Pearls from Peoria eBook

Illustrated by Keith Howell, Charles Berlin, Jason Robert Bell, and Mario Zecca

An outstanding and unique collection from an outstanding and unique talent. Philip José Farmer, three time Hugo winner and Nebula Grand Master in 2001, has written exciting and provocative fiction since his debut, the ground breaking “The Lovers,” stunned the SF community in 1952.

Pearls from Peoria assembles over sixty previously uncollected pieces of fiction, nonfiction, poetry and autobiography that demonstrate the extraordinary range and vitality of Philip José Farmer’s imagination.

Many of the pieces appear here for the first time anywhere, while others have previously appeared only in small run magazines that have remained elusive and avidly sought after by Farmer aficionados.

These tales and articles provide the reader with a grand tour of the literary pocket universes that make up Philip José Farmer’s private cosmos. The range is vast, from horror to pulp heroes, and autobiography with pieces on Tarzan and Edgar Rice Burroughs, Doc Savage and Sir Richard Burton, Riverworld and Oz, Sherlock Holmes and Ralph von Wau Wau.

Pearls from Peoria represents outstanding value for people who want access to this incredibly rare work without spending a fortune, and copious amounts of time and energy, tracking down the individual original publications.</p

Table of Contents

Myths and Paramyths

• Nobody’s Perfect
• Wolf, Iron, and Moth
• Evil, Be My Good
• Mother Earth Wants You
• Opening the Door
• The Wounded
• Heel

Ralph von Wau Wau

• A Scarletin Study
• The Doge Whose Barque Was Worse Than His Bight
• Jonathan Swift Somers III: Cosmic Traveller in a Wheelchair

Lost Futures

• Seventy Years of Decpop
• Fundamental Issue
• Some Fabulous Yonder
• Planet Pickers
• The Terminalization of J.G. Ballard

Psychological Tales

• The Blind Rowers
• Hunter’s Moon
• The Rise Gotten
• The Good of the Land
• O’Brien and Obrenov

Doc Savage

• Writing Doc’s Biography
• Savage Shadow
• Doc Savage and the Cult of the Blue God
• The Monster On Hold

Tarzan and Edgar Rice Burroughs

• The Princess of Terra
• The Golden Age and the Brass
• An Appreciation of Edgar Rice Burroughs
• The Arms of Tarzan
• The Two Lord Ruftons
• A Reply to "The Red Herring"
• The Great Lorak Time Discrepancy
• The Lord Mountford Mystery
• From ERB to YGG
• A Language for Opar
• The Purple Distance

PJF on SF

• The Source of the River
• A Rough Knight for the Queen
• The Journey as the Revelation of the Unknown
• The Jos�s from Rio
• Getting A-Long with Heinlein
• God’s Hat
• To Forry Ackerman, the Wizard of Sci-Fi
• Pornograms and Supercomputers
• A Review of the 1977 Anthology Chrysalis ..
• Review of The Prometheus Project ..
• Review of How the Wizard Came to Oz ...
• Oft Have I Travelled
• White Whales, Raintrees, Flying Saucers...
• IF R.I.P. .....
• The Tin Woodman Slams the Door
• Witches and Gnomes and Talking Animals, oh my
• Suffer A Witch to Live

Poems

• Imagination
• The Pterodactyl
• Sestina of the Space Rocket
• Beauty in This Iron Age
• In Common
• Black Squirrel on Cottonwood Limb’s tip
• Job’s Leviathan

PJF on PJF

• Maps and Spasms
• Religion and Myths
• Creating Artificial Worlds
• Phonemics
• Lovers and Otherwise
• A Fimbulwinter Introduction
• On A Mountain Upside Down

On PJF

• Mother of Pearl
• The Artwork
• Photo Montages

From Publishers Weekly (Starred Review):
“This colossal scrapbook of scarce, offbeat fiction, poetry and nonfiction from SF veteran Farmer offers fans a smorgasbord of his hard--and impossible--to find work from fanzines and other small publications, spanning the 1940s to the 1990s. Amassed by Mike Croteau, who runs the official Philip José Farmer Web site, and edited by Paul Spiteri, who provides brief introductions for each piece, this collection is especially valuable for its insights into the author’s writing methods. For fun, Farmer reinterpreted the adventures of pulp hero Doc Savage, Oz characters, Sherlock Holmes and Tarzan. His canine detective, Ralph von Wau Wau, in ‘A Scarletin Study,’ somehow blended Holmes, Sam Spade and, typically, puns. Farmer also reprised vampire, werewolf and Frankenstein stories. About the sale of his first story, ‘The Lovers’ (which won a Hugo in 1952), Farmer says in the autobiographical ‘Maps and Spasms’ that he thought he ‘had the world by the tail. But, as it turned out, there was a tiger at the other end.’ Fortunately for generations of SF readers, he persisted.”

From Booklist:
“More than 60 pieces in all showcase Farmer’s amazing versatility and should gratify the pants off fans searching for previously unpublished and long-out-of-print gold.”

Paul Di Filippo, in Science Fiction Weekly (A+ Review)
“... we have to acknowledge that Farmer’s unique voice leaps out of every piece. Cumulatively, they represent as clear a transmission of his startling mind and talents as any other book in his oeuvre. The sheer bulk of the material has the effect of enwrapping the reaer in PJF’s warm embrace. (Perhaps that image is a bit too creepy, given Farmer’s notoriously kinky fiction, but we'll let it stand.) Farmer’s ludic delights in fiction as gameplaying; his nostalgia for the milestones of Western pop culture (Oz, pulps, Hollywood, etc.); his Midwestern moral sunniness underpinned by psychological darkness (Farmer is the genre’s Sherwood Anderson or Thornton Wilder); his vibrant prose, packed with metaphors--all of this is on display in even the most ‘trivial’ piece herein.”

And Philip José Farmer’s Reaction to Pearls:
“After a lifetime of writing it is a real joy to see a collection such as Pearls in print. That it covers so many aspects of my work is especially gratifying. I’ve enjoyed revisiting this diverse collection of my work (some over fifty years old!) and am impressed with the thought that went into arranging the pieces into the order they appear. I do believe it gives a good overview of my whole catalog; I hope the reader will enjoy the collection and the access it affords to some of my rarer pieces. I had fun writing them, I hope the reader has fun reading them.”

From MagillOnLiterature:
“For fifty years or more, Philip José Farmer has been known as a major science fiction writer, one unafraid of sex, religion, and politics; in 2001 the Science Fiction Writers of America selected him as a Grand Master. Pearls from Peoria showcases the full range of his interests... it is a rich and varied look into one of the strangest and most fascinating minds in the science fiction community.”