Inherent in science fiction are a number of contradictory impulses: imaginative wonder and scientific exactness, romance and realism, childish joy and adult seriousness, the desire to escape and the passion to know. No modern writer expresses and...

Philip José Farmer is a prolific science fiction writer whose success is based on his deft mixture of three primary components, "religion, sex, and violence," in each of his many works, according to Franz Rottensteiner in Science-Fiction...

Joshua L. Weinstein Portland Press Herald (Maine) 06-27-1998 LOCAL & STATE Philip ''Bud'' S. Jewett, a longtime sheep and dairy farmer who, even as an octogenarian was active raising sheep, died unexpectedly Thursday. He was 88. He remained vigorous throughout his life. ''This...

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Philip José Farmer has always been liked and respected inside the science fiction field as an explorer of unconventional or forbidden ideas, a maker of dangerous visions. All the same, he has received less critical attention than he deserves; outside of book reviews and fanzine interviews, only two general pieces on Farmer have appeared in print up to this time…. For [Leslie] Fiedler, Farmer represents sf's ability to arouse "wonder and ecstasy" in its readers…. He ...

Philip José Farmer seems now to have reached the point of public recognition, and I for one am feeling a little dismayed…. I liked it much better when a taste for Farmer's fiction could still seem a private, slightly shameful pleasure, or a perverse affectation on the part of a scholar, an eccentric vice. In those days, he belonged chiefly to readers who did not even suspect that the novel is dead … and with no sense certainly that they were approaching "literature."...

The most flamboyant celebration of the new licence [for sexual openness] is to be found in the late 1960s with Philip José Farmer's Herald Childe (i.e. Childe Harold) romances…. There is a brutal shock achieved by these novels which violently juxtapose the clichés of the Los Angeles private detective novel (Childe is a private dick, appropriately enough), SF and hard core pornography. In mitigation it should be noted that Farmer has been battering away at SF's sexual retic...