Dr. Simon Reads Appendix N Part Eleven: Philip José Farmer

Dr. Simon Reads Appendix N Part Eleven: Philip José Farmer

 

This is an ongoing sporadic series, in which I explore classic fantasy and science fiction works. Appendix N is the bibliography of Gary Gygax's original Dungeon Masters Guide, and lists a range of classic SF and fantasy authors that influenced his interest in the fantastical. See the first part of this series for more information.

This time around, I have reached the works of:

Philip José Farmer

Farmer was born in Indiana in 1918, but although he wrote and published short stories sporadically from 1953 onwards, while working as a technical writer, but produced the bulk of his works in the early 70s, especially his two main series; the Riverworld series, and the World of Tiers, which is the one that gets a mention in Appendix N, and so is the one that I’ve covered here.

Farmer continued to write all the way up until he died in 2008, and some the last two books in the World of Tiers series are written in the early 90s. Thus I’ve ignored them for the purposes of this blog, since they won’t have influenced a young Gary Gygax at the time of the DMG’s publication in 1979.

The World of Tiers series

Although, for me, the name Philip José Farmer is synonymous with the Riverworld saga (having first seen his name, when looking for Appendix N books long ago, on The Fabulous Riverboat), this is the series that gets recommended in Appendix N, and in the updated Appendix E.

There are seven books in the sequence in total; I only read the first five written in the 1960s -1970s, and not the later 1990s instalments. They are set in a multiverse of artificial worlds, created by immortal “Lords” for their own amusement, and inhabited with humans plucked from their worlds, and strange beasts grown in their labs and released. The Lords are a squabbling family of humans that have long since lost sight of their humanity thanks to their great technological power and longevity making them like gods. This does not, however, stop them from fighting one another with treacherous games.

The first book, The Maker of Universes, concerns one Robert Wolff, who is drawn out of his humdrum life on Earth into a strange land filled with creatures from Greek Mythology when a mysterious figure, Kickaha, gives him a magical macguffin, a horn. Wolff and his love interest Chryseis (who may be the Chryseis of Homeric myth, or may have been based on her) are pursued by the bestial gworls, some kind of orc/beastman kind of monster. It turns out that the world they are in is something like a wedding cake, the World of Tiers of the title, with a massive climb up to successive layers, each set within the centre of the lower one and progressively smaller. Above “Okeanos”, where Greek myth lives in an idyllic Polynesian paradise, is the Amerind level, where great herds of buffalo roam, and various pseudo-Native American peoples contend with the centaur-like Horse-Men. Above that is Dracheland, a kind of weird Crusader setting full of Germanic and Yiddish knights, above that Atlantis, and finally the palace of the Lord of this world.

As Wolff, Chryseis and Kickaha climb ever upwards, we, and they, learn more about what has happened. It turns out the Wolff is actually Jadawin, the original Lord of this world, cast out by a rival and living with amnesia as a human. This plotline is very similar to Robert Silverberg’s Lord Valentine’s Castle, and it also put me in mind of Zelazny’s Amber series. And, funnily enough, Book 3 has a foreword by Zelazny admitting that this series inspired him. Oh, and of course, his experiences make Wolff/Jadawin one of the few Lords to have a conscience and regret using people as playthings.

Books 2 and 3, The Gates of Creation and A Private Cosmos, take place concurrently. In The Gates of Creation, Wolff/Jadawin is trapped with a bunch of his murderous, squabbling siblings by their father, who wants rid of them. They pass through various weird and disturbing world (my favourite being the one made of nearly frictionless material, inhabited by creatures with suction-cup feet). 

Book 3, A Private Cosmos, details what happens in the World of Tiers while Wolff/Jadawin is away. Kickaha (real name, the authorial insert Paul Janus Finnegan (PJF) from Terre Haute Indiana) ends up teaming with one of Wolff’s sisters, Anana, against a menace known by the somewhat awkward name of the Black Bellers. These are artificial intelligences created by the Lords, resembling bell-shaped automata that can extract and replace the mind of Lords and humans. And, Holy Battlestar Galactica (or, Holy Skynet) they turned on the Lords, and thus began a ten-thousand year battle.

Here, the last fifty Bellers have begun to invade Wolff’s world, with various adventures and narrow escapes, before finally the last one escapes through a portal (or gate, as they are in these books) to Earth.

And in Behind The Walls of Terra, Kickaha and Anana pursue the last Beller through a teeth-grindingly awful pastiche of 1960s Earth, where Kickaha in the process learns that Earth, rather than being the original universe, is itself merely an artifice of the Lords (along with a parallel Earth that was identical 150,000 years ago but has long since developed along other lines). Here the face off against the Beller, the Lord of Earth Red Orc, and a usurper Lord called Urthona.

Urthona leads them all into a trap, a giant gate, that transports them to one of his own creations, which we get to explore further in The Lavalite World.

Phew. That’s a lot of summary.

 

The books are very frenetic, leaping (much like Kickaha) from one peril to the next, and by the time we get to the Lavalite World there’s also a rather irritating “Your Princess is in Another Castle” theme arising.  In fact, it became so frustrating that I gave up before the final two volumes in the series (given that both of these were written in the early 90s, and the Dungeon Master’s Guide published in the late 70s, I also felt somewhat vindicated at bugging out since these didn’t exist at the time).

But, really, the Lavalite World in particular is an exercise in frustration. Kickaha and Anana (plus another companion who is just whisked offscreen towards the end) spend most of their time chasing after a floating citadel (belonging to the erstwhile master of this world, Urthona). Urthona himself is a much a prisoner of his own creation as the other characters, but spends most of the time offscreen.

Just as our heroes are about to reach the citadel, they are carried off as part of the world buds off to form a temporary moon, as it sometimes does. We then get another three to four chapters covering several months whereby they devise a scheme to get back to the main planet, and then they spend several more months in story time getting back to where they were at the beginning of the digression. And this is just one of many such frustrating events.  And, worst of all, once they finally get to the citadel and have the climactic showdown, things have moved on no further than they did at the start of the book. At the start of the previous book, almost.

This aside, I didn’t come away enamoured with Farmer’s style, it was all just a little too mannered, the characters a little too much archetypes rather than people – Kickaha/Finnegan himself pretty much consciously styles himself a Trickster (which, as I recall, is the translation of “kickaha”). Everyone else is pretty much a miserable grouch, the most interesting character is Wolff’Jadawin’s brother Theotormon, a tragic being mutated into an ugly fish-like creature by his siblings. And once again it’s one of those series where the shape of their breasts is an important character trait of the female characters.

I don’t think I’ll be rushing back to Farmer. I preferred the way Zelazny does a similar plot, and for general Saturday Morning Serial style hijinks, I preferred, say, Burroughs, because at least his plots go somewhere.

I didn’t spot any obvious and direct influences, except for a general multiverse feel, but certainly one could take pretty much all of the world settings and borrow from them. The idea of obnoxious immortals using mortals as playthings is a great campaign idea as well.