Before one can write a story set in the Wold Newton Universe, which usually entails interactions between characters of disparate origins, reseach must be done. Hours and hours spent verifying such meetings could have really occurred. Win Scott Eckert has, in all likelihood, put more hours into such research than anyone, including Phil Farmer himself.

“The Blakeney Family Tree”

by Win Scott Eckert

            Readers of “Is He in Hell?” may have noticed the rather unusual relationship Sir Percy has with his wife Marguerite and their friend, Alice Clarke Raffles. The relationship intimated in the story is based on chronological and genealogical observations culled from Baroness Orczy’s canonical series of Scarlet Pimpernel novels, Philip José Farmer’s fictional biography Tarzan Alive: A Definitive Biography of Lord Greystoke, and “John Blakeney’s” fictional biography The Life and Exploits of the Scarlet Pimpernel (Sir Percy Blakeney, bart.), or, A Gay Adventurer. The result of these observations is, in true Creative Mythographical fashion, a genealogical reconciliation of these sources: the Blakeney Family Tree. Along the way, I’ll include some helpful suggestions and thoughts from fellow Creative Mythographers Mark Brown, Jess Nevins, Cheryl L. Huttner, Dennis E. Power, Matthew Baugh, and Jean-Marc Lofficier.
      Much of the framework of the Blakeney Family Tree is built upon John Blakeney’s family tree from his biography, The Life and Exploits of the Scarlet Pimpernel, which can be viewed at <http://www.blakeneymanor.com/books/gay/g.html>. However, there are a few inaccuracies and omissions, perhaps purposeful, in this particular tree. A new, expanded tree has been constructed and is available for reference at the conclusion of this note.
      Cheryl L. …

(Copyright © 2010 by Win Scott Eckert)

The rest of the “The Blakeney Family Tree” can be found in The Worlds of Philip José Farmer 1: Protean Dimensions. Keep watching this space for more 200 word excerpts.

During his career, Philip José Farmer gave many speeches at science fiction and literary conventions. A quick perusal of this list of Conventions, Events and Other Appearances will show that he was very well travelled in this regard. However, he was also a popular speaker in his home town of Peoria, Illinois. Sadly, he did not keep copies of most of the speeches he gave (boy would we love to read the speech he gave at the 1953 Worldcon, ”SF and the Kinsey Report”). Just as Farmerphile did, we hope to print as many speeches as possible in The Worlds of Philip José Farmer series of books. Here is just the first, a very funny speech about writing his first mystery novel.

“The Legend of Mishiwapo”

by Philip José Farmer

     Members of the Kiwanis and guests, it’s an honor to be your guest speaker.
     Before I really get into this speech, I’m going to give you three quotations. These are on the quotation page of my mystery novel, Nothing Burns in Hell.
     “Nothing burns in Hell, except self-will.” That line was written by an anonymous German medieval monk, and it begged to be part of the title of a novel.
     The second phrase comes from a famous 1930s book: Trader Horn. Trader Horn was an Englishman who worked in the African ivory trade in the late nineteenth century and early twentieth century.
     “The Americans—a moral people except when it comes to murder and so on.”
     The third quotation is from a poem, The Imitation of Faust, by Alfred Jarry.
     “The world is ordered to an obvious Methodist design/And God, with a slight Peoria accent, hovers over all.”
     I’d like you to keep these in mind as I talk to you. They are relevant to my mystery novel Nothing Burns in Hell.
     Fellow citizens of Peoria, I’m a fiction writer, chiefly of science fiction, so far. Most people know science fiction only through the movies. Thus they don’t know there’s …

   (Copyright © 2010 by the Philip J Farmer Family Trust)

The rest of “The Legend of Mishiwapo” can be found in The Worlds of Philip José Farmer 1: Protean Dimensions. Keep watching this space for more 200 word excerpts.

Do you remember how much fun Philip José Farmer had, paying tribute to his pulp heroes among other things, with the extremely unlucky character Greatheart Silver? Don’t you wish Phil had written more than three stories about him? So do we, which is why we were so thrilled when Chris Roberson said he wanted to write…

“The Final Flight of Greatheart Silver”

by Chris Roberson

       The future wasn’t what it used to be.
       From the front door of Greatheart Silver’s apartment, he could see the rusting bulk of a long-deactivated robot on the far side of the veranda. Once the robot and thousands more like it had served as Minerva’s workforce, performing all of the unpleasant but essential services that the island-nation’s populace required. But the Utopian vision of Minerva’s founders had not long survived contact with reality, and the delicate circuitry and mechanisms of the robots had quickly corroded in the hot, humid air of the south Indian Ocean. Now immigrants from Australia and Indonesia cleaned the Minervans’ laundry, washed their dishes and trimmed their hedges, but none of them had any hope of becoming citizens. Even with the island-nation now a faded shadow of its former glory, only multimillionaires could even think of applying for citizenship.
       Which led Greatheart to suspect that the raven-haired beauty at his front door had come to the wrong place. Trim and athletic, no more than thirty years old and less than half Greatheart’s age, she was surely looking for someone else.
       “Mr. Silver?” Her voice had a lilt to it he couldn’t quite place, an accent that …

   (Copyright © 2010 by the Philip J Farmer Family Trust)

The rest of “The Final Flight of Greatheart Silver” can be found in The Worlds of Philip José Farmer 1: Protean Dimensions. Keep watching this space for more 200 word excerpts.

This story was found in Philip José Farmer’s computer, a late 1980s IBM PS/2. While the story was complete, there were no notes indicating what or who it was written for. As for the story, sometimes you shake your head and think, “Only Phil Farmer could have thought of this…”

“My Summer Husband”

by Philip José Farmer

       Being married to a human male is tough enough. It’s triply hard if that man is also a bear and a god. I wish that life on no one. However, I do enjoy many compensations.
       His jealousy is not one of these. Although he tells me I should take a lover while he’s in his long uneasy winter sleep, he doesn’t really mean it. Maybe he does in the fall when he tells me that. But, when spring arrives, he’ll come snorting and roaring out of the burrow in our backyard. He’ll be full of hormones, lusting for a mate, me, bursting with a rage to fight any male trying to take me from him.
       He’d sniff out, track down, and cripple, maybe kill, any man I’d slept with while he was dozing. His nose isn’t quite as keen as the nose of a one hundred percent bear. But it’s good enough to determine if a man has been in the house a few times or quite often.
       I should stress, however, that it’s not the bear in him that would drive him to such extreme action. Male bears are content to chase rival mates for the females from their …

   (Copyright © 2010 by the Philip J Farmer Family Trust)

The rest of “My Summer Husband” can be found in The Worlds of Philip José Farmer 1: Protean Dimensions. Keep watching this space for more 200 word excerpts.

In 1968 Philip José Farmer wondered, what if William S. Burroughs had written Tarzan instead of Edgar Rice Burroughs? His short story, “The Jungle Rot Kid on the Nod” gave us a short glimpse of what that might have read like.  Ed Morris had the same idea, but he took it in a totally different direction. Instead he showed us a world in which this could have happened, a world where a young Phil Farmer meets WSB just as he begins to write about the jungle lord.

“Infamy”

by Edward Morris

       We sat together at the morning’s end, my earnest young friend and I, and talked of science fiction while we barred the door and waited for the bombs to start falling.
      Outside my wide, white suite, chaos reigned supreme throughout the sordid rooms of the Chelsea Hotel. I was tempted to go out and fire my .38 into the ceiling as a warning shot, but on further thought I determined that might not be so good. I have no love for flatfeet, especially in hysterical times when it’s every crumb for himself. Today met and far exceeded the latter conditions.
      Early this morning, just after my new friend had come to call, two explosions had rocked the Five Boros. There was dust falling in the streets like snow. My fellow New Yorkers and I had witnessed scenes such as we had believed were never enacted outside the covers of pulp magazines.
      Two mere office buildings, whose destruction threw the country into mortal terror. One ludicrous instant accentuated the brutality at home and abroad forever, stole the ground from beneath unborn feet forever and made widows and widowers. Forever. The whole thing could have been avoided. But now there was no … 

(Copyright © 2010 by Edward Morris)

The rest of the “Infamy” can be found in The Worlds of Philip José Farmer 1: Protean Dimensions. Keep watching this space for more 200 word excerpts.

Anthology editors are never supposed to say “this is my favorite” about something in a book they edit, but I just can’t help myself. As much as I love the new stories set in Phil’s worlds and the other fascinating items in The Worlds of Philip José Farmer 1: Protean Dimensions, I guess, when it comes down to it, I’m really just a (science fiction) history buff. This essay not only gives us first person history from science fiction great Randall Garrett, but also includes text by Philip José Farmer that was thought lost forever.

“The Bite of the Asp”

by Randall Garrett

   Someone once said that the difference between a goose and a viper was that a viper is an asp in the grass. In the science fiction world, we have a great many of both. For some reason, the science fiction fan (amateur or professional) seems to take great delight in sinking his little fangs into someone else, discharging a good dose of venom, and then sitting back to watch the results.
    In the March 1953 Dimensions, Richard Elsberry ripped into Gernsback’s Science Fiction Plus with great glee, concentrating especially on a story therein entitled “The Biological Revolt,” which was printed in that magazine under the byline of Philip José Farmer. When I read it, I very noisily blew my stack.
    Calm down, Elsberry; I’m not sore at you. Quite the contrary; I agree with you all the way. And, oddly enough, so does Phil Farmer. The story was a stinker; an out-and-out rotter. If you want to see Mr. Farmer cry in his beer, just say “biological revolt” to him, and behold, his eyes become misty.
    Why? Gather round, kiddies, and I’ll tell you.
    There are certain editors in the field who believe that an editor’s job, begad, is to … 

(Copyright © 1957 by Randall Garrett. Reprinted by permission of JABerwocky Literary Agency Inc.)

The rest of the “The Bite of the Asp” can be found in The Worlds of Philip José Farmer 1: Protean Dimensions. Keep watching this space for more 200 word excerpts.

Here is another story set in a world Philip José Farmer created, Ancient Opar and the Khokarsan Empire. This was a favorite of both Phil and his fans in the short lived series, Hadon of Ancient Opar and Flight to Opar. The following takes plays after a battle in Flight to Opar, and follows Hinokly’s story a little further than Phil did. Christopher Paul Carey is able to tell this tale because, as coauthor with Philip José Farmer of the forthcoming Khokarsa novel The Song of Kwasin, he knows his Khokarsan lore.

“A Kick in the Side”

by Christopher Paul Carey

       Down he went into water blacker than the ink of his trade. But the cold waters of Piqabes, green-eyed daughter of Kho, would stain him much deeper than ink would his skin. The sea would absorb him until his body was indistinguishable from the salty depths and then his soul would drift listlessly through the mouths of many fishes and slithery creatures before ultimately sinking into the silt at the bottom of the Kemu.
       As his lungs gave out, Hinokly cursed his fate. He was not to be a hero, like Hadon, or even Hadon’s loutish, ax-swinging cousin, Kwasin. Though Hinokly had once stood in the court of the King of Khokarsa, twice traveled to the depths of the Wild Lands, and even journeyed to the Ringing Sea at the edge of the world to look into the eyes of a god, he was a nothing, an expendable sidekick to great men (and even greater women, he thought, as the beauteous face of Lalila filled his dying brain).
       Hinokly stopped struggling and waited to enter dread Sisisken’s dark realm. No longer would he be bullied or overshadowed by those whose minds were as thick as the half-witted engineers who had …

(Copyright © 2010 by the Philip J Farmer Family Trust)

The rest of the “A Kick in the Side” can be found in The Worlds of Philip José Farmer 1: Protean Dimensions. Keep watching this space for more 200 word excerpts.

We’ve gotten lots of questions about the subtitle of the book, “Protean Dimensions.” Just what does that mean? The subtitle, the entire book, and indeed the entire proposed series of Worlds of Philip José Farmer books, is explained at the front of the book, in the:

“Editor’s Preface”

by Michael Croteau

     Protean Dimensions. Two words attempting to describe a writer who eluded the conventional, side-stepped expectations, and denied even the need for boundaries. Philip José Farmer liked to kick down the walls that   defined—and enclosed—genre fiction. When that wasn’t enough, he blurred the lines between reality and fiction; just ask Sir Richard Francis Burton, Mark Twain, Tarzan, and Kilgore Trout.
     Farmer was many things to many people. He was an iconoclast, having written about sex and religion in places they had never been seen before. He wrote with a deep understanding of subjects like philosophy, psychology, and mythology. But he was also a teller of grand, supposedly “light,” adventure stories. He wrote pastiches and parodies of the stories he loved the most, and in doing so, introduced new generations of readers to the heroes of a bygone day. He was a master world—no, make that universe—builder. His “quasi-scholarship” was better researched than most Ph.D. thesis papers. He was himself protean: a renaissance man, a polymath, a self-taught: historian, theologian, anthropologist, linguist, evolutionary biologist, and sociologist. The careful reader may find all of these elements in any sample of his work.
     No matter how you first discover Farmer …

(Copyright © 2010 by Michael Croteau)

The rest of the “Editor’s Preface’” can be found in The Worlds of Philip José Farmer 1: Protean Dimensions. Keep watching this space for more 200 word excerpts.

The Worlds of Philip José Farmer isn’t just about publishing never before seen material by Farmer and new stories set in his worlds. We also intend to preserve essays written about Farmer and his work during his long career. If the essay happens to have been written by the man himself, so much the better:

“Comment on ‘Sail On! Sail On!’”

by Philip José Farmer

        Three years before “Sail On! Sail On!” was written, I had a dream. I saw the tiny galleon of the Portuguese Prince Henry the Navigator (1394–1460 A.D.). It was sailing along in a heavy sea and on a dark night. A small building was on the poopdeck; in it sat a very fat monk. He had earphones on and was tapping out a coded message, in Latin, on a spark-gap transmitter.
        That was all. The dream ended. However, I never forgot it. And a year later, the dream came to me again, as many of my best dreams do. Six months afterward, that dream occurred again. For some reason, my unconscious insisted upon thrusting up this strange picture. Perhaps it was a rather bizarre form of warning to me. If so, I never got the message. Instead, I wondered what kind of story I could make out of it.
        Before I even worked the story out, I had exchanged Columbus for Prince Henry. As a child, I had always been fascinated by the idea of Columbus’ falling off the edge of the world. Even when I was told that the earth was round, I did not quite believe it. …

(Copyright © 2010 by the Philip J Farmer Family Trust)

The rest of “Comment on ‘Sail On! Sail On!’” can be found in The Worlds of Philip José Farmer 1: Protean Dimensions. Keep watching this space for more 200 word excerpts.

We can’t believe a whole week eight days has already gone by since we posted First 200 Words (part 1). Time flies when you are going to the post office every day to mail books. Without further ado, the first 200 words of:

“The Pollinators”

by Rhys Hughes

       Nosy Sam was in big trouble and so were the other three occupants of the stolen air coach. A missile was rising towards them from one of the small islands far below. It was the moment he had long been dreading, when his ingenuity would be tested with his life.
     At first it appeared the projectile had locked directly onto them and the elegant curve of its vapor trail could easily be extrapolated in spacetime to the precise node their vehicle would soon occupy. Veering was useless, for the radar in the missile’s nose and the control circuits that operated the gyros were too sensitive and efficient.
      Sam held his breath, felt the tickle of sweat on his nose.
      To his relief, the equations altered.
      The missile had clearly found a new target, one behind the coach, and its exhaust nozzles had swiveled accordingly. Sam waited another instant before pulling a handle that released the drogue. A small explosive charge severed the steel cable and the dummy coach fell behind on its chute. The missile headed for that victim instead.
      The decoy erupted in flame and unsynchronized noise.
      The shockwave propelled them far out to sea. There was a humming …

(Copyright © 2010 by the Philip J Farmer Family Trust)

Can you remember what Farmer novel Nosy Sam appears in? It’s going to drive you crazy trying to remember. Save yourself the headache and order The Worlds of Philip José Farmer 1: Protean Dimensions so you can read “The Pollinators,” we’ll tell you what novel right in the introduction, we promise.

Keep watching this space for more 200 word excerpts.