God who lent a helping hand but rather a

race of superior beings, called the "Ethicals" though they appear to be

villains. The purpose of their actions is unclear, but there are conflicting

theories. One of them is advanced by the "Church of the Second Chance",

among whose more illustrious members is a sympathetically portrayed

Hermann Goering (who seems to hold a special appeal for American SF

writers, to judge from the number of SF stories in which he has figured). It

holds that the Riverworld is a sort of purgatory to cleanse humans of all

impurities, and prepare them for an eternal bliss, which some saints are

supposed to have already achieved. This happens also to be the official

doctrine of the "Ethicals," as we discover when the book's protagonist,Richard Francis Burton, the 19th Century adventurer and translator of the

Thousand and One Nights, is brought before a tribunal in celebration of

his 777th death. For death in the Riverworld is not final, but an act

repeatable at will, although turning dying into a hobby isn't advisable, since,

the reader is told, the soul or "psychomorph" might get lost. Its ties with

the body are weakened by too many deaths, and one might truly die.

The other theory is advanced by a renegade Ethical called The Mysterious

Stranger--an allusion to a story by Mark Twain, whose name is taken in

vain for the hero of the second novel in the series, The Fabulous Riverboat

(1971). He contends that the Riverworld is a gigantic experiment, a

scientific test for finding out the reaction of human beings in various

situations, and for increasing the knowledge of history by interviewing the

resurrected humans. This Mysterious Stranger pretends to want to help

people, but he might lie, as might the other Ethicals. Aside from the fact

that there is no interviewing in the novel, this theory is nonsense, since any

race able to restore every person that ever lived, atom by atom, with all

memories intact, already knows so much about them as to be in no need of



interviewing them. What can you tell a being that knows every atom of

your structure, which is infinitely more than any man can know about

himself.

In any case, Richard Burton determines to find out the Truth, to arrive, at

the dark Grail Tower where the mysterious grail masters dwell. To do so,

he travels around, until he discovers a more original method of

transportation: teleportation by suicide. Since the resurrections occur at

different "grailstones" along the river, obeying a random principle, dying is

a method of statistical travel. Now I have no idea what Burton or the

heroes of the other books in the series, existing or forthcoming, will finallyfind out about the Ethicals, but on the evidence we have so far I am

prepared to bet that it is something not worth knowing, and just as banal as

what has passed before. For I contend that To Your Scattered Bodies Go

doesn't tell us anything meaningful about life, death, or the hereafter.

Rather, it presents little children playing with the marbles of space, time

and resurrection; its "afterlife" is merely one more stage for the same old

set of events which have been recounted in any number of novels ofadventure.

What little value the novel has lies wholly in the fact that it presents in an

almost pure form the particular method of mass-market SF--that is, playing

around with a limited set of elements that are combined and recombined to

infinity. A kaleidoscope of oddities that is simultaneously derivative,

self-perpetuating and incestuous; a mixtum compositum of almost

unlimited assimilative powers, ahistorical and devaluating; readily accepting

what is intellectually bankrupt, and bankrupting what initially had some

value, before it was drawn into the gigantic junk-yard of SF, where

everything is but a pretext for another cops-and-robbers story--regardless



how the figures are called, and whether the background is the earth, some

other planet, the galaxy, past, present or future, some other dimension, or

indeed the afterlife. Without paying notice to historical context,

environment or character, such SF throws together the customs and

institutions of different pasts, usually jazzed up with some hyperbolic

technology of the future (a never described technique of resurrection in

Mr. Farmer's case). What SF in general does metaphorically, Mr. Farmer

presents literally as his subject: the Riverworld is quite factually a world

where past, present and future meet, where historical context no longer

exists, and knowledge of milieu is no longer necessary, since all figures in

the story share the same uniform and artificial background. Even the

psychology of individuals and character development has given way tomere name-dropping: Mark Twain, Hermann Goering, Richard Francis

Burton, the "original" Alice. None of these humans has, as lively as some

of them are, any real relation to their historical "prototypes": what Mr.

Farmer has to offer is at best some commonly known lexicographical

information. A revival on such a gigantic scale would have offered a chance

of a unique meeting of minds; but all Mr. Farmer presents is the old trite

quarrel of survival and petty warfare. People who were noted for theirsharp minds are here reduced to pages and pages of inane mutterings, and

to playing at the old game of imprisonment and escape.

This series is also further proof, if such proof were needed, that

present-day SF, far from being the literature of change, is as a rule, very

conservative in methods as well as content. While paying lip-service to

change, and offering some background slightly changed in relation to the

author's environment, it actually comforts the reader with the palliative that

nothing will ever really change, that we'll always be again what we have

been before, in this world or the next; as below, so above; as on Earth, so

in the afterlife, Amen.



Ever since The Lovers (1961)--his first and, for all its faults, still most

interesting SF novel, along with Night of Light (1966)--three components,

intermixed in different ways and degrees, occur again and again in Mr.Farmer's work: religion, sex, and violence. Religion most often takes the

form of a fascinated, secularized preoccupation with creation. His creators,

however, lack any dignity or higher purpose; they appear childlike in their

creative omnipotence, playful, scheming, lying, deceitful--and not very

bright. In Outside Inside (1964), for instance, the hero, a social climber,

finds himself in a nightmare miniature world that presents the reverse side

of the Riverworld coin. It delineates not a world after death, but a prenatal world, where artificial souls, created again by a race of "Ethicals" (perhaps

the same as in To Your Scattered Bodies Go), are conditioned for life in

our world. Or so at least the hero is told in the end, which may or may not

be a lie (it seems likely that it is only a cruel joke of the "gods" to further

torment the characters of the story). For, again, the "explanation" makes

very little sense: if the Ethicals create immortal souls out of benevolence,

why "condition" those souls in a purgatory? This seems to indicate a very

poor engineering job, for why not create souls that have the desired

qualities in the first place? And the straightening out job seems as poor.

Sexual perverts, for instance, are treated in the following way: "So, the

Exchange castrated them, cut out their tongues, amputated-all four limbs,

and thus made them unable to offend or harm anybody, even themselves."

The Ethicals really must have very curious educational theories, and Mr.

Farmer is aware of the irony of the situation: he has a "demon" comment

in the story that the perverts, to spite their creators, get more vicious all thetime.

Equally cruel is the afterlife pocket-universe in "A Bowl Bigger than



Earth," a short story in Mr. Farmer's collection Down in the Black Gang

(1971). There, human beings find themselves thrown into an intestine

shaped world, imprisoned in identical sexless bodies, and subjected to

mindless drudgery. This world is truly hell, and they are punished if they so

much as utter the word; insult is added to injury in that they are required to

exclaim that they positively like their toiling and that things couldn't be

better.

What does this all suggest? Farmer presents hellish worlds, before birth and

after it, into which, a vague hope is introduced only as an additional

torture. They depict various degrees of degradation of man, and reject theautonomy of human values and human beings. These stories proclaim the

Fortean doctrine that man is only property, utterly at the mercy of beings

with remarkable powers, "gods" or "Ethicals," who appear to be childlike,

prankish, sadistic dimwits, taking delight only in causing pain and suffering.

Even death offers no escape from the torturers, since it has lost its

uniqueness and become a playful act that can be reversed or repeated at

will. "As flies to wanton boys, are we to the gods, / They kill us for theirsport."

The author of such "gods" does in fiction what they are supposed to do in

reality: he plays around with shocking situations and possibilities, without

justifying them or giving them a larger meaning. Sometimes these creations

are, in their vividness of description, remarkable as fruits of a grotesque

imagination; but I think they are never of any importance as speculative

thought, as intellectual effort. Of the three components, religion, sex and

violence, the last seems by far the strongest, and to be gaining in strength

with time. Sex if often restricted to a few puns, some "bad" language

(which hardly seems anything but cursory), and a few acts deviating from



what is considered "proper"; more essential in these stories are the many

acts of maiming, mutilating, torturing and killing. The most significant

argument for this is perhaps the fact that Mr. Farmer unabashedly

continued one of his most far-out sex-books, the hardcore pornography A

Feast Unknown (1969), in two "clean" novels: Lord of the Trees /The Mad

Goblin (Ace Double, 1970). Does it not seem strange that a writer in

whose work sex is said to be so central, should find it so easy to delete all

sex in a sequel? Such an act, one would assume, would change the whole

nature of a story, turn it into something else altogether. That Mr. Farmer

did it so effortlessly, seems typical of him and SF in particular, and the

civilization it mirrors in general. Sex can come and go, as commercial

considerations make it necessary; the atrocities and violence are constant,for nobody objects to that. At least not the editors, the publishers, or the

Hugo Award voters.

ABSTRACT

What SF in general does metaphorically, Farmer presents literally as his

subject: his Riverworld in To Your Scattered Bodies Go is quite factually a

world where past, present, and future meet, where historical context no

longer exists, and where knowledge of milieu is no longer necessary, since

all figures in the story share the same uniform and artificial background.

Even the psychology of individuals and character development have given

way to mere name-dropping: Mark Twain, Hermann Goering, Richard

Francis Burton, the "original" Alice. These humans have no relationship to

their historical prototypes: at best, all Farmer has to offer is common



lexicographical information. A revival on such a grand scale would have

offered a chance of a unique meeting of minds, but all Mr. Farmer presents

is the old trite quarrel of survival and petty warfare. People who were noted

for their sharp minds are here reduced to pages and pages of inane

mutterings, and to playing the old game of imprisonment and escape.

Franz Rottensteiner - Playing Around With Creation Philip Jose Farmer

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