Book Collecting Guides

Philip José Farmer– First Edition Books: Identification Guide

Philip José Farmer
Philip José Farmer

Philip José Farmer (1918 – 2009) was an American author known for his science fiction and fantasy novels and short stories.

Farmer is best known for his sequences of novels, especially the World of Tiers (1965–93) and Riverworld (1971–83) series. He is noted for the pioneering use of sexual and religious themes in his work, his fascination for, and reworking of, the lore of celebrated pulp heroes, and occasional tongue-in-cheek pseudonymous works written as if by fictional characters. Farmer often mixed real and classic fictional characters and worlds and real and fake authors as epitomized by his Wold Newton family group of books. These tie all classic fictional characters together as real people and blood relatives resulting from an alien conspiracy. Such works as The Other Log of Phileas Fogg (1973) and Doc Savage: His Apocalyptic Life (1973) are early examples of literary mashup novel.

Literary critic Leslie Fiedler compared Farmer to Ray Bradbury as both being “provincial American eccentrics” who “strain at the classic limits of the [science fiction] form,” but found Farmer distinctive in that he “manages to be at once naive and sophisticated in his odd blending of theology, pornography, and adventure.”

Farmer won a Hugo Award for Best New SF Author or Artist in 1953, the first of three Hugos awards he won in his career. Thus encouraged, he quit his job to become a full-time writer, entered a publisher’s contest, and promptly won first prize for a novel, Owe for the Flesh, that contained the germ of his later Riverworld series.

He won a second Hugo award in 1968, in the category Best Novella, for Riders of the Purple Wage; a pastiche of James Joyce‘s Finnegans Wake as well as a satire on a futuristic, cradle-to-grave welfare state. Reinvigorated, Farmer became a full-time writer again in 1969. Upon moving back to Peoria in 1970, he entered his most prolific period, publishing 25 books in 10 years. His novel To Your Scattered Bodies Go (a reworked, previously unpublished version of the prize-winning first novel of 20 years before) won him a third Hugo in 1972, for Best Novel.

In 2001 Philip José Farmer won the World Fantasy Award for Life Achievement and the Science Fiction Writers of America made him its 19th SFWA Grand Master in the same year.

Philip José Farmer – First Edition Identification Guide

Note: This list only includes works published prior to 1977.

Philip José Farmer – First Printing Dust Jacket Identification Points

Gallery of First state Dust Jackets of Farmer’s works. Only includes the first appearance in book form. Either the UK or US edition and does not include later printings.

Reference:

  • Wikipedia
  • L. W. Currey, Science Fiction and Fantasy Authors: A Bibliography of First Printings of Their Fiction and Selected Nonfiction.