February 25th:
Philip José Farmer passed away peacefully in his sleep this morning.
He will be missed greatly by his wife Bette, his children, grandchildren, great-grandchildren, friends and countless fans around the world.
January 26, 1918 - February 25, 2009. R.I.P.
We love you Phil.
I'm not sure how many people have read any of Farmer's books, but they were a tremendous influence in my reading/writing life. A newly budding fascination with pulp fiction of the 1920s and 30s was jump started by reading the Heinlein novel The Number of the Beast. After devouring all of the Edgar Rice Burroughs' Mars stories, I was grasping for more pulp. It simply didn't exist in the late 1990s (it has since seen a fairly major return with collections like Adventure! and McSweeney's Action Stories), but I stumbled across mentions of this thing called Wold Newton, a concept that Farmer created to link pulp heroes across writers and generations. It ties figures like James Bond to Tarzan to Superman, etc, and spans great heroes of action stories from dozens of authors over the years.
With a renewed passion, I gorged myself on all things Wold Newton, reading all the old novels that Farmer referenced, including Doc Savage, The Scarlet Pimpernel, and many many others. When that was done, I stepped into Farmer's Riverworld series (please, please, please don't watch the made-for-Scifi Channel movie and draw conclusions), which blew me away.
When I started to write fiction, I initially tried fantasy, as I think most of us who play RPGs do at some time or another. But after a confluence of ideas (including Riverworld, Indiana Jones, Cormac McCarthy's The Road, Firefly, Robert E. Howard, and a few others I'm drawing blanks on now) rattled in my brain, I started to work on a story. It's shaping up so far (~30 pages) a novel or maybe a novella, but it's more natural and easier for me to inhabit (in writing) than elves and dragons.
He hadn't written anything new in quite awhile, but his passing has definitely saddened me. I just thought I'd share.
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